The electoral language of caste in India: The politics of shared identity

Despite a rise in identity-centric communication scholarship, there is a lack of theory and evidence regarding how media use relates to the on-going alignment between political and social identities (i.e., identity alignment). We offer a framework for theorizing this dynamic and apply it to examine the relationship between Americans’ media diets and on-going psychological alignment between political and social identities in the United States (i.e., partisan social sorting). We use data from 33,690 American respondents from three national surveys: one longitudinal (1972–2020) and two fielded in 2020. There is evidence that identity alignment (i.e., sorting) has grown over time, but only among those who are most interested and attentive to politics and media. In 2020 surveys, we find no evidence that the frequency of media use was a significant predictor of social sorting. Instead, the composition of individuals’ media diets predicted the alignment between their social and political identities.

The origin of Dalit assertion and politics has a long tradition. The main objective of Dalit assertion and politics was to transform the age-old caste-based hierarchical structure of Indian society based on liberty, equality, fraternity and social justice as envisaged by Dr B. R. Ambedkar. During this long period, the nature of Dalit politics has varied from issue to issue and from context to context. During the seven and half decades of our independence, we have witnessed a massive change, like politics in general and Dalit politics in particular. Up to 1980, we have seen a comprehensive Dalit movement in different parts of India. After that time, it is tough to organize such comprehensive politics, especially in the urban centres. Due to selfishness, personal greed for power and other gains of Dalit leaders and activists, Dalit politics become much more fragmented, localized and depoliticized. Not only that, but identity politics also divided the Dalits into different caste and sub-caste groups. Due to these reasons, it is hard to make grand solidarity in politics among different Dalit castes and other weaker sections of Indian society. We have recently seen a new swing in Dalit politics that is very aware, assertive, organized, well-connected, inclusive and beyond party politics. In this study, the author wants to draw a brief sketch of the history of Dalit politics. Further, he wants to explore the changing nature of Dalit politics. In this context, he has tried to discuss the impact of the depoliticization of Dalit politics by the Dalit leaders and the caste identity politics within Dalit caste groups in forming grand solidarity in Dalit politics in India.

BACKGROUND During the COVID-19 pandemic, the rapid spread of misinformation on social media created significant public health challenges. Large language models (LLMs), pretrained on extensive textual data, have shown potential in detecting misinformation, but their performance can be influenced by factors such as prompt engineering (ie, modifying LLM requests to assess changes in output). One form of prompt engineering is role-playing, where, upon request, OpenAI’s ChatGPT imitates specific social roles or identities. This research examines how ChatGPT’s accuracy in detecting COVID-19–related misinformation is affected when it is assigned social identities in the request prompt. Understanding how LLMs respond to different identity cues can inform messaging campaigns, ensuring effective use in public health communications. OBJECTIVE This study investigates the impact of role-playing prompts on ChatGPT’s accuracy in detecting misinformation. This study also assesses differences in performance when misinformation is explicitly stated versus implied, based on contextual knowledge, and examines the reasoning given by ChatGPT for classification decisions. METHODS Overall, 36 real-world tweets about COVID-19 collected in September 2021 were categorized into misinformation, sentiment (opinions aligned vs unaligned with public health guidelines), corrections, and neutral reporting. ChatGPT was tested with prompts incorporating different combinations of multiple social identities (ie, political beliefs, education levels, locality, religiosity, and personality traits), resulting in 51,840 runs. Two control conditions were used to compare results: prompts with no identities and those including only political identity. RESULTS The findings reveal that including social identities in prompts reduces average detection accuracy, with a notable drop from 68.1% (SD 41.2%; no identities) to 29.3% (SD 31.6%; all identities included). Prompts with only political identity resulted in the lowest accuracy (19.2%, SD 29.2%). ChatGPT was also able to distinguish between sentiments expressing opinions not aligned with public health guidelines from misinformation making declarative statements. There were no consistent differences in performance between explicit and implicit misinformation requiring contextual knowledge. While the findings show that the inclusion of identities decreased detection accuracy, it remains uncertain whether ChatGPT adopts views aligned with social identities: when assigned a conservative identity, ChatGPT identified misinformation with nearly the same accuracy as it did when assigned a liberal identity. While political identity was mentioned most frequently in ChatGPT’s explanations for its classification decisions, the rationales for classifications were inconsistent across study conditions, and contradictory explanations were provided in some instances. CONCLUSIONS These results indicate that ChatGPT’s ability to classify misinformation is negatively impacted when role-playing social identities, highlighting the complexity of integrating human biases and perspectives in LLMs. This points to the need for human oversight in the use of LLMs for misinformation detection. Further research is needed to understand how LLMs weigh social identities in prompt-based tasks and explore their application in different cultural contexts.

