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Socio-economic inequality in access to the internet has decreased in affluent societies. We investigate how gaining access to the internet affected the civic and political participation of relatively disadvantaged late adopters by studying a quasi-natural experiment related to the American National Election Studies. In 2012, when about 80% of the U.S. population was already connected to the internet, the ANES face-to-face study was for the first time supplemented with a sample of online respondents. Our design exploits the fact that the firm (KnowledgePanel) that conducted the web survey and provided the prerecruited respondents had equipped offline sample households with free laptop computers and internet access. The findings show that gaining internet access promotes late adopters’ civic participation and turnout, whereas there is no evidence for effects on the likelihood of political activism. These findings indicate that the closing of the digital divide alleviated participatory inequality.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Vincenz Frey: Department of Sociology, University of Groningen
E-mail: v.c.frey@rug.nl

Delia S. Baldassarri: Department of Sociology, New York University
E-mail: db1794@nyu.edu

Francesco C. Billari: Department of Social and Political Sciences and “Carlo F. Dondena” Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy, Bocconi University
E-mail: francesco.billari@unibocconi.it

Acknowledgements: We thank KnowledgePanel and Matthew DeBell of ANES for making available the information which respondents of the web survey had been furnished with free internet access. We acknowledge comments by Nicoletta Balbo, Valentina Rotondi, Luca Stella, the editorial team of Sociological Science (Ari Adut and an anonymous Deputy Editor), and participants of the ‘Annual Conference of Experimental Sociology’ (Florence) and the ‘Akademie für Soziologie’ meeting on ‘Digital Societies.’ Funding: This project received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program (grant agreement no. 694262), project ‘DisCont.’

Replication Package: A replication package including all analysis code is available on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/vq34k/).

Citation: Frey, Vincenz, Delia S. Baldassarri, and Francesco C. Billari. 2024. “Bridging the Digital Divide Narrows the Participation Gap: Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment.” Sociological Science 11: 214-232.
Received: June 30, 2023
Accepted: October 19, 2023
Editors: Ari Adut, Peter Bearman
DOI: 10.15195/v11.a9

Educational Tracking and the Polygenic Prediction of Education

By Parker Webservices on March 18, 2024 in Articles

Hannu Lahtinen, Pekka Martikainen, Kaarina Korhonen, Tim Morris, Mikko Myrskylä

Sociological Science March 18, 2024
10.15195/v11.a8

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Educational systems that separate students into curriculum tracks later may place less emphasis on socioeconomic family background and allow individuals’ personal skills and interests more time to manifest. We tested whether postponing tracking from age 11 to 16 results in stronger genetic prediction of education across a population, exploiting the natural experiment of the Finnish comprehensive school reform between 1972 and 1977. The association between polygenic score of education and achieved education strengthened after the reform by one-third among men and those from low-educated families. We observed no evidence for reform effect among women or those from high-educated families. The first cohort experiencing the new system had the strongest increases. From the perspective of genetic prediction, the school reform promoted equality of opportunity and optimal allocation of human capital. The results also suggest that turbulent circumstances, including puberty or ongoing restructuring of institutional practices, may strengthen genetic associations in education.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Hannu Lahtinen: Population Research Unit, University of Helsinki; Max Planck – University of Helsinki Center for Social Inequalities in Population Health, Helsinki, Finland
E-mail: hannu.lahtinen@helsinki.fi

Pekka Martikainen: Population Research Unit, University of Helsinki; Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany; Max Planck – University of Helsinki Center for Social Inequalities in Population Health, Helsinki, Finland
E-mail: pekka.martikainen@helsinki.fi

Kaarina Korhonen: Population Research Unit, University of Helsinki; Max Planck – University of Helsinki Center for Social Inequalities in Population Health, Helsinki, Finland
E-mail: kaarina.korhonen@helsinki.fi

Tim Morris: Centre for Longitudinal Studies, Social Research Institute, University College London
E-mail: t.t.morris@ucl.ac.uk

Mikko Myrskylä: Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany; University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland; Max Planck – University of Helsinki Center for Social Inequalities in Population Health, Rostock, Germany and Helsinki, Finland
E-mail: myrskyla@demogr.mpg.de

Acknowledgements: Special thanks for Aysu Okbay for providing education GWAS summary results excluding overlapping samples. We also thank the Finnish National Agency for Education for providing municipal-specific school-reform implementation years. The genetic samples used for the research were obtained from the THL Biobank (study number: THLBB2020_8), and we thank all study participants for their generous participation in the THL Biobank.

