Datafication meets democracy: Epistemic distrust and data-driven campaigns in India

While scholarship on data-driven campaigning has grown in recent years, the processes through which data is produced and how it translates to decision-making remain under-theorised. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted inside the campaign war room of a major political party during the 2022 Punjab Assembly elections in India, I examine the quotidian practices through which campaign data was collected, processed and rendered actionable. The article argues that democratic politics represents an arena where datafication indexes not an absolute faith in the power of numbers, but coexists with a pervasive suspicion about their capacity to reveal the truth. To conceptualise this phenomenon, I introduce the concept of ‘epistemic distrust’: a disposition in which political actors actively invest in data collection while remaining sceptical of the insights that data purportedly reveals. Bringing scholarship on data-driven campaigning into conversation with critical data studies, the article makes three interventions. First, I show how epistemic distrust generated a proliferation of competing data infrastructures, such that an excess of data – rather than scarcity – slowed decision-making and created inefficiencies. Second, I examine why, despite the campaign's information-rich environment, data increasingly assumed quantitative forms. Numbers acquired value not just because they facilitated statistical analysis, but because they enabled campaign workers to perform objectivity and credibility before sceptical party leaders. Third, foregrounding the labour of data production, I argue that interpersonal relations and human subjectivity are not distortions that contaminate data but are constitutive of how useful political insights emerge in the first place.