Showing papers in "Social Forces in 2016"

The Populist Style in American Politics: Presidential Campaign Discourse, 1952–1996

Abstract: This paper examines populist claims-making in US presidential elections. We define populism as a discursive strategy that juxtaposes the virtuous populace with a corrupt elite and views the former as the sole legitimate source of political power. In contrast to past research, we argue that populism is best operationalized as an attribute of political claims rather than a stable ideological property of political actors. This analytical strategy allows us to systematically measure how the use of populism is affected by a variety of contextual factors. Our empirical case consists of 2,406 speeches given by American presidential candidates between 1952 and 1996, which we code using automated text analysis. Populism is shown to be a common feature of presidential politics among both Democrats and Republicans, but its prevalence varies with candidates’ relative positions in the political field. In particular, we demonstrate that the probability of a candidate’s reliance on populist claims is directly proportional to his distance from the center of power (in this case, the presidency). This suggests that populism is primarily a strategic tool of political challengers, and particularly those who have legitimate claims to outsider status. By examining temporal changes in populist claims-making on the political left and right, its variation across geographic regions and field positions, and the changing content of populist frames, our paper contributes to the debate on populism in modern democracies, while integrating field theory with the study of institutional politics.

The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism, 2nd ed by Rosalind S. Chou and Joe R. Feagin (review)

Abstract: In Power Politics Karen Brodkin analyzes the successful mobilization of environmental justice activists against the construction of a power plant South Gate, a community in southeastern Los Angeles County. The historical and geographical context of the study is quite important considering that the mobilization took place during a major energy shortage throughout California. As such, Power Politics provides an engaging account of successful mobilization during a period of lowered political opportunities. Brodkin draws from a wide variety of informants, including activists, power plant representatives, and local politicians. Her analysis is also grounded in participant observation of community and city council meetings. The work addresses the history of the racial dynamics of the South Gate community, the history of the environmental justice movement in the community, and an analysis of how support and opposition to the power plant developed. Brodkin particularly emphasizes the development of environmental justice activism by South Gate High School students and teachers, who were key players in the mobilization against the plant. Finally, Brodkin analyzes the activities and strategies of the plants’ supporters and opponents during the struggle over whether to build the plant. Scholars of social movements and collective behavior will find many valuable insights in this work. Brodkin’s explicit focus on the impact of class and race on environmental organization may also be of interest to those studying social stratification, race, environmental racism, as well as their interactions. Wrongful Death Sentences: Rethinking Justice in Capital Cases, by Cathleen Burnett. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2010. 188pp. $52.50 cloth. ISBN: 9781588267160.

Atheists and Other Cultural Outsiders: Moral Boundaries and the Non-Religious in the United States

Abstract: We use data from a nationally representative survey to analyze anti-atheist sentiment in the United States in 2014, replicating analyses from a decade earlier and extending them to consider the factors that foster negative sentiment toward other non-religious persons. We find that anti-atheist sentiment is strong, persistent, and driven in part by moral concerns about atheists and in part by agreement with cultural values that affirm religiosity as a constitutive moral grounding of citizenship and national identity. Moral concerns about atheists also spill over to shape attitudes toward those who are spiritual but not religious (SBNRs) and influence evaluations of the recent decline in religious identification. Americans have more positive views of SBNRs than of atheists, but a plurality of Americans still negatively evaluate the increase in the percentage of Americans who claim no religious identification (nones). Our analyses show the continuing centrality of religiously rooted moral boundary-making in constituting cultural membership in the American context.

Flexible Work, Flexible Penalties: The Effect of Gender, Childcare, and Type of Request on the Flexibility Bias

Abstract: Although flexible work arrangements have the potential to reduce gender inequality and work-family conflict, the implications of requesting flexible work are poorly understood. In this paper, I argue that because flexwork arrangements in the United States are ambiguous and uncertain, people draw on cultural beliefs about gender to define flexwork and evaluate flexworkers. I conducted a controlled online experiment to examine the consequences of making a flexible work request and to examine how these consequences vary by accommodation type and by gender and parental status of the requester. Participants evaluated employees who requested flexible work more negatively than employees who did not request flexible work, and evaluated workers who requested telecommuting (or “flexplace”) arrangements more negatively than workers who requested flextime arrangements. Men and women who requested flexible work for reasons related to childcare were evaluated more positively than those who requested flexible work for reasons unrelated to childcare. I also found evidence of a fatherhood bonus. Men who made flexplace requests to care for a child were significantly advantaged compared to men who made flexplace requests for reasons unrelated to childcare. They were also advantaged compared to women who made flexplace requests to care for a child.

