Recent debate around the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, or SIR, have once again highlighted the need for scientific and transparent data analysis.
Elections are the cornerstone of a democratic system and, in India, they happen almost year-round at various levels, generating vast and complex datasets. This data remains underutilised due to a lack of analytical skills all around. This gap underscores the need for specialised professionals.
With Assembly elections approaching in several states — including West Bengal — there is a renewed interest in election-related data analysis.
Understanding elections through data-driven methods is called psephology, a term derived from the Greek word psephos, meaning “pebble”, which was historically used for voting in ancient Greece. Psephology combines statistical analysis of voting behaviour with insights from political science, sociology, economics and statistics to understand and forecast electoral outcomes.
A key component of election studies is working with diverse forms of data. These include voter lists, candidate details, election results, turnout figures and party manifestos. Analysing such data demands special skills — the ability to handle large datasets, identify patterns and interpret trends with precision.
Opportunities
Political strategy firms such as I-PAC, Leadtech, Political Analytics India and Mindshare Analytics now offer lucrative roles for those skilled in handling election data. Even public policy institutes and think tanks recruit such people.
Graduates from disciplines such as political science, statistics, economics, development studies and public policy are a good fit for electoral data analysis. They can strengthen their analytical and data-driven skills during their undergraduate years.
A key priority is learning to work with big data using tools such as R, Python or Stata. There are numerous free courses available online that cover the basics of these programming languages.
Graduates from other disciplines too could join this field if interested. They would, however, need to pick up the basics of statistics, machine learning and programming languages. Several colleges offer these as value-added courses.
In recent years, the availability of data on policy implementation, social indicators and election outcomes has expanded significantly. This has opened up new opportunities for designing quantitative and data-driven studies on politics and governance.
The Election Commission of India (ECI) is the custodian of all election-related data in the country. And analysing this data is essential for evidence-based reporting, research and policy evaluation. Therefore, graduates with analytical skills could build a career in the ECI.
Courses
There are very few courses in India that offer structured training in election and political data analysis. One of the established programmes is the summer school on Analysing Quantitative Research Techniques in Indian Politics run by the Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and Lokniti. It has been conducted every year since 2008.
Additionally, select courses on public policy offered by institutions such as the IITs and IIMs provide useful exposure to quantitative methods, though they are not always election-focussed. Loreto College in Calcutta introduced a value-added course called political campaign and psephology studies in 2025. The course aims to familiarise students with various aspects of electoral politics, including voting behaviour, designing political campaigns, campaign stimulators, gathering of
pre-poll data and analysis, propaganda, social media campaign studies and so on.
Another Calcutta-based organisation, the Sabar Institute, has been organising online training programmes focussed on election data analysis. This applied course is designed for learners with little or no prior programming experience and introduces the use of R for integrating political and socio-economic data to conduct predictive analysis.
The curriculum begins with the fundamentals of R programming, including basic operations, project management and data handling. Participants learn to create effective visualisations and interactive maps.
The second module focusses on election data analysis, covering access to and processing of candidate-level data for Assembly elections. Participants examine voter turnout, vote shares and winning patterns across constituencies, and where feasible, explore booth-level trends.
The third module emphasises integration of social and economic indicators, and analysing their relationship with political behaviour using datasets such as the Trivedi Election dataset. The final module introduces text analysis of party manifestos among other things.
Entry to mid-level salary packages typically range from Rs 25,000 to Rs 1.5 lakh per month, depending on experience.
If you vote for this stream, one thing is guaranteed — you won’t be short of opportunities.
The writer is affiliated to the Sabar Institute, a public policy research organisation based in Calcutta
