Are the positions that protesters take—in favor or against change—consequential for their ability to affect policy? While previous research suggests that protests can inform legislative priorities and facilitate policy introduction, this paper emphasizes policy inaction and stasis as goals of some protest actions. Analysis uses novel and detailed data on energy-related protest and policy actions in

The global housing affordability crisis and COVID shutdowns have put living space inequality back on the political agenda. Drawing on Durkheim’s theory of anomie and density, this paper argues that on how many square meters a society lives matters for how stable or anomic it develops. Using data from the Swiss Household Panel, we examine the selection, short-term, and dynamic effects associated with

Prior scholarship demonstrates that motherhood wage penalties and fatherhood wage premiums contribute to the gender pay gap. These analyses typically take a cross-sectional perspective, asking to what extent gender inequalities in the association between parenthood and wages can explain gender pay inequality for a given cohort or at a given moment in time. By contrast, explorations of gender pay convergence

We examine the gendered distribution of peer-ascribed status in schools. Using network data from more than 14,000 students in 676 classrooms, we explore gender differences in the ascription of status and the types of behavior rewarded with status. On average, girls receive slightly fewer status ascriptions than boys, and students tend to grant status more frequently within the same gender. Contextual

While prior research has widely acknowledged the consequences of specific family transitions (e.g., parental death, parenthood, grandparenthood) for individual wealth holdings, the interplay of multiple family transitions and positions occurring at different life stages and in various orderings has received little attention. This is despite the fact that these transitions and positions most likely

Research has demonstrated that couples have similar partisan preferences, a finding associated with political polarization. However, it remains debated to what extent different mechanisms contribute to this homogamy. Analyzing dyadic panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel 1984–2020, we distinguish analytically between (1) direct political matching (i.e., partner selection on matching party

Drawing on a unique survey of US workers with information about their employers’ policies on pay discussions and whether workers engage in such talk with their coworkers, we provide the most comprehensive investigation into pay talk in workplaces to date. Unlike existing treatments, we focus on core organizational and relational factors that influence whether workers talk about pay. We theorize pay

Benefit cutbacks have been prominent after the Great Recession. The Family Economic Stress Model (FESM) theorizes how financial losses such as those spurred by cutbacks might adversely affect parental and child well-being. Yet, few links with policy have been established. We extend current knowledge by comprehensively assessing how benefits cutbacks may affect parents and their adolescent children

In the United States, exclusionary public policies generate inequalities within and across labor, financial, and legal status hierarchies, which together undermine immigrant well-being. But can inclusive public policies improve immigrant health? We examine whether and how an immigrant-inclusive federal program, Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), shaped health care access and use among farmworkers

Despite their significance, life-course dynamics are rarely considered as consequences of social movements. We address this shortcoming by investigating the relationship between protest and marriage formation in Ethiopia. Building on scholarship in social movements and insights from family demography, we argue that exposure to protest delays marriage formation. To test our theoretical arguments, we

Research has shown that socioeconomic and psychological resources may influence educational trajectories. There are still unanswered questions, however, about the unique roles of these resources and the interplay between them. We consider two such questions: First, how do major psychological resources—a sense of school belonging and optimistic future expectations—predict educational trajectories when

This paper connects insights from the literature on cosmopolitan worldviews and the effects of perspective-taking in political science, (intergroup) anxiety in social psychology, and identity economics in a vignette-style experiment. In particular, we asked German respondents about their attitudes towards a Syrian refugee, randomizing components of his description (N = 662). The main treatment describes

Receiving assistance can be stigmatizing. As the cash welfare rolls have fallen to near-historic lows, the privatization of the social safety net in many states has brought up new questions about how recipients of assistance meet their material needs without sacrificing their sense of dignity. I draw on 15 months of ethnographic observation and 44 interviews with social service recipients in two majority

Unions serve as primary labor market institutions that improve employees’ working conditions, yet existing literature offers mixed results of their influence on workers’ access to work–family policies. This may be partially due to the extant literature having not considered possible variation across work contexts. In this study, I ask whether union coverage can increase workers’ access to work–family

How does competition for school resources, along with racial and socioeconomic biases, shape parental preferences for schools? In this article, I investigate how school attributes affect preferences and choice, which sheds light on the processes that maintain school segregation. To do so, I conduct a survey experiment that explores parental preferences and the tradeoffs inherent in the process of school