Replication Package: Instructions for data access and code to reproduce the analysis can be found at https://github.com/halahti/SocSci23

Citation: Lahtinen, Hannu, Pekka Martikainen, Kaarina Korhonen, Tim Morris, and Mikko Myrskylä. 2024. “Educational tracking and the polygenic prediction of education.” Sociological Science 11: 186-213.
Received: September 19, 2023
Accepted: October 31, 2023
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Nan Dirk de Graaf
DOI: 10.15195/v11.a8

Validating the White Flight Hypothesis: Neighborhood Racial Composition and Out-Migration in Two Longitudinal Surveys

By Parker Webservices on March 14, 2024 in Articles

Peter Mateyka, Matthew Hall

Sociological Science March 14, 2024
10.15195/v11.a7

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Empirical research assessing the link between neighborhood racial composition and out-migration has largely relied on a single sample from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). In this article, we validate these models by comparing estimates from the PSID to estimates from identical models based on internal Census data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Doing so serves two purposes: (1) as a replication exercise for findings with major implications for racial/ethnic inequality and (2) as an expansion of the scope of ‘flight’ models to test mobility models among contemporary samples of white, black, Latino, and Asian households. Results from these models indicate that white households’ migration responses to minority racial concentrations are substantively similar in SIPP and PSID, with the likelihood of out-migration among whites increasing as minority shares grow, albeit weaker in SIPP than the PSID. Results for black householders are comparable across samples, with blacks demonstrating a tendency to leave Hispanic neighborhoods. Results for Hispanic households are, however, divergent between the SIPP and PSID, potentially reflecting differences in the representativeness of the samples. Lastly, the results from SIPP reveal that the mobility behaviors of Asian households are largely indifferent to neighborhood racial composition.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Peter Mateyka: Department of Housing and Urban Development, Policy Development and Research
E-mail: peter.j.mateyka@hud.gov

Matthew Hall: Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, Cornell Population Center, Cornell University
E-mail: mhall@cornell.edu

Acknowledgements: This work is released to inform interested parties of ongoing research and to encourage discussion of work in progress. Peter Mateyka completed his work on this project while employed at the U.S. Census Bureau. The Census Bureau has reviewed this data product for unauthorized disclosure of confidential information and has approved the disclosure avoidance practices applied. Census Bureau data privacy policy prohibits the sharing of data or code used in this analysis. Any views or opinions expressed in the article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development or the U.S. Census Bureau. Please direct correspondence to Peter Mateyka, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, PDR, 451 7th Street S.W.,Washington, DC 20410, or via email at peter.j.mateyka@hud.gov.

Replication Package: Programs to replicate the PSID analysis are available online at https://osf.io/3rvfa/. These files require authorization to use restricted-access PSID geocodes, managed by the University of Michigan (see https://simba.isr.umich.edu/restricted/RestrictedUse.aspx).

Citation: Mateyka, Peter, and Matthew Hall. 2024. “Validating the White Flight Hypothesis: Neighborhood Racial Composition and Out-Migration in Two Longitudinal Surveys.” Sociological Science 11: 164-185.
Received: July 20, 2023
Accepted: December 20, 2023
Editors: Ari Adut, Maria Abascal
DOI: 10.15195/v11.a7

Differences in Academic Preparedness Do Not Fully Explain Black–White Enrollment Disparities in Advanced High School Coursework

By Parker Webservices on March 11, 2024 in Articles

João M. Souto-Maior, Ravi Shroff

Sociological Science March 11, 2024
10.15195/v11.a6

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Whether racial disparities in enrollment in advanced high school coursework can be attributed to differences in prior academic preparation is a central question in sociological research and education policy. However, previous investigations face methodological limitations, for they compare race-specific enrollment rates of students after adjusting for characteristics only partially related to their academic preparedness for advanced coursework. Informed by a recently-developed statistical technique, we propose and estimate a novel measure of students’ academic preparedness and use administrative data from the New York City Department of Education to measure differences in Advanced Placement (AP) mathematics enrollment rates among similarly prepared students of different races. We find that preexisting differences in academic preparation do not fully explain the under-representation of Black students relative to White students in AP mathematics. Our results imply that achieving equal opportunities for AP enrollment not only requires equalizing earlier academic experiences, but also addressing inequities that emerge from coursework placement processes.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

João M. Souto-Maior: The Institute of Human Development and Social Change, New York University
E-mail: jms1738@nyu.edu

Ravi Shroff: Department of Applied Statistics, Social Science, and Humanities, New York University
E-mail: ravi.shroff@nyu.edu

Acknowledgements: We thank Johann Gaebler, Sharad Goel, Jongbin Jung and L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy for helpful comments and feedback. This study was conducted with data obtained through the Research Alliance for New York City Schools. The findings and conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Research Alliance.

