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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.

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

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

Income and Trustworthiness

By Parker Webservices on August 17, 2016 in Articles

John Ermisch, Diego Gambetta

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

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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.

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

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

Religion, Time Use, and Affective Well-Being

By Parker Webservices on August 10, 2016 in Articles

Chaeyoon Lim

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

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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.

This 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

Lifestyles through Expenditures: A Case-Based Approach to Saving

By Parker Webservices on August 3, 2016 in Articles

Lisa A. Keister, Richard Benton, James Moody

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

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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.

This 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

Multicollinearity and Model Misspecification

By Parker Webservices on July 26, 2016 in Articles

Christopher Winship, Bruce Western

Sociological Science, July 26, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a27

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Multicollinearity in linear regression is typically thought of as a problem of large standard errors due to near-linear dependencies among independent variables. This problem can be solved by more informative data, possibly in the form of a larger sample. We argue that this understanding of multicollinearity is only partly correct. The near collinearity of independent variables can also increase the sensitivity of regression estimates to small errors in the model misspecification. We examine the classical assumption that independent variables are uncorrelated with the errors. With collinearity, small deviations from this assumption can lead to large changes in estimates. We present a Bayesian estimator that specifies a prior distribution for the covariance between the independent variables and the error term. This estimator can be used to calculate confidence intervals that reflect sampling error and uncertainty about the model specification. A Monte Carlo experiment indicates that the Bayesian estimator has good frequentist properties in the presence of specification errors. We illustrate the new method by estimating a model of the black–white gap in earnings.

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

Christopher Winship: Department of Sociology, Harvard University
Email: cwinship@wjh.harvard.edu

Bruce Western: Department of Sociology, Harvard University
Email: western@wjh.harvard.edu

Acknowledgements: We thank Kinga Makovi for help in the preparation of the manuscript. We also appreciate the editor’s suggestions for citations that we were unaware of.

Citation: Winship, Christopher, and Bruce Western. 2016. “Multicollinearity and Model Misspecification.” Sociological Science 3:627-649.
Received: February 5, 2016
Accepted: March 5, 2016
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
DOI: 10.15195/v3.a27

Stylized Facts in the Social Sciences

By Parker Webservices on July 19, 2016 in Articles

Daniel Hirschman

Sociological Science, July 19, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a26

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Stylized facts are empirical regularities in search of theoretical, causal explanations. Stylized facts are both positive claims (about what is in the world) and normative claims (about what merits scholarly attention). Much of canonical social science research can be usefully characterized as the production or contestation of stylized facts. Beyond their value as grist for the theoretical mill of social scientists, stylized facts also travel directly into the political arena. Drawing on three recent examples, I show how stylized facts can interact with existing folk causal theories to reconstitute political debates and how tensions in the operationalization of folk concepts drive contention around stylized fact claims.

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

Daniel Hirschman: Department of Sociology, Brown University
Email: daniel_hirschman@brown.edu

Acknowledgements: I thank Beth Berman, Jamie Budnick, Wendy Espeland, Isaac Reed, and audiences at the 2013 Junior Theorists Symposium and the Michigan Social Theory Workshop for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

Citation:Hirschman, Daniel. 2016. “Stylized Facts in the Social Sciences.” Sociological Science 3: 604-626.
Received: April 22, 2016
Accepted: April 29, 2016
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
DOI: 10.15195/v3.a26

The Consequences of the National Math and Science Performance Environment for Gender Differences in STEM Aspiration

By Parker Webservices on July 12, 2016 in Articles

Allison Mann, Thomas A. DiPrete

Sociological Science, July 12, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a25

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Using the lens of expectation states theory, which we formalize in Bayesian terms, this article examines the influences of national performance and self-assessment contexts on gender differences in the rate of aspiring to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) occupations. We demonstrate that girls hold themselves to a higher performance standard than do boys before forming STEM orientations, and this gender “standards gap” grows with the strength of a country’s performance environment. We also demonstrate that a repeatedly observed paradox in this literature—namely, that the STEM gender gap increases with a more strongly gender-egalitarian national culture—vanishes when the national performance culture is taken into account. Whereas other research has proposed theories to explain the apparent paradox as an empirical reality, we demonstrate that the empirical relationship is as expected; net of the performance environment, countries with a more gender-egalitarian culture have a smaller gender gap in STEM orientations. We also find, consistent with our theory, that the proportion of high-performing girls among STEM aspirants grows with the strength of the national performance environment even as the overall gender gap in STEM orientations grows because of offsetting behavior by students at the lower end of the performance distribution.

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

Allison Mann: Sociology Department, Columbia University
Email: alm2174@columbia.edu

Thomas A. DiPrete: Sociology Department, Columbia University
Email: tad61@columbia.edu

Acknowledgements: This project was supported by Award Number R01EB010584 from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering or the National Institutes of Health. We acknowledge helpful comments by Claudia Buchmann and Joscha Legewie.