How does migrants’ social embeddedness influence non-migrants’ attitudes? Although research on intergroup relations has considered the effects of various dimensions of migrants’ lives, often measured by economic and cultural traits, social embeddedness, defined by the composition of interpersonal relationships, has received relatively less attention. We consider two types of social embeddedness and

We distinguish two streams of theory that dominate explanations of religious change: cohort-based cumulative decline theory, which emphasizes small and ongoing declines in individual religiosity accruing across generations; and political backlash theory, which emphasizes period- and identity-based changes due to the politicized meaning of religion. Notably, Muslim countries have largely been excluded

The salience of neighborhoods in shaping crime patterns is one of sociology’s most robust areas of research. One way through which neighborhoods shape outcomes is through the creation and maintenance of social networks, patterns of interactions and relationships among neighborhood residents, organizations, groups, and institutions. This paper explores the relationship between network structures generated

Divorce among older adults—known as gray divorce—is increasingly common; however, we have a relative gap in knowledge about predictors of gray divorce. Job insecurity, a pervasive and disruptive work-related exposure, may be a salient predictor of divorce among older couples for whom job loss can be particularly detrimental. Using longitudinal dyadic data from the Health and Retirement Study (1998–2020)

Rising antisemitism in the twenty-first century has alarmed Jewish communities and the general public, but antisemitic hate crime victimization remains understudied outside the US context. This study primarily relies on a comprehensive survey of 16,400 Jews across twelve European countries, supplemented with data from additional sources, to assess individual and country-level predictors of Jews’ experiences

This paper theorizes the interplay of public and organizational policies by investigating whether the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) shifted patterns of gender inequality within U.S. workplaces. Did this leave law increase women’s representation in positions of authority (moving more women into management jobs)? We argue that the impact of public policies will vary by organizational context, hypothesizing

How do fathers adjust their working hours after the birth of their first child? Though the impact of childbirth on women’s employment is well-established, less is known about its effect on fathers. We investigate this question in the Netherlands (2006–2017), a country characterized by high prevalence of part-time work. We focus on two contexts that might shape the extent to which first-time fathers

This study investigates two concurrent trends across Europe and North America: the increasing instability of parental unions and men’s rising contributions to household work. Because children have almost universally resided with their mothers and it is difficult for non-residential fathers to maintain any levels of care work, union dissolutions have potentially slowed societal increases in gender equality

Popular explanations of inequality as the result of individual failings rather than structural processes are powerful cultural mechanisms that legitimize and reproduce inequality in the United States. How might individuals’ experiences of downward or upward mobility shape the explanations they give? We argue that perceived experiences of economic mobility may not only shape how Americans understand

Scholars and policymakers are increasingly interested in subjective well-being as a development indicator. However, sociological research on this topic is quite limited, as is research that considers the effects of the biophysical environment on subjective well-being. In this study, we address these gaps in the literature by examining social and environmental influences on life satisfaction, a core

Social movement theory holds that disrupting social and political processes is among the most effective tools social movement organizations (SMOs) use to motivate recognition for themselves and their constituents. Yet, recent research suggests that the political reception of disruption is not racially neutral. Black SMOs face a dilemma in that, although disruption is a powerful tool for change, the

School integration is an important indicator of equality of opportunity and racial reconciliation in contemporary South Africa. Despite its prominence in public and political discourse, however, there is no systemic evidence on the levels and patterns of school segregation. Drawing on the literature on the post-apartheid political settlement and sociological theories of opportunity hoarding, we explain

The etiology of psychological differences among those who pursue distinct lines of work have long been of scholarly interest. A prevalent early and continuing assumption is that experiences on the job influence psychological development; contemporary analysts focus on dimensions indicative of mental health. Still, such work-related psychological differences may instead be attributable to selection

Public discourse has become more polarized, especially when it comes to moral issues. Moral issues related to gender and sexuality—particularly concerning children—are politically fraught. To assess the extent to which ideologies about gender and parenting are polarized, we interviewed eighty-five gender activists from diverse political orientations. Surprisingly, we found some convergence in how activists

While studies show that public opinion and educational workshops promoted by nonprofits affect judicial behavior, it remains unclear whether and how social movements affect judges’ decision-making through disruptive actions. I develop a framework to explain the conditions under which and the mechanisms through which social movement mobilization affects the decision-making of judges, drawing on a mixed-methods

