Indian Institute of Management Rohtak

 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
POLICITCAL ANALYTICS HOLDS THE KEY!: AN APPLICATION OF R

It was a Tuesday morning, and the newly appointed intern Mr. Anurag Rahi had
arrived. He was recruited for a two-month internship summer project by the
company "Talent Analytics Ltd.," and after completing the joining formalities, he
sat down at his allocated seat waiting for getting briefed about the details of the
project he was assigned to. Just then, he got a much-awaited notification in his
mailbox and he opened it to see an email from his internship mentor to meet him.

It was his first internship, and he was looking forward to a challenging project that
will activate his grey cells and where all the data crunching skills he acquired will
be applied in a real-life scenario.

He entered the cabin, and his supervisor beamed at him and said: "Welcome to
Talent Analytics. You must be excited to know what you are here for. We have
been assigned a project, a very interested and challenging one... ummmm. You
must be wondering what it is, yes we have got a project for political analysis in
upcoming Uttar Pradesh assembly elections on 2022. Yes, we need to devise a
political strategy for our client in the upcoming UP elections.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prepared by Professor Praveen Ranjan Srivastava, Indian Institute of Management Rohtak. This
case has been prepared as a basis for class discussion. It is not designed to present illustrations of
either correct or incorrect handling of administrative problems.

1
 
We need to advise our client as to which constituencies they target for contesting,
which are bit dangerous to back away and where a coalition with other powerful
party can work wonders in reducing the damage and maybe even turn in favor of
his party and wherever possible, convert the NOTA votes i.e., those who have no
intention of supporting any party but can be convinced in your favor. So, fire
away!”

The intern was excited at the same time bit apprehensive since politics is a very
tricky field, and providing political strategies is like a double-pronged sword that
needs careful examination. He knows that when there is the election season in the
state of Uttar Pradesh, the political parties will fight and contest till a blood bath,
and adrenaline gush as the political fever will be on a “meteoric” rise among the
residents there.

This was commonplace here every election season since this region was the
political hotbed witnessing many political cold-blooded wars fought between the
two most powerful parties. Like every year, this year favorites continued to be the
Party X owing to their thumping victory three years ago here on the Y recreating
and etching an indelible mark on the political history of this place.

Without much time waste, the intern opened his laptop and started searching for
insights about the previous assembly election that took place in 2017. His search
directed him to his favorite data analytics competition website Kaggle, where he
had won many competitions. He was pleasantly surprised to see an election
commission web site have plenty of information related to the assigned task. Intern
have an idea about web scraping (The intern was a well-known academic genius
who was pursuing an MBA Programme at a prestigious institute(institute was well
known for Analytics)). He learned an analytical skill in his one of the course name
"Business Analytics" during management program. Now he felt how analytics

2
 
course is important for the industry nowadays for getting handsome salary and
recognition. Based upon his learning ability (he thanks his prof for same) he was
able to extract his Dataset of constituency-wise results of all the UP candidates
which were completely in line with his objective and this search excited him to no
bounds! After extraction he was relaxing for a while because he changes
unstructured data to the structured data set.

Thus, as expected, he did not waste much time and went on to examine the
structured dataset of constituency-wise results of UP candidates to ascertain the
further course of action, a sample demonstrated below in Exhibit 1:

Exhibit 1: Votes constituency-wise and party results

3
 
UP with a population of around 220 million is as big as the whole of the United
States. It has 403 constituencies each having its demographic breakup. The election
was conducted in 7 phases.

The data showed the party contesting for a seat, the phase of the election, assembly
constituency with number and district. Further, the candidate who won and his
party and votes secured were also displayed, for instance, Naresh Saini from INC
party won with 97035 votes a seat also allotted for INC and in Behat constituency
of Saharanpur district and currently the election was in phase 2. Also, he observed
through structured data one national party had collation with one regional party
who have an impact in entre UP and earlier that part rule over UP. He also
observed somewhere both party candidates were fighting (even after collation); in
this situation, structured data mentioned friendly fight (FF). Given data, he also
observed somewhere won candidate margins are too low !interesting for further
analysis!

The main challenge was analysis with advanced R tool .beacuse organization
believe in open source software!

This data prompted the intern to make some exploratory data analysis and uncover
some interesting patterns that will enable him to make a suitable political strategy
for the client for which he came up with the following questions.

Hope data analytics comes to the rescue of the newly recruited intern who wants to
make it big in this line. This could be the first real-time analytics project that he is
taking up!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

4
 
Case Questions:

Q1. What is the overall election result from the data?

Q2. How many votes were pulled by NOTA (None of the above) and in which of
the constituencies?

Q3. What is the number of Seats won by each party?

Q4. Which constituency has the highest margin of win for BJP+ combine?

Q5. Which constituency has the highest margin of win for INC+SP combine?

Q6. Display Constituency winner and runner up names?

Q7. Analysis top 10 and lower ten candidate's details with other factors?

5