Rights, Economics, or Family?Frame Resonance, Political Ideology, and the Immigrant Rights Movement

Abstract: Although social movement scholars in the United States have long ignored activism over immigration, this movement raises important theoretical and empirical questions, especially given many immigrants’ lack of citizenship. Is the rights “master” frame, used extensively by other US social movements, persuasive in making claims for noncitizens? If not, which other movement frames resonate with the public? We leverage survey experiments—largely the domain of political scientists and public opinion researchers—to examine how much human/citizenship rights, economics, and family framing contests shape Californians’ views about legalization and immigrants’ access to public benefits. We pay particular attention to how potentially distinct “pub lics,” or subgroups, react, finding significant differences in frame resonance between groups distinguished by political ideology. However, alternative framings resonate with—at best—one political subgroup and, dauntingly, frames that resonate with one group sometimes alienate others. While activists and political theorists may hope that human rights appeals can expand American notions of membership, such a frame does not help the movement build support for legalization. Instead, the most expansive change in legalization attitudes occurs when framed as about family unity, but this holds only among self-reported conservatives. These findings underscore the challenges confronting the immigrant movement and the need to reevaluate the assumption that historically progressive rights language is effective for immigrant claims-making. When making claims for immigrants, which frames are most resonant for ordinary Americans? Social movement scholars have long argued that activists can

Telecommuting and Earnings Trajectories Among American Women and Men 1989–2008

Abstract: While flexibility in the location of work hours has shown positive organizational effects on productivity and retention, less is known about the earnings effects of telecommuting. We analyze weekly hours spent working from home using the 1989-2008 panels of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth. We describe the demographic and occupational characteristics of the employees engaged in telecommuting, then track their earnings growth with fixed-effects models, focusing on gender and parental status. Results show substantial variation in the earnings effects of telecommuting based on the point in the hours distribution worked from home. Working from home rather than the office produces equal earnings growth in the first 40 hours worked, but "taking work home" or overtime telecommuting yields significantly smaller increases than overtime worked on-site. Yet most observed telecommuting occurs precisely during this low-yield overtime portion of the hours distribution. Few gender or parental status differences emerged in these processes. These trends reflect potentially widespread negative consequences of the growing capacity of workers to perform their work from any location. Rather than enhancing true flexibility in when and where employees work, the capacity to work from home mostly extends the work day and encroaches into what was formerly home and family time.

NGOs, INGOs, and Environmental Policy Reform, 1970–2010

Abstract: We examine the effects of domestic and international environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) on pro-environmental policy adoption using cross-national data. We address three views: (1) a bottom-up perspective, prioritizing the role of domestic NGOs; (2) an interaction imagery, stressing alliances or reinforcing pressures between domestic and international NGOs; (3) a top-down view, emphasizing the part of international NGOs. We use event history analysis to model the cross-national adoption of three major pro-environmental policy reforms between 1970 and 2010: omnibus environmental laws, environmental impact assessment reporting requirements, and national environmental ministries. Results show that international NGOs are strongly associated with pro-environmental reforms, with very large effects. By contrast, domestic NGOs are generally not associated with policy adoption in global analyses. In a subsample of democratic countries, we find smaller effects of domestic NGOs for some outcomes. We find no evidence that international NGOs amplify the effects of domestic ones. While there are compelling historical examples of bottom-up and interaction processes, the broad pattern of environmental policy adoption across the world is better explained by global rather than domestic organizational dynamics.

