Dataset on the Electoral Performance and Criminal Status of Candidates Contesting the 2004 and 2009 Parliamentary Elections to the Lok Sabha (India)

This dataset contains information on the electoral performance and criminal status of all candidates contesting elections to the lower house of the Indian Parliament, the Lok Sabha, in the elections of 2004 and 2009. These were the first national elections conducted after the 2002 Supreme Court ruling mandating that all candidates running for public office file affidavits with the Election Commission of India prior to the election in which they report criminal histories or pending criminal charges for any offense punishable with imprisonment of two years or more and lodged prior to six months before the individual filed candidate papers. Affidavits were c ompiled and digitized by the Liberty Institute of India, a New Delhi-based NGO, and posted on its website http://www.empoweringindia.org/new/home.aspx. We input only whether the candidate reported being charged or not, excluding information such as the statute number. Each row in this dataset corresponds to a candidate who is running for parliament in an electoral constituency in a given election year. All electoral data included in this dataset is from the Election Commission of India. The 2004 data was downloaded October 2007 and the 2009 data was downloaded October 2009 (both from http://eci.nic.in). Data on self-reported criminal status of candidates is from the Liberty Institute of India (downloaded May 2009 from http://www.empoweringindia.org/). This codebook reflects the output generated by the "codebook" command when the dataset is loaded in Stata