Special Issue on Tamil Nadu Assembly Election 2026: Algorithmic Publics and Psephological Ruptures

2026-09-28
Tamil Nadu Assembly Election 2026: Algorithmic Publics and Psephological Ruptures

Issue Editors:

Dr Arulselvan S, Professor, Department of Electronic Media & Mass Communication, Pondicherry University

Dr Prabhakar K B, Guest Faculty, Department of Electronic Media & Mass Communication, Pondicherry University

Submission deadline (Abstract): October 30, 2026

Full manuscripts due: February 10, 2027

I. Introduction

The Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly election - 2026 is an event of considerable significance, not merely in the political realm but as an empirical and theoretical rupture in the study of communication. For the first time after the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) captured power in the Tamil Nadu Assembly in 1967, neither of the two hegemonic Dravidian parties, the DMK nor its breakaway, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, secured the majority to form a government in Tamil Nadu; instead, the throne was conquered by Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam, a party established a couple of years ago by a Tamil film superstar, C Joseph Vijay. The recent electoral outcomes have ushered in a paradigmatic shift among new voters in their self-abstractions and the formation of political publics (Bucher, 2018; Gillespie, 2014).

In this context, a special issue titled “Tamil Nadu Assembly Election 2026: Reflections on Political Publics and Psephological Ruptures” has become an inevitable responsibility of Communication and Culture Review. This special issue could be a scholarly intervention that deploys the empirical rigour of the aforementioned electoral event as a site for broader theoretical and methodological inquiry into the formation of algorithmic publics, thereby contributing across the following three distinct registers of academic inquiry.

1. Political Communication

The centrality of short-form content and algorithm-driven information ecosystems in the electoral campaign urges academia to reflect on its existing understanding of political communication. Though the yesteryear conceptualisations, such as hybrid media system (Chadwick, 2017), connective action framework (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012), and influencers as a new category of opinion leadership (Riedl et al., 2023), offer a good starting point for understanding developments, the specificities of the South Indian vernacular digital sphere require significant theoretical elaboration. However, the recent developments in Tamil Nadu electoral politics provide a fertile landscape to fill that gap and to theorise new communicative configurations that are embedded in platform dependency (Bucher & Helmond, 2018) and algorithmic amplification (Gandini et al., 2026; Gillespie, 2014). Contributions along this axis may engage with theories on publics and address questions such as, ‘How are political publics constituted through digital and social media platforms?’, ‘How do algorithmic architectures shape modern political and social imaginaries?’, ‘What is the communicative logic of influencer-mediated political discourse?’, and ‘What are the implications for democratic deliberation?’.

2. Psephology

The drastic failure of most of the exit polls on the Tamil Nadu Assembly election - 2026 to predict the electoral outcome clamour critical reflection on methodological refinement and conceptual adequacy to account for the sociology of the voter in societies structured by caste, fandom, vernacular digital cultures, and populist affect (Rai, 2021; Roy & Sopariwala, 2019). Therefore, this special issue invites both empirical assessments and theoretical critiques that can collectively contribute to a paradigm shift in the epistemological questions in psephology. The reconsideration of questions such as ‘Why do voters vote as they do?’, ‘How are electoral choices made in conditions of informational abundance and ideological fragmentation?’, ‘What is the relationship between affective attachment to a film personality, a community identity, a welfare promise, and rational electoral calculation?’ has become relevant and crucial again. What does the failure of predictive polls reveal about the epistemological foundations of survey-based research? What alternative or complementary methodologies, such as computational, ethnographic, discourse-analytic, and network-analytic, might better apprehend the dynamics at work in contemporary Tamil electoral politics? Contributions along this line are invited to make explicit their methodological arguments and to situate them within broader debates in the philosophy of social science.

3. Populism studies

The recent political changes also allow scholars of the Dravidian movement to rethink whether the assertive populism or paternalistic populism of the Dravidian parties offers adequate tokens in today's power politics in Tamil Nadu. Contribution in this axes may reassess how caste positionality, economic status, and voting patterns are changing and connected in the emerging era and address the questions such as, ‘How does caste continue to structure electoral alignments in Tamil Nadu, and how has its articulation with new forms of identity politics, such as fandom, regional pride, welfare entitlements, and digital communities, transformed its political valence?’, ‘What is the continued relevance of political ideology, and how do populist and affective appeals mediate it?’.

II. Themes for Submission
  1. Short-form contents and political communication
  2. Vote-bank in a transformed media environment
  3. Algorithm-driven electoral campaigns
  4. Fandom-driven political mobilisation and its structural conditions
  5. Populism, fandom, and affective politics in Tamil Nadu
  6. Epistemological limits of exit polls
  7. Methodological innovations for studying electoral shifts
  8. Anti-incumbency as a structural phenomenon
III. Submission guidelines
  • Length: 6,000 to 8,000 words, inclusive of notes and references
  • Abstract: 150 to 200 words, in addition to five keywords
  • Style: APA 7th edition
  • Format: OpenDocument Format (.odt), or MS Word (.docx); Times New Roman 12 pt, single-spaced; employs italics, rather than underlining (refer to Author guidance for detailed instructions)
  • Review: Double-anonymised peer review
  • Submission: register/login at the following link for submitting your article in OJS  http://communicationandculturereview.in/index.php/communication_culture_review/about/submissions

Manuscripts must be original, unpublished, and not under consideration elsewhere.

IV. Proposed Timeline
  • Abstract Submission Deadline: October 30, 2026
  • Notification of Abstract Acceptance: November 20, 2026
  • Full Paper Submission Deadline: February 10, 2027
  • Peer Review Results: March 15, 2027
  • Revised Manuscript Submission Deadline: April 15, 2027
  • Anticipated Publication Date: May 30, 2027
V. Enquiries

Informal enquiries about fit and scope are welcome in advance of submission. Please write to the editors at communicationandculturereview@gmail.com 

VI. Reference

Bennett, W. L., & Segerberg, A. (2012). THE LOGIC OF CONNECTIVE ACTION: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Information, Communication & Society, 15(5), 739–768. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.670661

Bucher, T. (2018). If . . . Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics.

Bucher, T., & Helmond, A. (2018). The Affordances of Social Media Platforms. In J. Burgess, A. Marwick, & T. Poell, The SAGE Handbook of Social Media (pp. 233–253). SAGE Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473984066.n14

Chadwick, A. (2017). The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power. Oxford University Press.

Gandini, A., Keeling, S., & Reviglio, U. (2026). Conceptualising the ‘algorithmic public opinion’: Public opinion formation in the digital age. Dialogues on Digital Society, 2(1), 46–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/29768640251323147

Gillespie, T. (2014). The Relevance of Algorithms.

Rai, P. (2021). Psephological Fallacies of Public Opinion Polling. (28).

Riedl, M. J., Lukito, J., & Woolley, S. C. (2023). Political Influencers on Social Media: An Introduction. Social Media + Society, 9(2), 20563051231177938. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231177938

Roy, P., & Sopariwala, D. R. (2019). The Verdict: Decoding India’s Elections. Penguin Random House India Private Limited.