Below are some clarificatory notes related to the dataset.

Populist Outcome Related

Clarifications on Electoral Data

A few additional clarifications, as background information, are necessary to understand some of the measures related to the electoral data.

• 1. Bal Thackeray had never contested an election. But it seemed unjustifiable to ignore him, as he was clearly a populist leader of some measure in Maharashtra. Thus, I took the first electoral victory of the Shiv Sena in the assembly elections of 1995 as the populist instance, because Bal Thackeray reigned supreme for many years prior to and after this victory. And I took the electoral statistics of the incumbent chief minister and loyalist, Manohar Joshi, as the proxy for Bal Thackeray, assuming that the party chief that has got the assembly majority for the first time in its history would have its most trusted loyalist as the chief minister.

• 2. Jayalalitha's elections in 2001, 2011, and 2016 also need clarifications. In 2001, Jayalalitha was disqualified from competing in the election in May 2001 but was acquitted in December 2001 and thereafter won the byelections from Andipatti in 2002. In 2011, even though Jayalalitha won from the Srirangam constituency (which was the constituency included in the dataset), she was convicted by the Karnataka High Court soon thereafter and acquitted subsequently. She then contested from the RK Nagar constituency and resumed her chief ministership and contested from RK Nagar again in 2016.