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The Course of Law: State Intervention in Southern Lynch Mob Violence 1882–1930

Kinga Makovi, Ryan Hagen, Peter Bearman

Sociological Science, September 26, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a37

Collective violence when framed by its perpetrators as “citizen” justice is inherently a challenge to state legitimacy. To properly account for such violence, it is necessary to consider an opportunity structure incorporating the actions of both vigilantes and agents of the state. The motivation and lethality of lynch mobs in the South cannot be understood without considering how the state reacted to the legitimacy challenges posed by lynching. We trace the shifting orientation of state agents to lynching attempts between the end of Reconstruction and the start of the Great Depression. Analyzing an inventory of more than 1,000 averted and completed lynching events in three Southern states, we model geographic and temporal patterns in the determinants of mob formation, state intervention, and intervention success. Opponents of lynching often pled with mobs to “let the law take its course.” This article examines the course followed by the law itself, as state actors moved between encouraging, accommodating, and in many instances averting mob violence.

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Kinga Makovi: Department of Sociology, Columbia University
Email: km2730@columbia.edu

Ryan Hagen: Department of Sociology, Columbia University
Email: rah2168@columbia.edu

Peter Bearman: INCITE, Columbia University
Email: psb17@columbia.edu

Acknowledgements: The authors thank Nathan Nunn, Eric Foner, Karen Barkey, Charles Seguin, Christopher Muller, members of the Organizations Workshop at the University of Chicago, and the XS workshop at Columbia University for their helpful comments.

  • Citation: Makovi, Kinga, Ryan Hagen and Peter Bearman. 2016. “The Course of Law: State Intervention in Southern Lynch Mob Violence 1882–1930.” Sociological Science 3: 860-888.
  • Received: June 23, 2016
  • Accepted: July 15, 2016
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v3.a37


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Are Firms That Discriminate More Likely to Go Out of Business?

Devah Pager

Sociological Science, September 19, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a36

Economic theory has long maintained that employers pay a price for engaging in racial discrimination. According to Gary Becker’s seminal work on this topic and the rich literature that followed, racial preferences unrelated to productivity are costly and, in a competitive market, should drive discriminatory employers out of business. Though a dominant theoretical proposition in the field of economics, this argument has never before been subjected to direct empirical scrutiny. This research pairs an experimental audit study of racial discrimination in employment with an employer database capturing information on establishment survival, examining the relationship between observed discrimination and firm longevity. Results suggest that employers who engage in hiring discrimination are less likely to remain in business six years later.

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Devah Pager: Department of Sociology & Public Policy, Harvard University
Email: devah_pager@harvard.edu

Acknowledgements: Direct all correspondence to Devah Pager, Department of Sociology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, devah_pager@harvard.edu. The author is thankful for feedback from David Neumark, Larry Katz, Jeff Liebman, Ilyana Kuziemko, Bruce Western, and Mitchell Duneier. This research was supported by grants from NSF (CAREER0547810) and NIH (1K01HD053694).

  • Citation: Pager, Devah. 2016. “Are Firms That Discriminate More Likely to Go Out of Business?” Sociological Science 3: 849-859.
  • Received: June 29, 2016
  • Accepted: July 11, 2016
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
  • DOI: 10.15195/v3.a36


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Modernization and Lynching in the New South

Mattias Smångs

Sociological Science, September 15, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a35

This article evaluates an emerging body of historical scholarship that challenges prevailing views of the primacy of rural conditions in southern lynching by positing that it was symbiotically associated with the processes of modernization underway in the region in the decades around 1900. Statistical analyses of lynching data that differentiate among events according to communal participation, support, and ceremony in Georgia and Louisiana from 1882 to 1930 and local-level indices of modernization (urbanization, rural depopulation, industrialization, agricultural commercialization, and dissolution of traditional family roles) yield results that both support and contradict such a modernization thesis of lynching. The findings imply that the consequences of the social transformation in the South coinciding with the lynching era were not uniform throughout the region with regard to racial conflict and violence and that broad arguments proposing an intrinsic connection between modernization and lynchings therefore are overstated.

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Mattias Smångs: Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Fordham University
Email: msmangs@fordham.edu

Acknowledgements: I thank Peter Bearman, Janet Box-Steffensmeier, Christine Fountain, David Hacker, and Kenneth Sylvester for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

  • Citation: Smångs, Mattias. 2016. “Modernization and Lynching in the New South.” Sociological Science 3: 825-848.
  • Received: June 1, 2016
  • Accepted: July 8, 2016
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Delia Baldassarri
  • DOI: 10.15195/v3.a35


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Growing Farther Apart: Racial and Ethnic Inequality in Household Wealth Across the Distribution

Michelle Maroto

Sociological Science, September 12, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a34

