Understanding India’s 2014 Elections
Résumé
This special issue of Studies in Indian Politics draws from such an analytical exercise that has been
conducted during an academic meeting in Delhi in August 2014. This meeting held at the Indian Council
of Social Science Research took place in the framework of a three-year research project called Explaining
Electoral Change in Urban and Rural India (EECURI) that I coordinate and that has been selected as an
Indian-European Research Networking Programme in the Social Sciences. This project, associating
the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Lokniti Programme at the Centre for
the Study of Developing Societies, Janaagraha (Bangalore), Sciences Po (via the Centre for International
Research and Studies [CERI] and the Centre for Socio-Political Data [CDSP]), King’s College London
(via the King’s India Institute) and the London School of Economics, is co-funded by the
ICSSR (India), the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (France) and the Economic and Social Research
Council (UK).
This research network is exploring electoral politics in India by using quantitative and qualitative
methods. The articles which follow combine both perspectives. They throw some new light on the last
Lok Sabha elections from the campaigning phase to the outcome. While some of them concentrate on
one state (Assam, Bihar, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal), others take a macro-perspective, while
focusing on one social or socio-demographic category at the national level (women, the middle class).
The expertise of the authors and the data they mobilize will contribute to a better understanding of what
may well be a turning point in the political history of India.