Dr Annie Tubadji, Dr. Yashi Jain (p)

The Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) in India is a far-right Hindu nationalist and social conservative party in India that is ruling since 2014. This paper aims to reveal the links between the accumulation of local cultural capital and voting for the BJP. In particular, employing the Culture Based Development (CBD) paradigm we can differentiate between cultural heritage (CH) and living culture (LC) and sub-components of local cultural capital and quantifying the balance between them (by using the Cultural Entropy measures). Using voting data from 1951 till 2025 and Google Ngrams data to quantify culture we show that there is Keynesian socio-economic oscillation that is predicted by the levels of cultural entropy.

Dr. Valentina Kostadinova (p), Dr Annie Tubadji

The paper aims to examine how Thatcherism reconfigured British class relations. To that end it considers Thatcher’s flagship policy of crushing the trade unions. We test empirically which is the main factor that allowed this policy to come in place: shifting cultural attitudes, institutional-political agency, or socio-economic deprivation. The aim is to map out the shifting class relations in the 1970- 1995 period. We expect that the effect could also be mixed, namely: that when the institutions (organised bodies with power over the people) are more extractive, they can dominate the cultural impact (people's attitudes) and that when the institutions are less extractive, the cultural impact will be more prevalent. To conduct the analysis, we use data from Google Ngrams, Thatcher’s speeches and aggregate data from ONS GDP. We use timeseries analysis, vector error correction models and Granger causality tests to disentangle the causal links. In developing this analysis, we use insights from multidisciplinary literature, including Todd, Acemoglu, Putnam, Reich, and Tubadji.

Dr. Annie Tubadji (p)

Can individual political agency, biased with taste for discrimination, create significantly impactful narratives that can sway the behaviour of important institutions such as the police force without officially changing the law? This paper studies the case of Theresa May's hostile rhetorical legacy on immigrants, recorded in a press database, and its temporal association with the rise of stop-and-search policy practice among people of colour in the United Kingdom in the period of her being in political power. A difference in differences methodology is employed to delve into the causal direction between political hate speech and the tendency to rising hate crime of the institutions. Specifically, the paper delves into the type of regional milieu in which the hate speech was most impactful. The results reveal the role of the Tiebout-Hirschman-Rothschild mechanism for making places more vulnerable to hate speech instigating hate crime by the institutions.