Birds of a Caste - How Caste Hierarchies Manifest in Retweet Behavior of Indian Politicians
By Palashi Vaghela, Ramaravind Kommiya Mothilal, Joyojeet Pal. 2020
25 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The Hindu caste system plays an important role in the socio-political landscape of India. In recent years, Indian politicians have moved a lot of direct communication online. Social media is now an important space for the articulation and performance of their political positions. In this paper, we study ways in which the political performance of caste relations can be captured from the online connections and messaging of parliamentarians in India. We run tests of odds ratios among the members of LokSabha (lower house) of India to find the extent to which their engagement is insular to their own caste group versus other groups. We observe that in the LokSabha network, Members of Parliament (MPs) have higher odds of getting retweeted by others whose caste is the same or closer to their own in the caste hierarchy. The findings of this research shed light on an understudied, yet critical, social relation of caste in the study of political behavior on social media.
Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics, Social Sciences & Humanities
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Communication
In Sociology and Political Science
In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
In Social Sciences & Humanities
Citations in the corpus
- Re-contextualizing Fairness in NLP: The Case of India (2022, background): “…to have low literacy rates, misrepresentation, poverty, low technology access, and exclusion in language data (Deshpande, 2011; Kamath, 2018; Krishna et al., 2019).7 Caste-based prejudices have been documented in matrimonial ads (Rajadesingan et al., 2019) and social media (Vaghela et al., 2021).”