The rise of precarious work generates important questions about how this mode of employment might affect young workers’ transition to adulthood, particularly their decision to live independently. Existing demographic literature has considered the impact of unemployment on parental coresidence but overlooked the potential influence of precarious employment. Yet, features of precarious employment might

Largely overlooked in research on criminal legal expansion is the rise of political polarization and its attendant consequences for crime policy. Drawing on theories of intergroup collaboration and policymaking research, I argue that network polarization—low frequencies of collaborative relations between lawmakers belonging to distinct political groups—negatively affects crime legislation passage by

While the progress of the knowledge economy is inexorable, this paper argues that partisan politics and labor market institutions can affect the direction in which the knowledge economy progresses. In particular, a combination of corporatist industrial relations systems and left partisanship tends to foster greater wage restraint, and such a wage outcome tends to encourage the greater adoption of communications

To modernize public service delivery, U.S. communities increasingly rely on 311 systems for residents to request government services. Research on 311 systems is relatively new, and there is mixed evidence on whether 311 can help bridge the gap between disadvantaged communities and governments. This study draws from research on immigration, race/ethnicity, and differential engagement to explore the

Classic models of urban inequality acknowledge the importance of politics for resource distribution and service provision. Yet, contemporary studies of spatial inequality rarely measure politics directly. In this paper, we introduce political dynasties as a way of integrating political economy approaches with ecological theory to better understand the political construction of urban spatial inequality

This article utilizes the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to demonstrate how disadvantages in healthy life expectancies accumulated across generations create disparate kin structures among African American families in the United States. The analysis quantifies the overlap in parents’ healthy years with their adult children’s healthy life expectancies and examines how much the overlap coincides with

Gender and racial pay penalties are well-known: women (of all races) and people of color (of all genders) earn less, on average, even when they gain access to occupations historically reserved for White men. Studies of social mobility show that people from working-class backgrounds in the US have also been excluded from top professional and managerial occupations. But do working-class-origin people

In response to women’s changing roles in labor markets, couples have adopted varied strategies to reconcile career and family needs. Yet, most studies on the gendered division of labor focus almost exclusively on changes either in work or family domain. Doing so neglects the process through which couples negotiate and contest traditional work and family responsibilities. Studies that do examine these

When commercial real estate becomes a highly coveted investment commodity, tensions intensify between those whose interest lies in extracting maximum profits from their properties and those who utilize the very same spaces for making a livelihood. Through ethnographic research with a tenant shopkeepers’ social movement organization (SMO) in Korea, I analyze the new collective consciousness forming

All around the world, school-entry cohorts are organized on an annual calendar so that the age of students in the same cohort differs by up to one year. It is a well-established finding that this age gap entails a consequential (dis)advantage for academic performance referred to as the relative age effect (RAE). This study contributes to a recent strand of research that has turned to investigate the

A longstanding urban sociological literature emphasizes the geographic isolation of city dwellers in residence and everyday routines, expecting exposures to neighborhood racial and socio-economic structure driven principally by city-wide segregation and the role of proximity and homophily in mobility. The compelled mobility approach emphasizes the uneven distribution of organizational and institutional

Fairness in the criminal legal system is unattainable without effective legal representation of indigent defendants, yet we know little about the experience of attorneys who do this critical work. Using semi-structured interviews, our study investigated occupational stress in a sample of 78 attorneys representing indigent clients across the United States. We show how the chronic stressors experienced

Police collusion with drug market organizations is widespread around the world, but the nature of this collaboration remains poorly understood. This article draws on a unique data source to dissect the inner workings of police collusion: transcripts of wiretapped conversations, embedded in thousands of pages of court cases in which state agents have been prosecuted for collaborating with drug market

Birth weight is a robust predictor of valued life course outcomes, emphasizing the importance of prenatal development. But does birth weight act as a proxy for environmental conditions in utero, or do biological processes surrounding birth weight themselves play a role in healthy development? To answer this question, we leverage variation in birth weight that is, within families, orthogonal to prenatal

Political economists and labour sociologists alike have studied how the skill specificity of workers can be explained, as it significantly affects workers’ performance. However, the emergence of the gig economy may substantially change skill hiring and specificity in online labour markets because gig workers do not need formal educational credentials to offer their services. Instead, skills are “unbundled”