Replication Package: See the Data and Code Availability Statement on page 158.

Citation: Souto-Maior, João, and Ravi Shroff. 2024. “Differences in academic preparedness do not fully explain Black-White enrollment disparities in advanced high school coursework.” Sociological Science 11: 138-163.
Received: October 30, 2023
Accepted: December 19, 2023
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Jeremy Freese
DOI: 10.15195/v11.a6

Classed Burdens: Habitus and Administrative Burden during the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Parker Webservices on March 7, 2024 in Articles

Taylor Laemmli

Sociological Science March 7, 2024
10.15195/v11.a5

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This paper shows how class shaped service workers’ experiences of administrative burdens during the COVID-19 pandemic. I use the pandemic and pandemic-related shutdowns as a pseudo natural experiment in which job loss was applied to a set of workers from different class backgrounds and with different class locations, workers who then turned to the state for assistance. Drawing on 46 interviews I conducted with service workers across the United States from May to October of 2020, I use Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus to show how class background shaped the administrative burdens workers encountered. Workers’ class origins left them with distinct approaches to bureaucracy that translated into disparate experiences of administrative burdens when workers sought unemployment insurance benefits. As a result, compared to workers from middle-class backgrounds, workers from working-class backgrounds more often experienced housing difficulties, dangerous work, and challenges to their sense of integrity.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Taylor Laemmli: Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
E-mail: laemmli@wisc.edu

Acknowledgements: I thank Chloe Haimson, Mustafa Emirbayer, and Ryan Ellis for valuable feedback. For helpful research assistance, I thank Morgan Barlin, Alexis Bernhardt, Novak He, Clara McKinney, Julia Mann, Siying Qu, and Damini Rao. The paper benefited from participants’ comments at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

Citation: Laemmli, Taylor. 2024. “Classed Burdens: Habitus and Administrative Burden during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Sociological Science 11: 114-137.
Received: August 24, 2023
Accepted: October 13, 2023
Editors: Ari Adut, Kristen Schilt
DOI: 10.15195/v11.a5

Emerging Pronoun Practices After the Procedural Turn: Disclosure, Discovery, and Repair

By Parker Webservices on March 1, 2024 in Articles

Julieta Goldenberg, Rogers Brubaker

Sociological Science March 1, 2024
10.15195/v11.a4

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We examine emerging practices of pronoun disclosure, discovery, and repair after the procedural turn in pronoun politics, which shifted attention from the substantive question of which pronouns should be used to the procedural question of how preferred pronouns, whatever they might be, could be effectively communicated to others. Drawing on interviews with and observations of college students and recent graduates who are committed in principle to using preferred pronouns, we consider how they seek to do so in practice, focusing on practices of disclosure, discovery, and repair. We underscore the gap between the knowledge that is required in principle to use preferred pronouns consistently and the imperfect knowledge that pronoun-users have in practice, and we show how the use of preferred pronouns creates new forms of interactional accountability.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Julieta Goldenberg: Independent Scholar
E-mail: jgoldenberg@g.ucla.edu

Rogers Brubaker: Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles
E-mail: brubaker@soc.ucla.edu

Acknowledgements:The authors thank Zsuzsa Berend and Wisam Alshaibi for working closely with Goldenberg on her thesis project; Zsuzsa Berend also provided helpful comments on a draft of the article.

The interview and observational data for this article were collected and analyzed by Goldenberg for her senior honors thesis, entitled “Pronoun Disclosure: Surveillance, Setting, and Repair.” Brubaker developed the overall framing of the argument of the article, whereas most of the specific arguments were developed in Goldenberg’s thesis. Brubaker drafted the article, incorporating and reworking material from Goldenberg’s thesis.