The article examines the phenomenon of Navayana (Neo-Buddhism) created by Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956) as an instrument of changing the social identity of the untouchables from the Mahar community. The problem of untouchability and vestiges of the caste system in India became more acute during the struggle for independence. To build a new Indian nation, it was necessary to include in its ranks all strata of Indian society, including communities of the so-called untouchables. The most interesting in this regard is the social project of B.R. Ambedkar, who tried, drawing on the history of the Mahar community on the one hand and the religious conversion on the other, to create a new social identity for the untouchables. Ambedkar advocated the complete destruction of the caste system in India and considered a complete break with Hinduism as the only opportunity for low castes to gain equal rights. Ambedkar saw the religious conversion as the only way of getting rid of untouchability.

Background Racism remains a deep-rooted and pervasive feature of U.S. society. Racist ideas, defined by Ibram X. Kendi as “any concept that regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group in any way,” are major features of the current landscape of teacher education. Focus Rejecting the re-production of racial inequities as an unavoidable outcome of teacher education, in this article, a university-based teacher educator of color and an early childhood teacher/school-based teacher educator of color unveil the complex sociospatial dialectic of teacher education across settings. Positioning mapping as a possible pathway for coauthoring a counternarrative that rejects teacher education's first spaces characterized by the overvaluation of White ontologies, Eurocentric epistemologies, and ideologies that deem university-based knowledge to be superior to school- and community-based ways of knowing, they identified and mapped inequities across the physical, relational, and pedagogical spatialization of teacher education. They considered the following questions: (a) How do teacher education programs position intersectionally mi-noritized students of color, their families, and communities? (b) What are the spaces in which power has been—and continues to be—inscribed and reinforced by Whiteness as the norm in teacher education programs and practices? (c) How can teacher educators of color across settings interrupt teacher education's re-production of inequities in critically and spatially conscious ways? Research Design Through a three-year collaborative participatory research project, the authors engaged with critical race spatial analysis to read the landscape of teacher education, naming its sociospatial injustices—writ large and as situated within their immediate contexts and lives—in addressing the first two research questions. Then, they sought to interrupt these mapped realities by re-mediating teacher education, understanding that perhaps it is the tools and artifacts, and/or the learning environments, that must be reorganized in ways to foster deep, meaningful, and transformative learning, thereby addressing the third question. Practice Working to transform the inequitable status quo of teacher education, they worked to build a horizontal collaboration marked by intellectual interdependence and shared expertise across physical, relational, and pedagogical geographies, thereby moving to transform teacher education through the re-mediation of its traditional first space and the design of a third space. The kind of horizontal partnership they negotiated was in stark contrast to dominant and prevalent vertically organized teacher education partnerships, which position universities as having more importance, expertise, and legitimacy than schools—in disconnected ways. Conclusions This article unveils the ways in which current models of teacher education continue to pathologize intersectionally minoritized populations and re-produce inequities as design features. The collaboration the authors codesigned enabled pedagogical third spaces for transformation to occur and offers an example of what is possible in and through teacher education. In a situated way, it offers insights into how university-based teacher educators and schoolteachers/school-based teacher educators can collaboratively work toward equity and justice in and through teaching and teacher education.

This study aims to examine the interplay between political communication and discursive practices in the emerging new media landscape after the recent political reform in Ethiopia. The study employs interpretative textual analysis in qualitative research approach to analyze political communication texts posted by political party leaders and activists’ official pages through Critical Discourse Analysis. By using this method, the study critically examines the recent political developments with a specific focus on: EPRDF fragmentation, disintegration of TPLF from the central government, de-facto state formation, the integration of PP into political scene, inter-party political dialogues, and election scenarios among purposely selected ethno-nationalist and unionist political party leaders and activists’ official pages. The finding of the study reveals that political actors used social media as a political communication backchannel and a counter-hegemonic space to construct their political identities and ideologies. The result further shows ethnic identity has overwhelmingly become the source of power over pan-Ethiopian nationalism identity. The politics of ethnic belongingness is found to be an emerging political communication discourse in the study. Ethnic divisions and polarized political views have been recurrently propounded among political actor’s posts in their digital media. Accordingly, accommodative discursive strategies appear to be the dominant discursive strategies utilized by unionist political actors, while ethno-nationalists employ divisive rhetorical strategies in their political communication. In this continuum, polarized political views along with ethnic-based political formations put the issue of identity in a vexed condition and the existing Ethiopian politics in a state of interregnum.

BackgroundDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, the rapid spread of misinformation on social media created significant public health challenges. Large language models (LLMs), pretrained on extensive textual data, have shown potential in detecting misinformation, but their performance can be influenced by factors such as prompt engineering (ie, modifying LLM requests to assess changes in output). One form of prompt engineering is role-playing, where, upon request, OpenAI’s ChatGPT imitates specific social roles or identities. This research examines how ChatGPT’s accuracy in detecting COVID-19–related misinformation is affected when it is assigned social identities in the request prompt. Understanding how LLMs respond to different identity cues can inform messaging campaigns, ensuring effective use in public health communications.ObjectiveThis study investigates the impact of role-playing prompts on ChatGPT’s accuracy in detecting misinformation. This study also assesses differences in performance when misinformation is explicitly stated versus implied, based on contextual knowledge, and examines the reasoning given by ChatGPT for classification decisions.MethodsOverall, 36 real-world tweets about COVID-19 collected in September 2021 were categorized into misinformation, sentiment (opinions aligned vs unaligned with public health guidelines), corrections, and neutral reporting. ChatGPT was tested with prompts incorporating different combinations of multiple social identities (ie, political beliefs, education levels, locality, religiosity, and personality traits), resulting in 51,840 runs. Two control conditions were used to compare results: prompts with no identities and those including only political identity.ResultsThe findings reveal that including social identities in prompts reduces average detection accuracy, with a notable drop from 68.1% (SD 41.2%; no identities) to 29.3% (SD 31.6%; all identities included). Prompts with only political identity resulted in the lowest accuracy (19.2%, SD 29.2%). ChatGPT was also able to distinguish between sentiments expressing opinions not aligned with public health guidelines from misinformation making declarative statements. There were no consistent differences in performance between explicit and implicit misinformation requiring contextual knowledge. While the findings show that the inclusion of identities decreased detection accuracy, it remains uncertain whether ChatGPT adopts views aligned with social identities: when assigned a conservative identity, ChatGPT identified misinformation with nearly the same accuracy as it did when assigned a liberal identity. While political identity was mentioned most frequently in ChatGPT’s explanations for its classification decisions, the rationales for classifications were inconsistent across study conditions, and contradictory explanations were provided in some instances.ConclusionsThese results indicate that ChatGPT’s ability to classify misinformation is negatively impacted when role-playing social identities, highlighting the complexity of integrating human biases and perspectives in LLMs. This points to the need for human oversight in the use of LLMs for misinformation detection. Further research is needed to understand how LLMs weigh social identities in prompt-based tasks and explore their application in different cultural contexts.

Extant literature suggests that people who are highly identified with a particular group are likely to make choices in line with that group’s interests. But, in the realm of politics, we know very little about how group identification transitions into a salient political identification. What is the mechanism that makes this transition happen? I argue that this transition and prioritization hinges on political communication that makes a group member believe that they are relevant to the political group. To engage this argument, I focus on Black political identification due to the strong empirical evidence that demonstrates that Black political identification, or linked fate, is fundamental to explaining the political decisions and behavior of Black Americans. Using experimental research, I test the effects of racialized political discourse by varying which segments of the Black community are being defined as a part of the broader “Black” interest. I find that Blacks who are marginalized in mainstream and intra-group discourse (moveable Blacks) show significant change in their strength of political identification with the racial group when their interests are being framed as major interests for the group.

Caste has always generated political and scholarly controversy, but the forms that this takes today newly combine anti-caste activism with counter-claims that caste is irrelevant or non-existent, or claims to castelessness. Claims to castelessness are, in turn, viewed by some as a new disguise for caste power and privilege, while castlessness is also an aspiration for people subject to caste-based discrimination. This article looks at elite claims to “enclose” caste within religion, specifically Hinduism, and the Indian nation so as to restrict the field of social policy that caste applies to, to exempt caste-based discrimination from the law, and to limit the social politics of caste. It does so through a comparative analysis of two cases. The first is the exclusion of Christian and Muslim Dalits—members of castes subordinated as “untouchable”—from provisions and protections as Scheduled Castes in India. The other case is that of responses to the introduction of caste into anti-discrimination law in the UK. While Hindu organizations in the UK reject “caste” as a colonial and racist term and deploy postcolonial scholarship to deny caste discrimination, Dalit organizations, representing its potential victims, turn to scholarly discourse on caste, race, or human rights to support their cause. These are epistemological disputes about categories of description and how “the social” is made available for public debate, and especially for law. Such disputes engage with anthropology, whose analytical terms animate and change the social world that is their subject.

