Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Summary of recent data related pieces written by me.

Over the past year, I have written a number of pieces as part of data journalism. All of the pieces are election-related (but of course it was a major election year in India). Links to the pieces (with short descriptions) that I have written are presented here: 

a) The Aam Aadmi Party's win in the Delhi Elections. (Written for the EPW Web Exclusives). The article tries to use GIS tools to understand the reasons favouring the AAP's win in the Delhi assembly elections. It comes up with interesting insights: Link

b) Articles related to the Lok Sabha elections in the EPW: 

i) Explaining the high turnout in the 2014 elections: Link . This article was written as elections were underway using preliminary voter turnout information released by various Chief Election Officers of different states (and UTs) in India. It seeks to explain the very high turnout in the 2014 elections and identifies variances, unexplored reasons. 

ii) Preliminary statistics from the 2014 election results: Link This article was written post the Lok Sabha elections and provides visualization of results - voteshares, constituency winners and losers, party performance and so on. 

c) A case for proportional representation in Uttar Pradesh: (written for the site, kafila.org in 2012 and basically an analysis of the election results in the state then. The slightly misleading headline is not mine). Link

d) Recent pieces in indiatogether.org, written in March-June this year (as part of a Data Journalism fellowship): 

i) On Fragmentation in India's political system over the years (since 1977) and regionalisation: Link. I seek to show the regionalisation emphasis in India since 1977. 

ii) What sways the urban voter? Results of a survey conducted by the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR) among others. Link. This article uses survey data to highlight urban voter choices across the country. 

iii) The AAP's Performance in Punjab - its salient features. Link. I use polling booth data and other insights to find out whether the AAP's performance in the Punjab LS polls replicated its Delhi victory from last year. I find out that the reasons for the Punjab victory were different from the Delhi victory

iv) Explaining the many reasons for the UPA's defeat. Link. Here I used regression techniques to filter out reasons for the UPA's defeat through analysis of available empircal information. 

v) Voter Turnouts across India and explaining the variance: Link . An extended version of the article written in the EPW on voter turnouts, this time correlating these with survey data on voter preferences. 

e) I curated this election special page using data from all Lok Sabha elections since 1977 and narratives for the EPW:link. Please see bottom of page for election statistics from 1977 onwards. 

f) I managed to scrape data from Election Commission's live results page and run a visualisation on maps using Google Fusion Tables live during three assembly elections for North East states in 2013. Location: http://epw.in/elections

Forthcoming & Pending in late 2014: 

An article on the West Bengal Lok Sabha election results. An indepth look at the results using polling booth level data from both the 2014 LS polls and the 2011 assembly elections. 

A research article on explaining the presence/absence of the "incumbency effect" over the years using disaggregated survey data provided by the CSDS' Lokniti.