Data on religion and politics in India

This repository provides highly localized statistics on religion and politics in India under an open license. I aim to cover Uttar Pradesh as comprehensively as possible, and the rest of India during general elections (see roadmap) and/or if other people contribute. A (potentially incomplete) list of academic usecases for this data is on Google Scholar; there is also a separate folder with examples to replicate.

Fortunately, recent transparency initiatives by the Election Commission of India in general and the Chief Electoral Officer of UP in particular now allow researchers to shift the central unit of quantitative political analyses from the constituency level to that of polling booths, stations, and villages (earlier, such data had to be interpolated or estimated). Often, this data is not very user-friendly, though (think garbled, scanned PDFs). The purpose of this repository is to curate this data in a more accessible format and to share the scraping and cleanup code for reference. This official data is then supplemented with estimates of religious demography based on the religious connotations of electors' names in the voter lists.