Why Does Education Matter to Employers in Different Institutional Contexts? A Vignette Study in England and the Netherlands

Abstract: We study the process by which employers evaluate and interpret information related to the educational background of job applicants in simulated hiring contexts. We focus on England and the Netherlands, countries with very different education systems and labor-market institutions. Using a vignette study, a quasi-experimental technique, we asked employers to rate a series of resumes of hypothetical job applicants that randomly varied on a number of characteristics, including level of education, field of study, grades, study delays, and internships. Our findings suggest that the informational value of these characteristics varies across the two countries: English employers primarily sort applicants based on relative signals of merit such as grades, in line with queuing theory; Dutch employers instead base their ratings on fields of study and occupation-specific degrees, as predicted by human capital and closure theories. The findings from the vignette study are in line with results obtained from a survey administered to the same employers, corroborating the research validity. This study brings the employers’ perspective into a field that has mainly tested theoretical arguments about employers’ hiring behavior using employee data. From a theoretical point of view, our approach nuances three well-known theories on the relationship between education and job assignment (human capital, queuing, and closure theories), by specifying the scope conditions under which they are more likely to hold. We show that the reason why education matters to employers and the way employers evaluate educational credentials during the hiring process are conditional on institutions.

The Legitimacy of Protest: Explaining White Southerners' Attitudes Toward the Civil Rights Movement

Abstract: Activists seek attention for their causes and want to win sympathy from the broader public. Why do some citizens but not others approve when activists use protest tactics? This is a crucial but poorly understood aspect of social movements. While most prior research has focused on the personal determinants of attitudes toward movements, we argue that proximity to protest may cultivate positive views about a movement. Individuals living near centers of movement activity may become more favorable to protest because they become more sympathetic to the demands of activists. We investigate public support about protest tactics among white Southerners during the early stages of the civil rights movement. To do so, we employ a representative survey conducted in 1961 with nearly 700 white adults living in the South. These survey data are combined with contextual data measuring local protest, political behavior, and civic organizations. Most scholars have focused on the ways that civil rights activity propelled white counter-mobilization, but protest also won sympathy from a small subset of white Southerners, thereby fracturing the dominant consensus in support of Jim Crow segregation. We also find that local racial political context matters: individuals living in counties with weaker support for segregationist politics, where white moderates were active, and outside the Deep South were generally more favorable. At the individual level, our strongest findings indicate that sit-in support was more likely from those with greater educational attainment, less frequent church attendance, and exposure to discussions about race relations from the pulpit.

Cascades of Coverage: Dynamics of Media Attention to Social Movement Organizations

Abstract: Gaining attention in the mass media is a key goal of many social movement organizations (SMOs). The dominant explanation of media attention to SMOs is that the media act like a filter, selecting some types of SMOs and events for attention, and ignoring others based on characteristics of these SMOs, events, and their political environment. In contrast to this “bias model,” I argue that some media attention to SMOs is characterized by positive feedback, or rich-get-richer processes: past media attention increases the likelihood of future media attention through its effect on the SMO and on other media outlets. Like other positive feedback systems, media attention can be path dependent, is routinely punctuated by large cascades of attention to previously obscure SMOs, and can be contingent on “accidents” of history: at critical junctures, individuals, organizations, and events have the potential to radically impact the extent of media attention to their movements and organizations. Media attention to SMOs can also become decoupled from the types of events that initially sparked their media attention, becoming spokes-organizations for their movements and receiving media attention for events and stories that they themselves are not involved. In support of this theory, I first show that media attention is, similar to other positive feedback processes, power-law distributed across SMOs using two national (US) data sets. I then illustrate the process of positive feedback in media attention through a case study of the Black Panther Party’s rise to prominence in media attention.

Gendering (Non)Religion: Politics, Education, and Gender Gaps in Secularity in the United States

Abstract: Gender gaps in religiosity among Western populations, such that women are more religious than men, are well documented. Previous explanations for these differences range from biological predispositions of risk aversion to patriarchal gender socialization, but all largely overlook the intersection of social statuses. Drawing on theories of intersectionality, we contribute to the cultural and empirical analysis of gender gaps in religiosity by documenting an interactive effect between gender, education, and political views for predicting religious nonaffiliation and infrequent attendance at religious services among Americans. For highly educated political liberals, gender gaps effectively disappear, such that men and women are almost equally likely to be secular (or religious). The results have implications for the long-standing disputes about the gendered “nature” of religiosity and highlight the importance of multiple intersecting statuses and modalities in shaping aggregate patterns of religiosity and secularity.

Compared to Whom? Inequality, Social Comparison, and Happiness in the United States

Abstract: We contribute to the literature on positional goods and subjective well-being by providing new evidence on the following questions: Is the effect of income on subjective well-being mainly relative or absolute? Does the intensity of social comparison condition the effect of income on well-being? Does the reference group for comparison condition this effect? We present results from the Social Status, Consumption, and Happiness Survey, a national survey of Americans conducted in 2012. The findings suggest that the more highly individuals rate their income relative to others, the happier they are; that individuals who find it important to compare their income to that of others are less happy; and that the reference group that is salient for comparison conditions the association between income and well-being. We situate these findings in the literatures on the dynamics of inequality, social comparison, and well-being.

