Politically In/Sane

In this episode of Politically Insane, host V. Prakash sits down with Pavithra Suryanarayan, Associate Professor in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics, to unpack one of the most consequential and misunderstood forces in Indian politics: caste. But this isn't a conversation about caste simply as identity or ethnicity. Suryanarayan argues that to truly understand how caste shapes political behavior, you have to understand it as rank -a form of inherited social standing that functions more like aristocracy or racial hierarchy than like religion or tribe.Drawing on her research across India and the post-Civil War American South Suryanarayan explains why threatened elites - from upper-caste groups in India to white coalitions in the Reconstruction-era South - consistently respond to social integration not by competing harder, but by weakening the very state institutions that might level the playing field. She also offers a striking new lens on the BJP's electoral dominance: a welfare strategy built deliberately around direct transfers that deliver material benefits to the poor without ever blurring the caste boundaries that its upper-caste base is most anxious to preserve.

In this insightful interview, Dr. Van der Linden, Professor of Social Psychology in Society at the University of Cambridge and author of #Foolproof, explores the psychology of misinformation, inoculation techniques, and the role of policy and education in combating disinformation.
Discover how psychological strategies and regulatory measures can help build societal resilience against misinformation threats.

Key topics
Inoculation theory and pre-bunking techniques
The role of education and policy in combating misinformation
AI threats and inoculation against AI-generated falsehoods

The conversation delves into the importance of polling in elections, the misuse of polls for political narratives, the public's understanding of polls and misinformation, the impact of technology on polling, the challenges of conveying uncertainty in polling, and the complexity of polling accuracy and interpretation.

Takeaways
Polls and their interpretation can be instrumentalized to spread misinformation or disinformation.

The public's understanding of polls and their significance is relatively low, and conveying uncertainty is challenging.

Why do political elites so often misread the public -- and why does it matter for democracy? In this episode of Politically In/Sane, Sarina Sharma-Welsh speaks with Dr. Miguel Pereira (LSE) about how politicians learn what voters want, why elite blind spots persist, and how social background, unequal political voice, and social media distort representation. The conversation explores distrust in institutions, polarization, and whether democratic accountability still works—and what it would take to rebuild it.

The episode explores political entrepreneurs like Nigel Farage, their strategies (issue entrepreneurship and anti-establishment rhetoric), and how they're disrupting traditional party systems across Europe and beyond. A conversation with Prof. Sara Hobolt.
Prof. Sara Hobolt: https://bsky.app/profile/sarahobolt.bsky.social