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Equalization through Deterioration: The Shrinking Gender Gap in Swedish School Grades

By on September 30, 2025 in Articles

Carina Mood

Sociological Science September 30, 2025
10.15195/v12.a27

Abstract

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This article documents a surprising reversal in the long-standing gender gap in academic achievement: between 2021 and 2024, Swedish girls’ school grades declined sharply, whereas boys’ grades remained stable, narrowing the gender gap by over a third. Using full-population data on official school grades and national test scores, the analysis shows that the decline is broad based, affecting nearly all subjects and concentrated among previously high-performing girls. Changes in grading policy or long-term mental health trends are unlikely to account for the sudden downturn. Instead, the evidence points to behavioral changes in girls’ school engagement, possibly triggered by external shocks. Among the most plausible shocks are the rise of TikTok, which increased in popularity among girls just before the grade decline, and Covid-19 disruptions, which may have acted as a catalyst. Although the causes remain uncertain, the pattern signals a sociologically significant disruption, challenging assumptions of stable female academic advantage and inviting international replication.
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Carina Mood: Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University, Institute for Futures Studies E-mail: carina.mood@sofi.su.se.

Acknowledgments: I am grateful to Janne Jonsson for helpful comments and Vetenskapsrådet (grant number: 2022-02036) and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (grant number: P24-0170) for financial support.

Reproducibility Package: A reproducibility package is available at https://osf.io/y8vmk/files/osfstorage. Parts of the article are based on publicly available aggregate data. These data, links to sources, and code to reproduce the analyses are provided in the reproducibility package. Parts of the article are based on analyses of microdata accessed through Statistics Sweden’s secure MONA server within the framework of the Inequality project with ethical approval from the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (Dnr 2019-02761). Data can be accessed only after ethical approval from the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (see https://etikprovningsmyndigheten.se/en/) and after secrecy assessment of Statistics Sweden (see https://www.scb.se/en/services/ordering-data-and-statistics/ ). A list of necessary registers and variables and code to reproduce the analyses are provided in the reproducibility package.


  • Citation: Carina Mood. 2025. ““Equalization through Deterioration: The Shrinking Gender Gap in Swedish School Grades” Sociological Science 12: 670-684.
  • Received: July 30, 2025
  • Accepted: August 30, 2025
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Jeremy Freese
  • DOI: : 10.15195/v12.a27

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The Political Economy of Optimal Taxation

By on September 18, 2025 in Articles

Elias Nosrati

Sociological Science September 18, 2025
10.15195/v12.a26

Abstract

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The question of how to design socially optimal tax policies is located at the epicenter of today’s inequality debate. However, the field of optimal policy design is dominated by a distinctive brand of economic analysis which suffers from a blinkered theoretical lens and weak empirical foundations. This article offers an alternative framework for studying optimal policy design that replaces the dominant economic model’s emphasis on individual utility with a sociological emphasis on unequal life chances. Cross-national data are mobilized to study the architecture of contemporary tax systems across different institutional contexts. The dual taxation of labor and capital income coupled with the preferential treatment of socially concentrated wealth accumulation is shown to have generated sharp tax regressivity at the top of the resource distribution in all countries under consideration, from the (neo)liberal Anglosphere to social-democratic Scandinavia. Rationales for and possible designs of a progressive wealth tax, for which there is renewed international interest, are then explored in detail. A tractable formal model of optimal policy design is presented in which the net welfare effect of a tax policy reform emerges as a weighted sum of how the reform impacts aggregate life chances, inequality in life chances, and the ambient ecosphere. Under common normative and analytical assumptions, a socially optimal annual wealth tax levied on society’s most affluent—defined above a high exemption threshold—is shown to be positive and, in empirically realistic scenarios, lies upward of 10 percent. The corresponding top income tax rate exceeds 65 percent and can, on “limitarian” grounds, approach the confiscatory rate.
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Elias Nosrati: : Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo E-mail: eliasno@uio.no.

