This collection consists of a survey we administered in 40 villages on either side of the Madhya Pradesh- Chhattisgarh state border. The surveys were completed during the election season of November-December 2013 during which new state legislative assemblies were elected simultaneously in both states. Respondents were asked about a variety of public services. As part of this grant we carried out two surveys. Part 1 provides details about the survey carried out in Tamil Nadu, which primarily focuses on candidate evaluations. Part 2 provides details about the survey carried out in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh which primarily focuses on public service evaluations (for Part 1, see Related Resources). The network intends to compare politics in Indian cities and villages by studying state and local elections, quantitatively as well as qualitatively. It will ask whether voters are moving from identity-related to issue-based motivations - in cities if not in villages - and hypotheses that the changing profile of elected representatives - including MLAs - reflects an ongoing social democratisation process in spite of the development of local dynasties and the resilience of patronage. The network will bring into conversation researchers in different social science disciplines, employing different methodologies to demonstrate the complementarity of survey-based and ethnographic approaches to studying elections.

We administered the survey in 40 villages on either side of the MP-CG state border: 20 in Madhya Pradesh (in the sub-districts of Anuppur and Kotma) and 20 in Chhattisgarh (in the sub-districts of Marwahi and Manendragarh). We purposively selected two state legislative assembly constituencies on either side of the border matching the incumbency status of each, so that we had both a BJP and Congress held constituency in each state. Within each constituency we randomly selected 10 villages and in each village we randomly selected 12 people from the electoral rolls. The surveys were completed during the election season of November-December 2013 during which new state legislative assemblies were elected simultaneously in both states. The surveys were conducted after voting had taken place but before the results were announced so that participants would be thinking about the conduct of the recent elections but not influenced by their outcomes.