This article investigates net worth disparities by race and ethnicity using pooled data from the 1998–2013 waves of the U.S. Survey of Consumer Finances. I apply unconditional quantile regression models to examine net worth throughout the wealth distribution and decomposition procedures to demonstrate how different factors related to demographics, human capital, financial attitudes, and credit market access contribute to racial wealth disparities. In the aggregate, non-Hispanic black households held $8,000 less in net worth than non-Hispanic white households at the 10th percentile, $204,000 less at the median, and $1,055,000 at the 90th percentile. Hispanic households faced similar disadvantages, holding $4,000 less in net worth at the 10th percentile, $208,000 less at the median, and $1,023,000 less at the 90th percentile. Disparities continued, but declined, after accounting for labor market disadvantages and credit market access, which again varied across the distribution. Decomposition models show that demographic and income differences mattered more for high-wealth households. These variables accounted for 43–55 percent of the gap for high-wealth households at the 90th percentile but only 10–28 percent at the 10th percentile. Among low-wealth households, differential access to credit markets and homeownership was associated with a larger proportion of the gap in net worth.

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Michelle Maroto: Department of Sociology, University of Alberta
Email: maroto@ualberta.ca

Acknowledgements: This research was partially supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Development Grant (#430-2014-00092).

  • Citation: Maroto, Michelle. 2016. “Growing Farther Apart: Racial and Ethnic Inequality in Household Wealth Across the Distribution.” Sociological Science 3: 801-824.
  • Received: May 11, 2016
  • Accepted: June 13, 2016
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
  • DOI: 10.15195/v3.a34


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Measuring Paradigmaticness of Disciplines Using Text

Eliza D. Evans, Charles J. Gomez, Daniel A. McFarland

Sociological Science, August 31, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a32

In this paper, we describe new methods that use the text of publications to measure the paradigmaticness of disciplines. Drawing on the text of published articles in the Web of Science, we build samples of disciplinary discourse. Using these language samples, we measure the two core concepts of paradigmaticness—consensus and rapid discovery (Collins 1994)—and show the relative positioning of eight example disciplines on each of these measures. Our measures show consistent differences between the “hard” sciences and “soft” social sciences. Deviations in the expected ranking of disciplines within the sciences and social sciences suggest new interpretations of the hierarchy of disciplines, directions for future research, and further insight into the developments in disciplinary structure and discourse that shape paradigmaticness.

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

Eliza D. Evans*: Graduate School of Education, Stanford University
Email: elizae@stanford.edu

Charles J. Gomez*: Graduate School of Education, Stanford University
Email: cjgomez@stanford.edu

Daniel A. McFarland: Graduate School of Education, Stanford University
Email: dmcfarla@stanford.edu

Acknowledgements: This project has been generously funded by the Brown Magic Grant, Dean of Research at Stanford University, and NSF Award #0835614. This material is based upon work supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (No. DGE-114747). Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. This work was also supported by the Stanford Graduate Fellowship Program and by a generous grant from the Global Development and Poverty (GDP) exploratory project, sponsored by the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies (SEED) and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. These data were collected by the Mimir Project conducted at Stanford University by Daniel McFarland, Dan Jurafsky, and Jure Leskovec. Access to these data was approved by the Mimir Project, and usage followed IRB guidelines.

* Co-first authors and corresponding authors

  • Citation: Evans, Eliza D., Charles J. Gomez and Daniel A. McFarland. 2016. “Measuring Paradigmaticness of Disciplines Using Text.” Sociological Science 3: 757-778.
  • Received: March 4, 2016
  • Accepted: April 19, 2016
  • Editors: Gabriel Rossman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v3.a32


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Opportunity without Equity: Educational Inequality and Constitutional Protections in Egypt

Michelle Jackson, Elizabeth Buckner

Sociological Science, August 24, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a31

The claim that the law can be an inequality-reducing weapon is a staple of legal and political discourse. Although it is hard to dispute that legal provisions sometimes work to reduce inequality, we argue that, at least in the domain of equal opportunity in education, the pattern of these effects can be more perverse than has typically been appreciated. Positive laws implemented in the name of promoting equality of opportunity may yield only a narrowly formal equality, with the goal of substantive equality undermined because a high-profile reform will often expose the pathway to educational success. The pathway, once exposed, can then be navigated and successfully subverted by the socioeconomically advantaged. We illustrate such pitfalls of a positive legal approach by examining educational inequality in Egypt, a country with long-standing constitutional protections for equality of opportunity in education. Using data recently collected from a cohort of young people, we show that despite the institutional commitments to equality of opportunity present in Egypt, privileged families have a range of options for subverting the aims of positive legal provisions. We argue that the pattern of educational inequality in Egypt is distinctive relative to countries without similar legal protections.

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Michelle Jackson: Department of Sociology, Stanford University
Email: mvjsoc@stanford.edu

Elizabeth Buckner: Teachers College, Columbia University
Email: esb2174@tc.columbia.edu

Acknowledgements: We thank David Cox, Corey Fields, Jared Furuta, David Grusky, Tomás Jiménez, Paolo Parigi, Deborah Rhode, Aliya Saperstein, Steffen Schindler,
Adam Swift, Robb Willer, Cristobal Young, Patricia Young, and participants at the RC28 Spring Meeting 2013 (Trento) and at the College for Interdisciplinary Educational Research 2016 (Berlin) for their comments on an earlier version of this article. We would also like to express our appreciation to Stephen Morgan and the Sociological Science reviewers, who offered incisive and helpful comments on the article.