The Feminization of Occupations and Change in Wages: A Panel Analysis of Britain, Germany, and Switzerland

Abstract: In the past four decades, women have made major inroads into occupations previously dominated by men. This paper examines whether occupational feminization is accompanied by a decline in wages: Do workers suffer a wage penalty if they remain in, or move into, feminizing occupations? We analyze this question over the 1990s and 2000s in Britain, Germany, and Switzerland, using longitudinal panel data to estimate individual fixed effects for men and women. Moving from an entirely male to an entirely female occupation entails a loss in individual earnings of 13 percent in Britain, 7 percent in Switzerland, and 3 percent in Germany. The impact of occupational feminization on wages is not linear, but sets apart occupations holding more than 60 percent of women. Moving into such female occupations incurs a wage penalty. Contrary to the prevailing idea in economics, differences in productivity—human capital, job-specific skills, and time investment—do not fully explain the wage gap between male and female occupations. The wage penalty associated with working in a female occupation is also much larger where employer discretion is greater—in the private sector—than where wage-setting is guided by formal rules—the public sector. These findings suggest that wage disparities across male and female occupations are due to gender devaluation.

The Relationship between Education and Mental Health: New Evidence from a Discordant Twin Study

Abstract: Prior research has documented a strong and positive correlation between completed education and adults’ mental health. Researchers often describe this relationship using causal language: higher levels of education are thought to enhance people’s skills, afford important structural advantages, and empower better coping mechanisms, all of which lead to better mental health. An alternative explanation—the social selection hypothesis—suggests that schooling is a proxy for unobserved endowments and/or preexisting conditions that confound the relationship between the two variables. In this article, we seek to adjudicate between these hypotheses using a relatively large, US-based sample of identical adult twins. By relating within-twin-pair differences in education to within-twin-pair differences in mental health, we are able to control for the influence of genetic traits and shared family characteristics that may otherwise bias the estimates associated with educational attainment. Results from our analyses suggest that the observed association between education and mental health is attributable to confounding on unobserved variables. This finding holds across mental health conditions, is robust to several sensitivity checks, and survives a falsification test. Theoretical implications for the study of educational gradients in mental health are discussed.

Credential Privilege or Cumulative Advantage? Prestige, Productivity, and Placement in the Academic Sociology Job Market

Abstract: Using data on the population of US sociology doctorates over a five-year period, we examine different predictors of placement in research-oriented, tenure-track academic sociology jobs. More completely than in prior studies, we document the enormous relationship between PhD institution and job placement that has, in part, prompted a popular metaphor likening academic job allocation processes to a caste system. Yet, we also find comparable relationships between PhD program and both graduate student publishing and awards. Overall, we find results more consistent with PhD prestige operating indirectly through mediating achievements or as a quality signal than as a “pure prestige” effect. We suggest sociologists think of stratification in their profession as not requiring exceptionalist historical metaphors, but rather as involving the same ordinary but powerful processes of cumulative advantage that pervade contemporary life.

A Hunger for God: Embodied Metaphor as Cultural Cognition in Action

Abstract: Drawing from an ethnographic study of fasting among converts to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in the United States, this article develops a conceptualization of embodied metaphor as a form of cultural cognition in action. The findings demonstrate that fasting reshaped converts’ subjectivities and subsequent actions through the creation of a series of metaphorical associations between concrete, bodily experiences related to food, hunger, and appetite and more abstract religious discourses pertaining to the soul, sin, and the acquisition of religious virtue. While current influential models of cultural cognition in sociology have focused on explaining the divide between cognition at the semantic level of discourse (i.e., discursive consciousness) and the somatic level of bodily perception and habit (i.e., practical consciousness), this study argues that embodied metaphor is a cognitive process that accounts for the dynamic, mutually informing interactions between these two cognitive registers. By way of conclusion, I argue for the broader theoretical, methodological, and empirical significance of this study for sociological scholarship on culture and cognition.

The Dynamics of Social Support Inequality: Maintenance Gaps by Socioeconomic Status and Race?