Citation: Goldenberg, Julieta, and Rogers Brubaker. 2024. “Emerging Pronoun Practices after the Procedural Turn: Disclosure, Discovery, and Repair.” Sociological Science 11: 91-113.
Received: December 1, 2023
Accepted: January 17, 2024
Editors: Ari Adut, Kristen Schilt
DOI: 10.15195/v11.a4

Breaking Barriers or Persisting Traditions? Fertility Histories, Occupational Achievements, and Intergenerational Mobility of Italian Women

By Parker Webservices on February 25, 2024 in Articles

Filippo Gioachin, Anna Zamberlan

Sociological Science February 25, 2024
10.15195/v11.a3

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Women and men share comparable levels of intergenerational social mobility in all Western economies, except for Southern European countries, where women’s life chances appear less determined by their family background. This is puzzling given Southern European’s persistent familialism, lack of institutional support for mothers, and the strong influence of social origin. We examine the role of women’s social class of origin on occupational achievements across birth cohorts in Italy, focusing on the close link between fertility dynamics and social mobility opportunities. By leveraging nationally representative retrospective data, we observed that middle- and working-class women experienced upgraded occupational achievements across birth cohorts in conjunction with educational expansion. Conversely, upper-class women exhibited consistently lower occupational achievements, especially those becoming mothers at a comparatively younger age, facing a higher risk of intergenerational downward mobility. Notably, the poorer labor market achievements of recent generations of upper-class women compared to the previous generations already emerged at labor market entry, suggesting that adverse self-selection mechanisms in early motherhood might be largely responsible for Italian women’s greater overall relative mobility. In Italy, women’s higher social mobility than men’s more likely reflects persistent traditional work–family choices among the better-off than a signal of growing equality of opportunity.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Filippo Gioachin: Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento
E-mail: filippo.gioachin@unitn.it

Anna Zamberlan: Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento
E-mail: anna.zamberlan@unitn.it

Acknowledgements:Earlier versions of this study were presented at the 2022 ISA RC28 Spring Meeting in London, at the 2022 conference of the Italian Society for Economic Sociology (SISEC) in Bologna, and at the University of Konstanz. We would like to thank the participants for their valuable feedback. We are particularly grateful to Davide Gritti, Giorgio Cutuli, Stefani Scherer, Matteo Piolatto, and Michael Zaslavsky for their thorough reading and detailed suggestions. Furthermore, we wish to thank the Doctoral School of Social Sciences of the University of Trento for supporting our research. Any remaining errors are our responsibility.

Replication Package: Access to the microdata is granted free of charge upon formal request for ‘scientific use files’ by members of a recognized research institution, as indicated on the following website: https://www.istat.it/en/analysis-and-products/microdata-files. Replication codes have been made public at: https://osf.io/7qey4/?view_only=.

Citation: Gioachin, Filippo, and Anna Zamberlan. 2024. “Breaking Barriers or Persisting Traditions? Fertility histories, occupational achievements, and intergenerational mobility of Italian women.” Sociological Science 11: 67-90.
Received: October 20, 2023
Accepted: December 12, 2023
Editors: Ari Adut, Maria Abascal
DOI: 10.15195/v11.a3

Criminal Record Stigma in the Labor Market for College Graduates: A Mixed Methods Study

By Parker Webservices on January 15, 2024 in Articles

Michael Cerda-Jara, David J. Harding, The Underground Scholars Research Cohort

Sociological Science January 15, 2024
10.15195/v11.a2

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One of the primary ways in which contact with the criminal legal system creates and maintains inequality is through the stigma of a criminal record. Although the negative effects of the stigma of a criminal record are well-documented, existing research is limited to the low-wage labor market. Through a job application audit design, this study examines the role of criminal record stigma in the labor market for recent college graduates across Black, Latino, and white men. We find that criminal record stigma has a large effect among white college-educated men but not among Black or Latino men and find no evidence that earning a college degree after the record mitigates criminal record stigma. In-depth interviews with college-educated men with a criminal record show that the criminal record stigma has effects beyond the initial application stage, as many reported provisional job offers being rescinded following a criminal background check, leading participants to limit the jobs to which they applied.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Michael Cerda-Jara: Department of Sociology, Stanford University
E-mail: mcerda@stanford.edu

David J. Harding: Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
E-mail: dharding@berkeley.edu

The Underground Scholars Research Cohort: University of California, Berkeley

Acknowledgements:We thank the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UC Berkeley for research funding. The Underground Scholars Research Cohort includes Mac Hoang, Juan Flores, Apollo Rosas Hernandez, Maura Barry, Luis Lopez-Ortiz, Sammie Gilmore, Tonatiuh Beltran, and Joshua Mason. We also thank Arturo Calvario-Diaz, Da Eun Jung, Fernanda Ochoa, Tanaell Villanueva Reyes, and Leslie Sandoval for excellent research assistance.