  • Citation: Jackson, Michelle, and Elizabeth Buckner. 2016. “Opportunity without Equity: Educational Inequality and Constitutional Protections in Egypt.” Sociological Science 3: 730-756.
  • Received: March 4, 2016
  • Accepted: May 5, 2016
  • Editors: Stephen Morgan
  • DOI: 10.15195/v3.a31


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Income and Trustworthiness

John Ermisch, Diego Gambetta

Sociological Science, August 17, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a30

We employ a behavioral measure of trustworthiness obtained from a trust game carried out with a sample of the general British population, the individuals of which were extensively interviewed on earlier occasions. Our basic finding is that given past income, higher current income increases trustworthiness and, given current income, higher past income reduces trustworthiness. Past income determines the level of financial aspirations, and whether or not these aspirations are fulfilled by the level of current income affects trustworthiness.

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John Ermisch: Department of Sociology and Nuffield College, University of Oxford
Email: john.ermisch@sociology.ox.ac.uk

Diego Gambetta: Department of Sociology and Nuffield College, University of Oxford
Email: diego.gambetta@eui.eu

Acknowledgements: We are grateful to the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council (People’s Trust: A Survey-based Experiment, RES-000-22-2241) for financial support for the research.

  • Citation: Ermisch, John, and Diego Gambetta. 2016. “Income and Trustworthiness.” Sociological Science 3: 710-729.
  • Received: March 9, 2016
  • Accepted: April 13, 2016
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Delia Baldassarri
  • DOI: 10.15195/v3.a30


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Religion, Time Use, and Affective Well-Being

Chaeyoon Lim

Sociological Science, August 10, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a29

This study examines whether religious people experience more positive affect and less negative affect in everyday life and, if they do, whether it is because of the differences in how they allocate time to different activities or because they feel differently during similar activities. Using the well-being module from the 2010–13 American Time Use Survey (ATUS), I show that churchgoers enjoy a significantly higher level of affective well-being on Sunday than non-churchgoers do. The supplementary analysis of the Gallup Daily Poll data suggests that this higher level of affective well-being among churchgoers is found throughout the rest of the week as well. Further analyses of the ATUS demonstrate that about 40 percent of the affective well-being gap between churchgoers and non-churchgoers on Sunday can be explained by how they spend their time differently. Churchgoers spend more time on Sunday participating in pleasant activities shared with family members and friends than non-churchgoers do. More than half of the gap, however, remains unexplained, implying that it has to do with how they feel during similar activities rather than the activities in which they participate. I discuss the implications of these findings on the mechanisms underlying the link between religion and subjective well-being.

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

Chaeyoon Lim: Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Email: chaeyoon.lim@wisc.edu

  • Citation: Lim, Chaeyoon. 2016. “Religion, Time Use, and Affective Well-Being.” Sociological Science 3: 685-709.
  • Received: April 6, 2016
  • Accepted: May 8, 2016
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
  • DOI: 10.15195/v3.a29


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Lifestyles through Expenditures: A Case-Based Approach to Saving

Lisa A. Keister, Richard Benton, James Moody

Sociological Science, August 3, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a28

Treating people as cases that are proximate in a behavior space—representing lifestyles—rather than as markers of single variables has a long history in sociology. Yet, because it is difficult to find analytically tractable ways to implement this idea, this approach is rarely used. We take seriously the idea that people are whole packages, and we use household spending to identify groups who occupy similar positions in social space. Using detailed data on household consumption, we identify eight positions that are clearly similar in lifestyle. We then study how the lifestyles we identify are associated with saving, an important measure of household well-being. We find that households cluster into distinct lifestyles based on similarities and differences in consumption. These lifestyles are meaningfully related in social space and save in distinct ways that have important implications for understanding inequality and stratification.

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

Lisa A. Keister: Department of Sociology, Duke University
Email: lkeister@soc.duke.edu

Richard Benton: School of Labor and Employment Relations, University of Illinois
Email: rabenton@illinois.edu

James Moody: Department of Sociology, Duke University
Email: Jmoody77@soc.duke.edu

Acknowledgements: Direct correspondence to Lisa A. Keister at 268 Sociology-Psychology Building, Box 90088, Durham, NC 27708. Lkeister@soc.duke.edu. Keister acknowledges a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES-1322738), and Moody acknowledges a grant the National Institutes of Health (HD075712-01) that supported this research. We are grateful for comments from David Diehl, Achim Edelmann, and Hang Young Lee.

  • Citation: Keister, Lisa A., Richard Benton, and James Moody. 2016. “Lifestyles through Expenditures: A Case-Based Approach to Saving.” Sociological Science 3: 650-684.
  • Received: March 17, 2016
  • Accepted: April 12, 2016
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
  • DOI: 10.15195/v3.a28


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