Tag: Joseph Vijay

• ‘Hidden’ voting preferences

  On May 4, former Tamil film actor C. Joseph Vijay and his Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) emerged in the Tamil Nadu Assembly elections as the single largest party. The magnitude of the victory was widely unexpected, and dislodged the Dravidian duopoly in the State since 1959.

  While the reasons for this win are still falling in place — a need for change and reform and fatigue with corruption seem to have been decisive forces — it also appears more than a few voters expected the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) to win even as they wished to shrink the size of its majority, to send a message of sorts.

  Eventually, of course, the TVK won, securing 108 seats in the 234-seat Assembly and with almost 35% of the vote share.

  A rational choice

  While the complete political psychology of Mr. Vijay’s win is still developing, we know the TVK did subtract more from the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam vote base. The erstwhile actor also had many vocal supporters, especially among the State’s youth. Many parents were even cowed by their starstruck and adamant children, often well below voting age, insisting they vote for the TVK irrespective of their own inclinations.

  In the mix of possibilities, the idea that one would vote for another party assuming a second party would win anyway stands out as a self-negating, even unpredictable, proposition.

  However, this way of deciding is actually rational and well-documented in political science and economics. The basic idea comes from the fact that people do not just vote for whom or which ideology they prefer. They also vote based on whom they believe ‘can’ win, how they believe others will vote, and what social rewards (or punishments) they associate with each choice. As a result, if voters believe one party is ‘destined’ to win, they could also believe they can defect to another party — i.e. voting for different reasons while not changing their expectations. When that idea becomes sufficiently widespread, the party they actually voted for could win.

  Of course, psychology alone cannot explain what happened in Tamil Nadu. But the way psychologists, sociologists, and economists have explored these possibilities may describe a part of why the State voted the way it did.

  Mediated by the media

  In the 1920s, the U.S. social psychologist Floyd Allport described a concept called pluralistic ignorance. It says that if each person in a group privately believes something but incorrectly assumes most other people do not believe that as well, they can behave on the basis of a collective opinion that they have failed to read. Scholars have also found that any society whose people think like this is actually less stable than it looks. When private preferences diverge far enough from the public one, even a small trigger — like a rupture in the appearance of consensus — can cause people to quickly and progressively reveal their true choices as they see others doing so.

  The TVK’s 34.92% vote share could suggest a reservoir of suppressed private preferences that did not always surface in mainstream discourse — or could it? Since the verdict on May 4, many reporters have recalled people on the ground telling them they would vote for the TVK — even as many in the media reported the DMK would emerge victorious.

  They may have struggled to reconcile two conflicting impressions. On the one hand, they encountered enthusiasm for a two-year-old party and its charismatic leader. On the other, they weighed the DMK’s formidable organisational machinery and its entrenched presence in Tamil Nadu politics, plus the common assumption that parties with deep cadres and alliances generally prevail. Many observers may have resolved this contradiction in favour of what they already ‘knew’ about how elections usually work. After all, if such intuitions prove unreliable in one major election, they could unsettle the observers’ confidence in others as well.

  Ultimately, those declarations in the press supporting a DMK victory could also have lowered the perceived cost of voting for an alternative. In Tamil Nadu, one popular media narrative of the TVK — that it was a celebrity vanity project, different in spirit from the campaigns of M.G. Ramachandran and J. Jayalalithaa — could also have made Mr. Vijay et al. seem like an alternative through whose bid to power individual voters could send a ‘message’.

  Diverging preferences

  Voters do not always infer information directly. They also survey the (apparent) behaviour of others. Each voter’s confidence in the DMK’s invincibility could have been abetted partly by observing what seemed to be confidence among others, leading some people to discount their own private impressions. This then could have created a feed-forward loop in which the strength of the private preference diverges significantly from that of the public one, until a voter reaches the ballot.

  Scholars have sometimes modelled this as a phenomenon called a threshold effect: each voter has a personal point at which they will act on their private preference. When enough people cross that threshold at the same time, the electoral outcome can shift nonlinearly, meaning it could appear sudden and disproportionate to what people have been seeing around them until then.

  In a 1995 book titled Private Truths, Public Lies, the Turkish-American economist Timur Kuran argued that individuals routinely misrepresent their private preferences in order to conform with public preferences, which he called preference falsification. And as falsified preferences accumulate over time, they could stabilise a misleading public consensus.

  The political scientist Anthony Downs helped put together a rational explanation of voting in which people weigh the expected value of their vote, including the small chance that it could be decisive. In a political climate where the DMK’s victory could have seemed like a given, for example, voters might try to improve the value of their vote, as they see it. Based on this idea, around three decades later, Australian economist Geoffrey Brennan and his American peer Loren Lomasky argued that because the chance of any one vote being pivotal is really small in a large election, voters also use the (private) ballot as a place where they can express themselves — an interpretation some scholars have also applied to the Brexit referendum.

  Defect without consequence

  In fact, the duo contended that the lower a person perceives the value of their vote to be, the more sincerely they will vote for whom they actually want to vote for. In this reading, some of TVK’s voters could be said to have voted expressively. Some scholars have described similar situations in terms of the ‘wasted vote’ — in Tamil Nadu, not wasted because it went to the TVK but because it would have been of ‘little use’ to the DMK.

