1. Caste: I measure social status of a household through a caste variable that orders the village social hierarchy as follows: VPB (1), zamindar (2), kammi (3) and muslim sheikh (4).

The census survey that we conducted in each village allowed us to stratify the population by caste. We used the three main caste, or quom, categories: (a) zamindars, which included all agricultural castes of the village, (b) kammis, which are the village artisanal castes and (c) muslim sheikhs, who are agricultural and domestic labourers. The zamindar category was further divided to separate out biradaris of the village elite, the historical VPBs, from other zamindar biradaris. This was based on information contained in the colonial Inspection Reports and the Sargodha Gazetteers. To be considered part of a village's colonial proprietary body, a biradari needed to have historically met two conditions: (a) it had to have been granted property rights to land, a land grant or land lease in the village by the colonial state and (b) it had to be from the zamindar quom, since the 1900 Land Alienation Act stipulated that a land grant or lease could only be given to someone from the designated ‘agricultural castes’. The colonial Village Inspection Reports listed all the biradaris that had received land grants during the time of the colonial village settlements.

2. Economic status: I use two different measures of wealth: number of acres owned, which is a continuous variable that records the number of acres that each household owns; and brick house, which is an ordinal variable that records whether the house is a mud or brick structure, and is a proxy for poverty. Twenty-three per cent of the population of the 35 villages lived in mud houses at the time of our census surveys.

3. General characteristics: I use three other independent variables to measure differences in characteristics of rural voters that I believe may impact their voting behavior. I measure each of these using the following variables: age, which is a continuous variable that records the age in years of the household head; education, which is a continuous variable that records the education in years of the household head; occupation, which records the occupation of the household head in ordinal categories.