Abstract: A vast literature demonstrates how personal networks mirror and reproduce broader patterns of social inequality. The availability of key resources through informal mechanisms is an important way that high-status Americans retain a host of social advantages. Largely absent from this account of social capital inequality, however, is an explicit temporal dimension. The current article addresses that gap by targeting the dynamic nature of personal networks. Specifically, we consider whether race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES) are associated with how US adults’ resource-providing ties persist or vanish between two time points. Using panel data from the Portraits of American Life Study, we find that non-Whites and lower-SES Americans tend to receive useful advice and practical help from fewer close ties than do White and higher-SES adults, while Black Americans are especially likely to receive financial assistance from their network members. Models fail to indicate that non-Whites lose these resourceful ties at a disproportionate rate over time. On the other hand, we find that income has a robust association with the ability to retain ties initially providing advice and help. We interpret the latter findings as a temporal manifestation of network-based inequality. The maintenance gap between higher- and lower-SES Americans, we argue, can reinforce other social capital disparities by shaping dependable access to important resources and by altering their ability to effectively mobilize resources. Network maintenance is a concept that could be useful to researchers studying how social capital matters for a variety of instrumental and expressive outcomes.

Beyond Boys' Bad Behavior: Paternal Incarceration and Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood

Abstract: A growing number of American school-aged children have incarcerated or formally incarcerated parents necessitating a more comprehensive understanding of the intergenerational effects of mass imprisonment. Using the Fragile Families Study, I assess whether having an incarcerated father impacts children's cognitive skill development into middle childhood. While previous studies have primarily found effects for boys' behavior problems, matching models and sensitivity analyses demonstrate that experiencing paternal incarceration by age 9 is associated with lower cognitive skills for both boys and girls and these negative effects hold net of a pre-paternal incarceration measure of child cognitive ability. Moreover, I estimate that paternal incarceration explains between 2 and 15 percent of the Black-White achievement gap at age 9. These findings represent new outcomes of importance and suggest that paternal incarceration may play an even larger role in the production of intergenerational inequalities for American children than previously documented.

Partnership Patterns in the United States and across Europe: The Role of Education and Country Context

Abstract: Patterns of partnership formation and dissolution are changing dramatically across the Western world. Some scholars have argued that women's trajectories of union formation and dissolution are diverging by education, with the higher educated postponing but eventually marrying and the lower educated more likely to cohabit or divorce if they do marry. At the same time, the variation in partnership behavior has also increased across countries, suggesting that country context plays an important role. Here, we use latent class growth models to compare the educational gradient of partnership trajectories in the United States and 14 countries in Europe and investigate the role of education and country context. Our results indicate a consistent positive educational gradient for partnership patterns showing the postponement of marriage, regardless of whether marriage was preceded by cohabitation, but a less consistent gradient for patterns reflecting long-term cohabitation and union dissolution. Although the US results show evidence of an educational divergence in marriage and union dissolution, the evidence from the other countries is weak. In addition, country context explains more of the variation in class membership than education, with context becoming more important over time. The divergence in behaviors across country contexts suggests that social, cultural, political, and economic developments are essential for understanding changes in partnership formation and dissolution.

For the Poor, but Not Only the Poor: On Optimal Pro-Poorness in Redistributive Policies

Abstract: The optimal design of redistributive systems continues to be a matter of considerable academic and public debate, with the optimal extent and intensity of pro-poor targeting remaining a key issue of contention. This article shows, first, that the overall relationship between pro-poor targeting and income inequality reduction is very weak. Although occasionally the association is positive, it is not robust, very weak, and effectively zero with various reasonable methodological decisions. Second, and more importantly, a detailed disaggregated analysis reveals that the most redistributive systems do contain subsystems that are strongly targeted to the poor by intent and by design. Third, we also show that a disaggregation over the function of social transfers is very relevant: old-age benefits are an important driver of the weak overall association, while for family benefits we find a positive relationship. Absolutely key, however, is our finding that means-tested systems play a crucial role in bringing about redistributive effectiveness, even if their relative size is small. We thus shed new light on the politics of targeting. While it remains important that broad sections of the electorate benefit from social transfers, strong pro-poor targeting within such a context is possible and indeed essential for real redistributive impact. Benefits for the poor need not be poor benefits if and when these are embedded in benefit systems that meet wider redistributive needs and rationales.