Reproducibility Package: Reproducibility package can be found at https://osf.io/q83ka/

Citation: Cerda-Jara, Michael, David J. Harding, and The Underground Scholars Research Cohort. 2024. “Criminal Record Stigma in the Labor Market for College Graduates: A Mixed Methods Study.” Sociological Science 11: 42-66.
Received: August 10, 2023
Accepted: September 18, 2023
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Maria Abascal
DOI: 10.15195/v11.a2

Old World Trade Diasporas

By Parker Webservices on January 8, 2024 in Articles

Lisa Blaydes, Christopher Paik

Sociological Science January 8, 2024
10.15195/v11.a1

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What explains worldwide, historical patterns of trade diaspora dispersal? In the premodern period, trade diasporas were among the most important communities facilitating cross-cultural exchange over long distances. We argue that two general principles explain the proliferation of premodern trade diasporas. First, diaspora merchants were drawn to wealthy societies with the goal of obtaining access to high-value luxury goods produced through the development of complex supply chains. Second, traders sought to establish diaspora communities in locations that exhibited bioclimatic complementarities to the merchant’s home region, thereby assisting the procurement of relatively uncommon natural resources. To empirically assess these arguments, we examine the historical record for information about the product composition of historical trade; collect data on the locations of trade diaspora communities across Eurasia between 600 and 1600 AD; and develop an agent-based model that specifies the agents’ (i.e., traders’) rule-based decisions to migrate in a wealth and resource-differentiated geographic space that represents Eurasia. Taken together, our findings describe the conditions that facilitated diaspora creation and historical cross-cultural exchange — a topic of rich exploration in the fields of global historical sociology and international political economy.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Lisa Blaydes: Department of Political Science, Stanford University
E-mail: blaydes@stanford.edu

Christopher Paik: Division of Social Science, New York University Abu Dhabi
E-mail: cp92@nyu.edu

Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Advait Arun, Binaya Paudyal, and Keshar Shahi for outstanding research assistance. Michael Aklin, Killian Clarke, Gary Cox, Vikram Deshmukh, Rowan Dorin, Jack Goldstone, Mark Granovetter, David Laitin, Steven Liao, Timur Kuran, Andrew Wojtanik, and audiences at Columbia University, Copenhagen Business School, Duke University, Harvard University, Korea University, Princeton University, Sogang University, Sungkyunkwan University, Stanford University, The Graduate Institute (IHEID), UC Berkeley, University of Bologna, University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Rochester provided helpful comments.

Citation: Blaydes, Lisa, and Christopher Paik. 2024. “Old World Trade Diasporas.” Sociological Science 11: 1-41.
Received: January 8, 2023
Accepted: May 2, 2023
Editors: Ari Adut, Peter Bearman
DOI: 10.15195/v11.a1

Evolutionary Influences on Assistance to Kin: Evidence from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics

By Parker Webservices on December 16, 2023 in Articles

Andrew J. Cherlin

Sociological Science December 16, 2023
10.15195/v10.a34

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Amid the changes that have diversified family life, studies have shown the continuing importance of attachment to kin through established patterns such as ties among full siblings and newer patterns such as efforts by donor-conceived individuals to find their donor siblings. Sociologists have good explanations for the diversity of family forms but not for the persistence of kinship ties. This article argues that evolutionary processes focused on genetic relatedness can provide a partial explanation for both the persistence and expansion of kinship ties. It proposes that the easing of social constraints on family-related behaviors and the resulting expansion of choices may have increased the importance of genetic relatedness in producing the current patterns. To illustrate this perspective, this article examines the consistency between patterns of financial assistance to kin and Hamilton’s rule, derived from the evolutionary theory of inclusive fitness, using the 1985 to 2019 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Andrew J. Cherlin: Department of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University
E-mail: cherlin@jhu.edu

Acknowledgements: I thank Dalton Conley, Frank Furstenberg, Rosemary Hopcroft, and Robert Schoen for comments on previous drafts. Data and analysis files are available at the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research, project number is openicpsr-193132.