Building Bridges:Articulating Dalit and African American Women's Solidarity Shailaja Paik (bio) The new millennium began with a dialogue between caste and race among activists at the United Nations Durban Conference on Racism and Racial Discrimination, 2001. It was at this conference that the universal human rights discourse engaged with the specifics of caste stratification and discrimination in India. In the wake of this historical moment, I conceived my idea of "building bridges" to outline a comparative model that might allow us to expand the contours of feminist theory and praxis and provide a blueprint for agitations that call for structural changes. More specifically, in this article I concentrate on the specific hurdles of two marginalized groups—Dalit (Untouchable) women in India and African American women in the United States—in order to investigate questions of power, identity, and oppression among them. Delving into personal experiences of Dalit and African American women's day-to-day living, I construct a "margin-to-margin" framework to investigate the possibilities of solidarity between the two groups of women, given the shared history of patriarchy as well as the ways they have been silenced by women from the dominant caste/race. By a margin-to-margin framework, I mean the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate margins (for my purposes, caste and race and Dalit and African American women), in order to construct new knowledge and enable political solidarity to build conscious and sustained commitment to challenge social injustice. Moreover, I argue that centering on the particular historical experiences, specific contexts, contradictions, and connections between the marginalized "Dalit of the Dalits"—Dalit and African American women—allows for the [End Page 74] most inclusive and productive politics, developing of new feminist frameworks, and critical decoding of systemic power structures. The timing of Dalit and African American women's solidarity is most significant because the U.S. Congress (like its British and European counterparts) has seriously begun to recognize the issue of caste in India. Significantly, working margin to margin privileges a vantage point from which to analyze the deep and common continuities of structures of law, education, feminism, capital, and labor affecting Dalit and African American women in different contexts. An intergroup exchange and feminist engagement facilitates the envisioning of broader and joint struggles between subordinated populations across the globe. It also promotes political possibilities for women to express their alternative views of the conceptual categories as well as actual processes of caste, race, gender and sexuality, and feminism(s). My essay makes important contributions to colonial history and feminist theory and practice. Most significantly, it highlights the politics of "location" within South Asia as a critical ground for producing new theoretical frameworks in feminism. In this essay, I use the particular dynamics of the South Asian position and, more specifically, the Dalit condition to engage with African American feminists in the United States and scrutinize history, revise certain feminist insights, and provide tools to tackle contemporary challenges of feminism. I draw upon works of Dalit and African American "womanist-humanists," such as Baby Kamble, Shantabai Kamble, Kumud Pawde, Urmila Pawar, Shantabai Dani, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Audre Lorde, and analyze some shared historical experiences and feminist and political theories.1 Thinking "Margin to Margin": Practicing Political Solidarity Methodologically, I use the margin-to-margin framework for two intimately tied purposes: to open up lived experiences as epistemic spaces and to use the newly produced knowledge to practice political solidarity. I depart from earlier studies (that focused mainly on men) and privilege Dalit and African American women's voices to rethink old and study new contexts of marginalization. I am committed to the reciprocity between scholarship and activism and hence to the dialectical relationship between the scholarly production of knowledge about Dalit and African American [End Page 75] women, political activism, and feminist practice and political questions of representation, equality, and solidarity. Moreover, I argue that a margin-to-margin framework will invite different social actors, including scholars and activists, inside a region, nation, or even transnationally to construct shared goals and new bonds of sentiment as well as bodies of knowledge among those most exploited, excluded, or...

Stunting in India: Role of Education, Behaviour and Social Identity

This paper explores the idea that how wealth is distributed across social groups (ethnic or language groups, gender, etc.) fundamentally affects the evolution of economic inequality. By providing microfoundations suitable for this exploration, this paper hopes to enhance our understanding of when social forces contribute to the reproduction of economic inequality. In tackling this issue, this paper offers contributions in two domains. First, it models social capital as a real capital asset with direct use and collateral value. Second, it extends the concepts of identity, alienation and polarization used by Esteban and Ray (1994). This generalization permits us to consider the multiple characteristics that shape social identity, inclusion and exclusion. It also underwrites a higher-order measure of socio-economic polarization that permits us to explore the hypothesis that economic inequality is most pernicious and persistent when it is socially embedded. Among other things we are able to show that holding constant the initial levels of economic polarization and wealth inequality, higher socio-economic polarization increases subsequent income and wealth inequality. Far from being a distributionally neutral panacea for missing markets, social capital in this model may itself generate exclusion and deepen social and economic cleavages.