Acknowledgments: The author wishes to thank the members of the Power, Elites, and Social Class (MEK) seminar group at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography, UiO for the opportunity to present an early version of the paper and for their helpful feedback. Thank you also to Simon Szreter for reading and commenting on the penultimate draft and to the journal’s editors and reviewers for their constructive critiques.

  • Citation: Elias Nosrati. 2025. “The Political Economy of Optimal Taxation” Sociological Science 12: 634-669.
  • Received: June 30, 2025
  • Accepted: August 12, 2025
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Cristobal Young
  • DOI: : 10.15195/v12.a26

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An Unreliable Ladder: Top–Bottom Self-Placement, Subjective Social Status, and Political Preferences

By on September 11, 2025 in Articles

Lewis Robert Anderson

Sociological Science September 11, 2025
10.15195/v12.a25

Abstract

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Research on right populist support and redistribution preferences increasingly argues for the explanatory power of subjective over objective social position. However, scrutiny of a widely used measure underlying such findings is lacking. I provide a multifaceted assessment of the Top–Bottom Self-Placement question (“Topbot”), which is primarily used in the International Social Survey Programme. Through 36 cognitive interviews and analysis of secondary data sets, I evaluate Topbot’s psychometric qualities, how it is interpreted by respondents, and how far this corresponds to the (contradictory) interpretations assumed by researchers. Consonant with findings of low reliability and high, non-random non-response when a “Don’t know” option is available, the interviews highlight that Topbot is worded ambiguously, leading to varied interpretations and often puzzlement. The most frequently mentioned bases of self-placement represent economic resources. Clustering of responses in the middle is widely known; interviews reveal explanations beyond misestimation. As additionally evidenced by convergent validity analyses, interpretations of Topbot as measuring perceived income decile or subjective social status in a specifically Weberian sense are untenable, and empirical claims made on these bases should be revisited.
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Lewis Robert Anderson: Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford; Institute for New Economic Thinking, University of Oxford. E-mail: lewis.anderson@spi.ox.ac.uk.

Acknowledgments: First and foremost, I wish to thank the 36 individuals who made this research possible by participating in an interview. For their valuable comments and suggestions, I am grateful to Noah Bacine, Geoff Evans, John Goldthorpe, Henning Lohmann, Brian Nolan, Patrick Präg, David Weisstanner, various anonymous reviewers, and participants at three venues where I presented earlier versions: a 2024 meeting of the Inequality and Policy Research Group at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford; the European Consortium for Political Research Joint Sessions of Workshops 2025 at Charles University, Prague; and the 2025 Sociological Science Conference at Cornell University. I also gratefully acknowledge funding from the European Research Council (Grant 856455, DINA) and the support of the Nuffield College Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS) in facilitating the interviews.

Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: Stata code and anonymized interview transcripts are available on the Open
Science Framework repository (https://osf.io/q4sjr/ ). The online supplement includes information about accessing the secondary data sets analyzed.

  • Citation: Anderson, Lewis Robert. 2025. “An Unreliable Ladder: Top–Bottom Self-Placement, Subjective Social Status, and Political Preferences” Sociological Science 12: 601-633.
  • Received: April 21, 2025
  • Accepted: July 15, 2025
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Kristian B. Karlson
  • DOI: 10.15195/v12.a25

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Streaming Platforms, Filter Bubbles, and Cultural Inequalities. How Online Services Increase Consumption Diversity

By on September 4, 2025 in Articles

Samuel Coavoux, Abel Aussant

Sociological Science September 4, 2025
10.15195/v12.a24

Abstract

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Do digital technologies affect diversity in cultural tastes? Digital sociologists have warned of “filter bubbles,” whereas sociologists of culture have shown that diversity in consumption is valued as a marker of upper-middle-class status. We estimate the effect of using streaming platforms on the diversity of cultural consumption using a matching technique applied to 2018 survey data from France. We find a statistically significant positive effect of using streaming platforms on the diversity of cultural consumption as well as on cosmopolitanism, on three domains, music, movies, and TV shows. The magnitude of this effect is much higher for TV shows. The study brings new evidence against the filter bubble thesis; it shows that platforms do reinforce cultural inequalities by increasing the social gap in consumption diversity. It further suggests that the effect of technology on cultural consumption might mainly operate through its impact on cultural markets rather than changes in cultural experience.
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Samuel Coavoux: CREST, ENSAE, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Paris, France. E-mail: samuel.coavoux@ensae.fr.
Abel Aussant: Sciences Po, CRIS, Paris, France. E-mail: abel.aussant@sciencespo.fr.