Delayed Disadvantage: Neighborhood Context and Child Development

Abstract: Neighborhood effects scholarship suggests that neighborhoods may impart different effects across the early life-course because children’s interactions with neighborhood actors and institutions evolve across the stages of child development. This paper expands our understanding of neighborhood effects on cognitive and non-cognitive development across childhood and early adolescence by capitalizing on thirteen waves of restricted and never-before-used longitudinal data from the NLSY Child and Young Adult (1986–2010) sample. The findings from within-child fixed-effects interaction models suggest that while younger children are immune to neighborhood effects on their cognitive development, older children consistently suffer a steep penalty for growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods. This neighborhood disadvantage penalty persists among older children despite alternative age constructs. Further, the results are robust to various adjustments for observed and unobserved sources of bias, model specifications, and also manifest as cumulative and lagged effects.

Skin Tone, Race/Ethnicity, and Wealth Inequality among New Immigrants

Abstract: Immigrants’ racial/ethnic status has profound implications for their lives in the United States, including its influence on their ability to improve their financial well-being. We examine a particular type of financial well-being—wealth or net worth—and consider how both skin tone and race/ethnicity contribute to wealth inequality. To assess these dual influences, we use the New Immigrant Survey and the recently developed preference for whiteness hypothesis to argue that darker-skinned immigrants will have lower levels of wealth and will be less likely to own certain assets. Results generally support the hypothesis with the strongest evidence apparent in the full sample and among Asian immigrants. Overall, the results illuminate how immigrants with a racial/ethnic minority status and a darker complexion encounter multiple forms of disadvantage relative to white and/or lighter-skinned immigrants.

The Media as a Dual Mediator of the Political Agenda-Setting Effect of Protest. A Longitudinal Study in Six Western European Countries

Abstract: The study investigates the impact of media coverage of protest on issue attention in parliament (questions) in six Western European countries. Integrating several data sets on protest, media, and political agendas, we demonstrate that media coverage of protest affects parliamentary agendas: the more media attention protest on an issue receives, the more parliamentary questions on that issue are asked. The relationship, however, is mediated by the issue agenda of mass media more generally, attesting to an indirect rather than a direct effect. Additionally, the effect of media-covered protests on the general media agenda is moderated by the political system and is larger in majoritarian countries than in countries with a consensus democracy. This shows the importance of political opportunity structures for the agenda-setting impact of protest.

The Dynamics of Prosocial Leadership: Power and Influence in Collective Action Groups

Abstract: This paper bridges insights from theories of collective action, power, and influence to address the conditions under which group leaders solve collective action problems. We show how leaders’ behaviors impact the success of collective action groups as a whole via both power and influence processes. In a laboratory experiment, groups first completed a baseline measure of cooperation in a public good dilemma without punishment. In a second phase, the capacity to punish was introduced. One condition, the “peer-sanctioning condition,” was equivalent to the prevailing solution in the experimental literature on collective action, where the ability to punish others is distributed equally among all group members. In the other two conditions, only a single group “leader” could punish; we varied whether the person assigned to lead was other-regarding (prosocial) or self-regarding (proself). The results support our prediction that prosocial leaders increase their contributions to the group after ascending to leadership, while proself leaders reduce their contributions. Further, as expected, rank-and-file group members are influenced by leaders’ contribution behaviors; as a result, prosocial-led groups as a whole were substantially more productive than proself-led groups. Indeed, as predicted, prosocial leaders were even more effective in maintaining large group contributions than the standard peer-sanctioning system. These findings suggest that putting power and influence in the right hands solves collective action problems and promotes collective welfare.

Ethnic Diversity and Support for Redistributive Social Policies

Abstract: Scholars and public figures have drawn attention to lower social spending in more ethnically diverse countries, and explicitly or implicitly claimed that this resulted from a lack of public support for more generous social-spending policies in more diverse countries—despite the lack of empirical evidence on the topic. Such arguments ultimately hinge on how diversity is related to attitudes about distribution. However, empirical studies of the relationship between social-spending attitudes and diversity in cross-national perspective are scarce and limited in geographic scope, and have yielded inconsistent results. Through a study of individual-level attitudes in 91 countries in this paper, I explore the relationship between ethnic diversity and actual attitudes about social spending using two different cross-national public opinion data sets, and multiple approaches to measuring diversity. The results of 48 regression models show that ethnic diversity itself is not negatively related, and may even be positively related, to support for redistributive social spending, which challenges the prevailing assumption about the divisiveness of ethnic diversity. There is one exception—support for redistribution may be lower when there have been large increases in the size of the immigrant population in a country, but only in countries in which economic inequality is particularly acute.