The United States manufacturing industry has long been regarded as the economic engine that built and sustained the middle class. In recent decades, this pillar of economic opportunity has eroded substantially. Though much has been written about the decline of manufacturing sectors in United States communities, the potential consequences for economic mobility, and stratification processes more generally

Recent research suggests that political polarization has spilled over into otherwise mundane areas of social life. And yet, the size, shape, and depth of that spillage into popular culture are generally unknown. Relying on a sample of 135 widely known movies, TV shows, musicians, sports, and leisure activities, we investigate these issues. We find the “oil spill” of polarization into popular culture

Drawing on interviews and focus groups from Conakry, the capital city of the Republic of Guinea in West Africa, this article examines how people talk about women working in male-dominated skilled trades alongside women’s accounts of their work experiences in those sectors. We find that the idea of women doing gender atypical work, whom we call “crossovers,” evokes widespread admiration. They are unanimously

This paper explores how social capital and property regulations shape cultural producers’ ability to own copyrights for the products they create. Because individual producers lack the resources required to develop and distribute their creations, they partner with large firms who demand the copyrights for products they invest in. I argue two types of social capital—status and partner substitutability—enable

Using data on fifteen countries based on the harmonization of IALS and PIAC data, we provide a cross-national analysis of the evolution of the role of educational attainment and cognitive skills as mediators of intergenerational inequalities between 1994 and 2015. We find that the association between parents’ education and children’s earnings is large and highly stable over time in most countries,

While economic sociology research and theory argue that excessive network embeddedness depresses competition in illegal markets, prior research does not examine how distinct types of embeddedness may have asymmetric effects on the diversity of purchasing behavior—the range of illegal goods that buyers typically purchase. This study considers how network embeddedness can positively or negatively affect

This article introduces fiscal impoverishment as a framework for comparative poverty research. We invert standard analyses of welfare state policy and household poverty by focusing not on poverty alleviation but poverty creation and exacerbation. Using harmonized household survey data, we show how the income and payroll taxes most rich countries rely on to finance the public sector serve to push households

We propose that volunteering increases the likelihood of self-employment among young adults because volunteering improves self-esteem, which helps prospective entrepreneurs cope with the challenges associated with self-employment. We further predict that young adults who participate in diverse voluntary organizations are particularly likely to undertake self-employment because affiliations with diverse

Peers influence students’ academic decisions and outcomes. For example, several studies with strong claims to causality demonstrate that peers affect the choice of and persistence in majors. One remaining issue, however, has stymied efforts to translate this evidence into actionable interventions: the literature has not grappled adequately with the fact that in natural settings, students typically

It has been extensively debated over whether the rise of flexible working arrangements (FWAs) may be an “opportunity” for a more egalitarian gender division of household labor or reinforce the “exploitation” of women in the traditional gender division. Drawing on a linked-lives perspective, this study contributes to the literature by using longitudinal couple-level dyadic data in the UK (2010–2020)

Prior research documents higher levels of depressive symptoms among Black Americans relative to Whites. Yet, we know less about the role of other dimensions of stratification (e.g., skin tone) in shaping mental health inequality between Black and White adults, and whether mental health trajectories by race and skin tone among Black adults are contingent upon social contexts in childhood and adolescence

We assess the relationship between gentrification and a key form of displacement: eviction. Drawing on over six million court cases filed in 72 of the largest metropolitan areas across the United States between 2000 and 2016, we show that most evictions occurred in low-income neighborhoods that did not gentrify. Over time, eviction rates decreased more in gentrifying neighborhoods than in comparable

Whether immigrants and their descendants are catching up socioeconomically with the rest of society is a fundamental question in the study of immigrant assimilation. In this paper, we examine the progress that Hispanic immigrant men make catching up with the earnings of later-generation Whites across generations. We rely on data from multiple years of the Current Population Survey linked with individuals’

Although family and migration scholars recognize that intimate partner violence (IPV) can motivate women’s movement between countries, little research considers IPV or other gendered family violence further back in women migrants’ life histories or explores the legacy of gendered family violence in cases where such violence is not the primary push factor. Here, we analyze in-depth interviews conducted

After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 2013, same-sex partners of U.S. citizens became eligible for spousal visas. Since then, the United States has seen a rapid rise in same-sex, mixed-citizenship couples. However, this effect varies greatly depending on the lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) policy context of the noncitizen’s country of origin. Using waves 2008–2019