Acknowledgments: This article benefited greatly from comments by Quentin Mazel, Patrick Präg, Léa Pessin, and anonymous reviewers, as well as from the audiences of AFS 2023, ESA-RN05 Midterm 2023, ECSR 2023, Culture in a digital context conferences, and the CREST sociology seminar.

Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: A replication package containing all scripts necessary to reproduce the results presented in the article is available at OSF. The data are available on demand from the Progedo-Adisp repository.

  • Citation: Coavoux, Samuel and Abel Aussant. 2025. “Streaming Platforms, Filter Bubbles, and Cultural Inequalities. How Online Services Increase Consumption Diversity” Sociological Science 12: 572-600.
  • Received: May 29, 2025
  • Accepted: July 6, 2025
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Bart Bonikowski
  • DOI: 10.15195/v12.a24

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Workplace Networks and the Dynamics of Worker Organizing

By on August 28, 2025 in Articles

Hana Shepherd, Rebecca Roskill, Suresh Naidu, Adam Reich

Sociological Science August 28, 2025
10.15195/v12.a23

Abstract

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A rich literature has established the importance of social networks for explaining participation in contentious politics but has typically treated networks as existing outside the awareness or influence of movement actors themselves. A separate literature has long recognized the importance of “organizing” for successful collective action but has not conceived of organizing in relation to network structure. Bridging these literatures, we develop the concept of “network-driven organizing” (NDO), where organizers allocate relational activity based on perceived social network structure. Using the case of labor organizers in a campaign at Walmart, we analyze more than 80,000 unstructured organizer field notes from almost 120 store-level campaigns between 2010 and 2015 and find that our measure of NDO is positively and robustly correlated with campaign success; going from 0 to 1 on the measure of NDO more than doubles the number of cards signed. We discuss the implications of our results in light of sociological theories of action and the practice of movement organizing.
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Hana Shepherd: Sociology, Rutgers University, E-mail: hshepherd@sociology.rutgers.edu
Rebecca Roskill: E-mail: beccaroskill@gmail.com
Suresh Naidu: Economics and SIPA, Columbia University, E-mail: sn2430@columbia.edu
Adam Reich: Sociology, Columbia University, E-mail: ar3237@columbia.edu

Acknowledgments: Authorship is equal and the order is randomized. We thank OUR Walmart for sharing their data and for their time and insights, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Evidence for Action Program for funding, and Jeff Jacobs, Easton Schindler, and Rachel Springer for research assistance.

Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: The data used in this article are proprietary data from the organization
OUR Walmart. More information about this is provided in the Data section. All code used for data processing and analysis is available at https://osf.io/wejb5/. The researchers will make the processed and anonymized data available for replication purposes upon request and subject to review of a plan to keep the data secure and to delete after use.

  • Citation: Shepherd, Hana, Rebecca Roskill, Suresh Naidu, and Adam Reich 2025. “Workplace Networks and the Dynamics of Worker Organizing” Sociological Science 12: 537-571.
  • Received: February 20, 2025
  • Accepted: April 28, 2025
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Filiz Garip
  • DOI: 10.15195/v12.a23

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One Sentiment, Multiple Interpretations: Contrasting Official and Popular Anti-Americanism in China

