Your Voice in
Tamil Nadu Politics

Tamil Nadu elects its state government through the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly, which has 234 constituencies. Each constituency returns a single Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) under a first-past-the-post system — the candidate with the most votes wins the seat outright, regardless of whether they cross 50%. A party or alliance needs 118 seats for a majority.

Assembly terms run for five years unless dissolved early. Separately, the state sends 39 members to the Lok Sabha, India's lower house of parliament, and those national elections run on their own five-year cycle — which is why a party can hold power in Chennai and be in opposition in Delhi at the same time.

A number of assembly and parliamentary seats are reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, meaning only candidates from those communities may contest them. Reservation status is noted on each constituency record on this site.

Why alliances decide Tamil Nadu elections

Since 1967, no national party has governed Tamil Nadu on its own. State politics has been dominated by the Dravidian movement and organised around two rival poles, each of which assembles a pre-election alliance of smaller regional, caste-based and national parties. Because seats are won on a plurality, the arithmetic of who allies with whom routinely matters more than any individual party's vote share — a few percentage points moving between alliances can swing dozens of seats.

This is why our poll and profile data is organised by party and alliance as well as by individual politician: in Tamil Nadu, the two rarely tell the same story.