Rerunning Patterns of Members of Legislative Assembly in India's State Elections, 1985-2018

We used the stringdist package in R developed by Van der Loo (2014) to name-match candidates in order to identify which of them reran for the same party in the same seat. The stringdist package offers a uniform interface to a number of well-known string distance measures, such as edit-based, q-gram and heuristics distances. Following an iterative process, we used a combination of Damerau-Levenshtein, q-gram, cosine, jaccard, and Jaro-Winker distances to identify candidates which have rerun for political office. The easiest to code were those that have a distance score of zero for all the distance measures. There were 4643 cases where all the distance measures were zero. Furthermore, there were an additional 4036 cases where the names were only marginally different across election years. For example, J.C. Divakar Reddy of INC in Tadpatri constituency for the 1989 Vidhan sabha elections in Andhra Pradesh was recorded as J.C. Diwakara Reddy in the same constituency for the 1994 Vidhan Sabha elections. A Levenshtein distance of less than or equal to 2 allows us to account for them. Moreover, considering the way the Election Commission of India recorded names across election years, we used a combination of distance measures to name-match candidates. For example in Birapur constituency of Uttar Pradesh Prof. Shivakant Ojha reran for elections in 2007 for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), but was entered as Shiva Kant Ojha without the prefix and with spaces. A simple Levenshtein distance score would not be able to capture this. Instead, we used a combination of Levenshtein and cosine distance to capture such cases. Another common example was the lack of order in terms of naming candidates across elections. For example, in 2004 Kagal constituency of Maharashtra, Mushrif Hasan Miyalal reran for elections for the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), but was entered as Hasan Miyalal Mushrif in 1999. Once again, a simple Levenshtein distance score would not be able to help us accurately record this. Instead we used a combination of Levenshtein and q-gram distance measures to accurately code them. Then there were some cases that showed a very high Levenshtein distance but were captured because of a distance of zero on either cosine, Jaccard or q-gram distance measures. For example, Aqbal Hasan Alias Aqbal Husain of Gainsari constituency of Uttar Pradesh was coded as Aqbal Husain for the 1991 Vidhan Sabha elections. The candidate has a Levenshtein distance of 18 but a Jaccard distance score of 0.
When it came to coding candidates which did not rerun for elections in the same seat for the same party, a Levenshtein distance of greater than 15 in combination with high scores on other distance measures was applied as a cut-off. Of course, there were many cases of candidates not rerunning for the same party in the same seat across elections, but had a Levenshtein distance of less than 15. These cases were captured by using a combination of Levenshtein distance with other distance measures. For example, the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) ran Godam Rama Rao in Boath constituency of Andhra Pradesh in 1989 but replaced him with Godem Nagesh for the 1994 Vidhan Sabha election. The two strings have Levenshtein distance of 9, but a cosine distance of 0.408, a Jaccard distance of 0.363, a q-gram distance of 13 and a Jaro-Winker distance of 0.450. In most cases, a combination of Levenshtein distance of greater than 5 with either a high Jaro-Winker distance and/or cosine distance helped us capture cases where candidates have not rerun for elections for the same party in the same seat.

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