pandas groupby to nested json

I don’t think think there is anything built-in to pandas to create a nested dictionary of the data. Below is some code that should work in general for a series with a MultiIndex, using a defaultdict

The nesting code iterates through each level of the MultIndex, adding layers to the dictionary until the deepest layer is assigned to the Series value.

In  [99]: from collections import defaultdict

In [100]: results = defaultdict(lambda: defaultdict(dict))

In [101]: for index, value in grouped.itertuples():
     ...:     for i, key in enumerate(index):
     ...:         if i == 0:
     ...:             nested = results[key]
     ...:         elif i == len(index) - 1:
     ...:             nested[key] = value
     ...:         else:
     ...:             nested = nested[key]

In [102]: results
Out[102]: defaultdict(<function <lambda> at 0x7ff17c76d1b8>, {2010: defaultdict(<type 'dict'>, {'govnr': {'pati mara': 500.0, 'jess rapp': 80.0}, 'mayor': {'joe smith': 100.0, 'jay gould': 12.0}})})

In [106]: print json.dumps(results, indent=4)
{
    "2010": {
        "govnr": {
            "pati mara": 500.0, 
            "jess rapp": 80.0
        }, 
        "mayor": {
            "joe smith": 100.0, 
            "jay gould": 12.0
        }
    }
}