Opportunity or Necessity? Disaggregating Self-Employment and Entry at Older Ages

Abstract: Bridging the literatures on entrepreneurship and the aging workforce, we study the factors, particularly job loss, wealth, education, and risk aversion, associated with entry into self-employment at older ages using a multinomial logit hazard model. Using the Health and Retirement Study, we disaggregate self-employment by defining four types through an interaction along two scopes: one that divides along those with supervisory responsibilities or business asset ownership and the other divided into so-called “knowledge” and “non-knowledge” occupations. We find that job loss shows a strong association with entry into self-employment, particularly with less desirable forms of self-employment. In addition, we show that there are large differences between individuals in these alternative measures of self-employment and that there are distinctive factors that influence entry into these types. Additionally, we show that there are some differences in the factors affecting men’s and women’s entry into self-employment.

Neighborhood Associations and Social Capital

Abstract: In the United States, the past 50 years have witnessed a remarkable expansion of formal associations in residential neighborhoods, including homeowners associations, condo associations, crime watch groups, tenant associations, and special-interest neighborhood coalitions. Despite their prevalence and growing role in neighborhood governance, the relationship of these associations to interpersonal trust and networks among residents and outsiders remains understudied. Drawing on the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey (SCCBS), we estimate the impact of neighborhood association membership on bonding and bridging social capital in a nationally representative sample of residents. Among non-homeowners, our findings suggest that neighborhood association membership is linked to bonding social capital (such as a propensity to socialize and cooperate with neighbors and a positive perception of impact on community conditions), as well as bridging social capital (such as a greater likelihood of trust in racial out-groups). These benefits from neighborhood association membership are attenuated or reversed among homeowners. The results underscore the need for social scientists to consider the inherent tension in neighborhood associations, as institutions that ensure the protection of property values, on the one hand, and that promote neighborhood cooperation and quality of life, on the other.

The Use of Disruptive Tactics in Protest as a Trade-Off: The Role of Social Movement Claims

Abstract: In protest, activists sometimes turn to disruptive and violent tactics to meet their goals. Doing so, however, can also undermine support for their claims. We argue that how protestors weigh this trade-off depends on their targets and the extent to which their claims appeal to diverse constituencies, which then factors greatly into their choice of protest tactics. We complement past work that suggests that forces of professionalization and counterpressure alter activists’ tendency to use violent and disruptive tactics. With data on over 23,000 protest events in the United States between 1960 and 1995, we find that protest events characterized by broadly resonating claims are more likely to employ tactics that are disruptive but nonviolent. By contrast, events espousing narrower claims are more likely to employ disruptive tactics that are also violent. Moreover, when governmental entities are targeted, protests are less likely to witness the use of both violent and nonviolent disruptive tactics. We discuss the implications of our results for social movement theory and the dynamics of collective violence.

Disaster Devastation in Poor Nations: The Direct and Indirect Effects of Gender Equality, Ecological Losses, and Development

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to quantitatively assess the drivers of suffering from disasters across less developed nations, with specific emphasis on the gender relations that potentially mitigate the breadth of devastation across affected populations. We draw on theoretical frameworks of environmental sociology, ecofeminism, gender inequalities, and development to inform our empirical analysis, which represents structural equation modeling of 85 less developed nations. While economic, political, and to a lesser extent environmental factors have been linked, theoretically and empirically, to vulnerability to natural disaster events, few consider the potential of improving women’s status to alleviate the toll of disasters on humans in affected nations. Our paper addresses this gap by theoretically developing and empirically analyzing the linkages that connect the environment, women’s economic standing, and disaster vulnerability. Our findings point to the beneficial effects of improving women’s status—itself conditioned by ecological and developmental factors—to limit the extent of human strife resulting from disaster events in important direct and indirect ways. Conclusions also point to interrelationships among additional social, economic, political, and ecological conditions in determining the distribution of disaster harm and death, such as ecological losses, democracy, underdevelopment, and provisions for health resources.