  In his noted work on public goods and collective action, the economist Mancur Olson found that individuals who are all interested in a common collective good will still also under-contribute towards the goal as long as they can benefit from the contributions of others. So for instance, if a group of DMK supporters believed that the DMK was set to win, one individual in the group may have also believed that as long as the others voted for the DMK, she alone could vote to ‘send a message’ without consequence. The defector’s decision is actually rational because, according to the information that she had, the cost of defection was zero.

  As analysts continue to make sense of the TVK’s unprecedented victory, it will be interesting to watch whether any of these reasons match what played out on the ground on April 23.

  2026.05.12

• Joel Mokyr, Gita Chadha, Lawrence Krauss, Joseph Vijay

  All that thinking about Joel Mokyr and his prescription to support society’s intellectual elite in order to ensure technological progress took me back to a talk Gita Chadha delivered in 2020, and to a dilemma I’d had at the time involving Lawrence Krauss. Chadha’s proposed resolution to it could in fact settle another matter I’ve been considering of late, involving Tamil actor-politician Joseph Vijay.

  But first a recap. Gita Chadha is a sociologist and author, a professor at Azim Premji University, and an honorary senior fellow at the NCBS Archives. Her 2020 talk was titled ‘Exploring the idea of ‘Scientific Genius’ and its consequences’.

  Lawrence M. Krauss is a cosmologist, sceptic, and author, former chair of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an alleged sexual predator, and a known associate (and defender) of convicted child-sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In 2020 he was a year away from publishing a book entitled The Physics of Climate Change, combining two topics of great interest to me, but I wasn’t sure if I should read it. On the one hand there was the wisdom about separating the scholarship from the scholar but on the other I didn’t want to fill out Krauss’s wallet — or that of his publisher, who was trading on Krauss’s reputation — nor heighten the relevance of his book.

  Finally, I’ve been thinking about Vijay more than I might’ve been if not for my friend, who’s a fan of Vijay the actor but not the politician. Whenever I express displeasure over her support for Vijay’s acting, she asks me to separate his films from Vijay the person, and politician. I haven’t been convinced. Is Vijay a good actor? I, like my friend, think so. My opinion of Vijay the politician declined however following the crowding disaster in Karur on September 27: while his party’s cadre whipped up a crowd whose size greatly exceeded what the location could safely hold, Vijay made a bad situation worse by first insisting on conducting a roadshow and then arriving late.

  Today, I firmly believe separating the work from the person doesn’t make sense when the work itself produces the person’s power.

  I first realised this when contemplating Krauss. When I asked during her talk about how we can separate the scholarship from the scholar, Chadha among other things said, “We need to critically start engaging with how the social location of a scholar impacts the kind of work that they do.” Her point was that, rather than consider whether knowledge remains usable once the person who originated it is revealed to have been unethical, we must remember prestige is never innocent: because it changes what institutions and audiences are prepared to excuse.

  Broadly speaking, when society puts specific academics “on pedestals”, their eminence and the grant money they bring in become ways to excuse their harm. This is how people like Krauss were able to conduct themselves the way they did. Their work wasn’t just their contribution to the scientific knowledge of all humankind; it was also the reason for their universities to close ranks around them, in ways that the individuals also condoned, until the allegations became too inconvenient to ignore. The scholar benefited from what the scholarship was and the scholarship benefited from who the scholar was.

  So a good response isn’t to pretend that it’s possible to cleanly separate the art from the artist but to pay attention to how the work builds social capital for the individual and to keep the individual — and the institutions within which they operate — from wielding that capital as a shield. Thus we must scrutinise Krauss, we must scrutinise his defenders, and we must ask ourselves why we uphold his scholarship above that of others.

  (Note: We don’t have to read Krauss’s books, however. This is different from, say, the fact that we have to use Feynman diagrams in theoretical physics even as Richard Feynman was a misogynist and a creep. It doesn’t have to be one at the expense of the other; it can, and perhaps should, be both. I myself eventually decided to not read Krauss’s book: not because he defended Epstein but because I wanted to spend that time and attention on something completely new to me. I asked some friends for recommendations and that’s how I read When the Whales Leave by Yuri Rytkheu.)

  The same rationale also clarified the problem I’d had with my friend’s suggestion that I separate Vijay’s work as an actor from Vijay himself. For starters: sure, an actor can play a role well and thus be deemed a good actor, but I think the sort of roles they pick to the exclusion of others ought to matter just as well to their reputation. And the parts he’s picked to play over the last decade or so have all been those of preachy alpha-males touting conservative views of women’s reproductive rights, male attitudes towards women, and retributive justice, among others. It’s also no coincidence that these morals genuflect smoothly to the pro-populist parts of his political messaging.

  Similarly, Vijay’s alpha-male roles that I dislike aren’t just fictions: they’re part of the public persona that Vijay has deliberately converted into his newfound political authority. Once a ‘star’ enters electoral politics, “watching for entertainment” is hard to separate from participating in and enabling a machinery that’s generating legitimacy for the ‘star’. The tickets sold, the number of streams, the rallies attended, and the number of fans mobilised all help to manufacture the claim that Vijay has a mandate at all. As with Krauss, participation increased, and continues to increase, material power and relevance as well as paves the way to claim and probably receive immunity from the consequences of inflicting social harm.

  But where the case of Vijay diverges from that of Krauss is that the former presents much less of a dilemma. When a person goes from cinema to electoral politics, separating their work from their personal identity is practically indefensible because the political leader himself is the vehicle of the power that he has cultivated through his film work. That is to say, the art and the artist are the same entity because the art fuels the artist’s social standing and the artist’s social standing fuels his particular kind of art.

  2025.12.15