While public opinion is typically stable over time, support for same-sex marriage increased from 35% to 61% between 2006 and 2016. It wasn’t just that older, more conservative people were dying and being replaced in the population by younger, more progressive people; people were changing their minds. Was this due to leadership from elites like President Barack Obama? To advocacy campaigns pushing for equal rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people? How does individual-level identity come into play? Given this uncharacteristic rate of attitudinal change, this book examines the relationship between social group identity and support for LGBT rights. Between 2011 and 2014, the authors conducted public opinion experiments across the country, testing their new Theory of Dissonant Identity Priming. Drawing from political communication, psychology, and identity literature, the theory suggests that people will be more supportive of LGBT rights when they hear that others within a shared identity group are also supporters, particularly if they find that support surprising. The experiments primed identities in four major social groups: sports fans, religion, ethnorace (Black or Latino identity), and partisanship. Overall, the results provide considerable support for the theory. Fans of the Green Bay Packers football team were more likely to say they support same-sex marriage when told that Packers Hall-of-Famer Leroy Butler was supportive. African Americans were more likely to support same-sex marriage when told that President Obama was supportive. Political communication that primes a social identity can change attitudes.

The Election Commission of India (henceforth, the EC), shouldering the responsibility of conducting parliamentary and state elections in India, operates the colossal electoral machinery and also works towards social mobilisation that is aimed at deepening democracy. This constitutional institution works all year round, holding elections asynchronously at dual levels. This book looks at the EC and electoral practice in India in a time period spanning between 1990 (the year just before the 10th parliamentary elections of 1991) and 2019 (the year of the 17th parliamentary elections). It analyses the EC's relations and interactions with pivotal state institutions – namely the parliament, the Supreme Court (which along with the EC are constitutional institutions in India) and political parties – to modernise the electoral machinery and streamline democratic procedures. The book primarily puts forth the argument that besides the citizen voters, political parties, social groups and civil society, a crucial role is also played by the EC in consolidating the project of democracy through its work of supervising and conducting elections. In other words, through its regulatory role, the EC is as much involved in the project of democratisation as other institutions or individuals. The book also attempts a comparison between some aspects of the electoral machinery in India and those of a few other liberal democracies (through examples of electoral practice and administration from the United States [US], the United Kingdom [UK], South Africa, Japan and Canada) to highlight the role electoral institutions play in democratisation. This contrast also brings the EC's position and working in India into sharper relief and clarifies its sociopolitical situatedness in India.

The article provides a comprehensive comparative discourse analysis of the Eurosceptic narratives articulated by the Visegrád Group (V4) countries – Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. The study explores how these narratives reflect the broader transformation of European identity and political communication within the European Union (EU). The research assumes that Central European Euroscepticism should not be reduced merely to a reaction against Brussels’ bureaucracy but should be understood as an attempt to redefine the principles of subsidiarity, sovereignty, and political solidarity in the evolving European project. Methodologically, the article employs a combination of critical discourse analysis, comparative politics, and the pragmatist theory of power, allowing for a multidimensional interpretation of political communication across the four countries. This interdisciplinary approach reveals how political elites in the V4 have strategically constructed rhetorical frames to legitimize alternative visions of European integration and to balance national sovereignty with collective obligations. The findings demonstrate a significant transformation in V4 Euroscepticism after 2022. The Russian war against Ukraine served as a catalyst for shifting discursive patterns: while earlier narratives focused on migration and economic policy, more recent ones emphasize energy autonomy, regional leadership, and «sovereign Europeanism». This concept encapsulates the V4’s pragmatic approach – combining critique of EU institutions with an aspiration to shape Europe’s future security and governance agenda. The article introduces the concept of pragmatic Euroscepticism to describe this hybrid model of political discourse, integrating both constructive and critical dimensions. The study’s practical relevance lies in its potential to inform EU communication strategies toward Central Europe and to forecast the evolving internal dynamics of the Visegrád Group.