Citation: Mann, Allison, and Thomas A. DiPrete. 2016. “The Consequences of the National Math and Science Performance Environment for Gender Differences in STEM Aspirations.” Sociological Science 3: 568-603.
Received: February 22, 2016
Accepted: March 31, 2016
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Stephen Morgan
DOI: 10.15195/v3.a25

American Exceptionalism Revisited: Tax Relief, Poverty Reduction, and the Politics of Child Tax Credits

By Parker Webservices on July 8, 2016 in Articles

Joshua T. McCabe, Elizabeth Popp Berman

Sociological Science, July 8, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a24

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In the 1990s, several liberal welfare regimes (LWRs) introduced child tax credits (CTCs) aimed at reducing child poverty. While in other countries these tax credits were refundable, the United States alone introduced a nonrefundable CTC. As a result, the United States was the only country in which poor and working-class families were paradoxically excluded from these new benefits. A comparative analysis of Canada and the United States shows that American exceptionalism resulted from the cultural legacy of distinct public policies. We argue that policy changes in the 1940s institutionalized different “logics of appropriateness” that later constrained policymakers in the 1990s. Specifically, the introduction of family allowances in Canada and other LWR countries naturalized a logic of income supplementation in which families could legitimately receive cash benefits without the stigma of “welfare.” Lacking this policy legacy, American attempts to introduce a refundable CTC were quickly derailed by policymakers who saw it as equivalent to welfare. Instead, they introduced a narrow, nonrefundable CTC under the alternative logic of “tax relief,” even though this meant excluding the lowest-income families. The cultural legacy of past policies can explain American exceptionalism not only with regard to CTCs but to other social policies as well.

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

Joshua T.McCabe: The Freedom Project, Wellesley College
Email: jmccabe@wellesley.edu

Elizabeth Popp Berman: Department of Sociology, University at Albany, SUNY
Email: epberman@albany.edu

Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Nadya Hajj, Sarah Quinn, and audiences at the University of Toronto and Social Science History Association for comments on various versions of this article.

Citation: McCabe, Joshua T., and Elizabeth Popp Berman. 2016. “American Exceptionalism Revisited: Tax Relief, Poverty Reduction, and the Politics of Child Tax Credits.” Sociological Science 3: 540-567.
Received: March 16, 2016
Accepted: March 27, 2016
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
DOI: 10.15195/v3.a24

The Bell Curve Revisited: Testing Controversial Hypotheses with Molecular Genetic Data

By Parker Webservices on July 5, 2016 in Articles

Dalton Conley, Benjamin Domingue

Sociological Science, July 5, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a23

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In 1994, the publication of Herrnstein’s and Murray’s The Bell Curve resulted in a social science maelstrom of responses. In the present study, we argue that Herrnstein’s and Murray’s assertions were made prematurely, on their own terms, given the lack of data available to test the role of genotype in the dynamics of achievement and attainment in U.S. society. Today, however, the scientific community has access to at least one dataset that is nationally representative and has genome-wide molecular markers. We deploy those data from the Health and Retirement Study in order to test the core series of propositions offered by Herrnstein and Murray in 1994. First, we ask whether the effect of genotype is increasing in predictive power across birth cohorts in the middle twentieth century. Second, we ask whether assortative mating on relevant genotypes is increasing across the same time period. Finally, we ask whether educational genotypes are increasingly predictive of fertility (number ever born [NEB]) in tandem with the rising (negative) association of educational outcomes and NEB. The answers to these questions are mostly no; while molecular genetic markers can predict educational attainment, we find little evidence for the proposition that we are becoming increasingly genetically stratified.

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

Dalton Conley: Department of Sociology, Princeton University
Email: dconley@princeton.edu

Benjamin Domingue: Graduate School of Education, Stanford University
Email: bdomingue@stanford.edu

Acknowledgements: Funding for this study was provided by the Russell Sage Foundation, Grant 83-15-29. This research uses data from the HRS, which is sponsored by the National Institute on Aging (Grants NIA U01AG009740, RC2AG036495, and RC4AG039029) and conducted by the University of Michigan.

Citation: Conley, Dalton, and Benjamin Domingue. 2016. “The Bell Curve Revisited: Testing Controversial Hypotheses with Molecular Genetic Data.” Sociological Science 3: 520-539.
Received: January 19, 2016
Accepted: February 22, 2016
Editors: Stephen Morgan
DOI: 10.15195/v3.a23

Financialization Is Marketization! A Study of the Respective Impacts of Various Dimensions of Financialization on the Increase in Global Inequality

By Parker Webservices on June 29, 2016 in Articles

Olivier Godechot

Sociological Science, June 29, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a22

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In this article, I study the impact of financialization on the rise in inequality in 18 OECD countries from 1970 to 2011 and measure the respective roles of various forms of financialization: the growth of the financial sector; the growth of one of its subcomponents, financial markets; the financialization of non-financial firms; and the financialization of households. I test these impacts using cross-country panel regressions in OECD countries. I show first that the share of the finance sector within the GDP is a substantial driver of world inequality, explaining between 20 and 40 percent of its increase from 1980 to 2007. When I decompose this financial sector effect, I find that this evolution was mainly driven by the increase in the volume of stocks traded in national stock exchanges and by the volume of shares held as assets in banks’ balance sheets. By contrast, the financialization of non-financial firms and of households does not play a substantial role. Based on this inequality test, I therefore interpret financialization as being mainly a phenomenon of marketization, redefined as the growing amount of social energy devoted to the trade of financial instruments on financial markets.

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

Olivier Godechot: Sciences Po / MaxPo and OSC-CNRS, Axa Chair Holder
Email: olivier.godechot@sciencespo.fr

Acknowledgements: I am very grateful to Moritz Schularick for sharing his precious data on debt (Jordà and al., 2014). I would like to thank Alex Barnard, Emanuele Ferragina, Neil Fligstein, Elsa Massoc, Cornelia Woll and Nicolas Woloszko for comments on this article.