By on August 21, 2025 in Articles

Yinxian Zhang, Di Zhou

Sociological Science August 21, 2025
10.15195/v12.a22

Abstract

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This study contrasts official and popular expressions of anti-Americanism in China by comparing narratives from People’s Daily and Zhihu between 2011 and 2022. Using computational and qualitative methods, we examined sentiment trends, topics, and opinions in official and popular discourses. We find that although both discourses have become increasingly negative toward the United States, they diverge significantly in specific expressions: official discourse mirrors Western liberal critiques of American social problems but attributes these issues to American democracy, whereas popular discourse blends left- and right-wing populism and blames liberal elites and capitalism for the American decline. These findings highlight both the limits of state control over public opinion and the pluralistic nature of nationalist expressions. The study also situates Chinese anti-Americanism within a global zeitgeist, discussing how populism transcends borders and shapes local political discourse in unexpected contexts.
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Yinxian Zhang: Department of Sociology, CUNY Queens College. E-mail: yinxian.zhang@qc.cuny.edu.
Di Zhou: Department of Sociology, New York University. E-mail: di.zhou@nyu.edu.

Acknowledgments: This study was financially supported by the 2025 CUNY Faculty Fellowship Publication Program (FFPP) and a PSC-CUNY Research Award (68208-00 56). We are deeply grateful to Yinxian Zhang’s FFPP mentor and fellow participants— Sarah Hoiland, Cindy Bautista-Thomas, Philippe Marius, Nicole McKenna, Douglas Medina, and Prash Naidu—for their invaluable comments and suggestions on earlier drafts.

Conflicts of Interest Statement: The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research and publication of this article.

Author Contributions: YZ: research design, data collection, data analysis and visualization, and writing and editing. DZ: data collection, sentiment classification, and writing (data and methods).

Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: The reproducibility package is available in an OSF repository (Zhang and Zhou 2025; https://osf.io/wxjnr/). Although the original Zhihu posts and People’s Daily articles cannot be shared for legal reasons, we have provided the complete code and derivative data (without text content) for colleagues to replicate the quantitative/computational analyses. Full Zhihu data can be collected via GitHub APIs and the People’s Daily database can be accessed through institutional subscriptions.

  • Citation: Zhang, Yinxian, and Di Zhou. 2025. “One Sentiment, Multiple Interpretations: Contrasting Official and Popular Anti-Americanism in China” Sociological Science 12: 511-536.
  • Received: April 6, 2025
  • Accepted: June 17, 2025
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Kieran Healey
  • DOI: 10.15195/v12.a22

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Rising Educational Divides in Attitudes: How Polarization across Cohorts Can Mask Age-Related Polarization

By on August 19, 2025 in Articles

Fabian Kratz

Sociological Science August 19, 2025
10.15195/v12.a21

Abstract

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The question of whether attitudes become more polarized over time has stimulated significant scientific and political debate. This study is the first to show that polarization processes can occur both across cohorts and with rising age and that cohort-based polarization may obscure age-related polarization. I introduce the age polarization and cohort polarization hypotheses, which propose that attitudes become increasingly polarized both as individuals age and across successive cohorts. I use multi-cohort panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and leverage one of its longest-running attitude measures: concerns about immigration. I show that education-specific differences in immigration concerns intensify both across cohorts and with rising age and that age related polarization only becomes apparent when cohort-based polarization is taken into account. These findings contribute to debates on polarization processes in attitudes over time and advance the literature on heterogeneity in the liberalizing effect of education.
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Fabian Kratz: Department of Sociology, University of Munich, LMU. E-mail: fabian.kratz@lmu.de
Acknowledgments: I am grateful to Daniel Krähmer, Madison Garrett, Lena Jost, Philipp Lersch, Josef Brüderl, and participants at the RC28 Conference in Milan (2025) for their helpful comments.

Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: STATA code for replication is available on the author’s Open Science Framework page: https://osf.io/um8f7/. The data sets were provided by the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) Study at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW). Access to the SOEP data requires signing a data assignment contract, which can be requested here: https://www.diw.de/en/diw_01.c.601584.en/data_access.html. For more information, visit https://www.diw.de/en/diw_01.c.838578.en/edition/soep-core_v37eu__data_1984-2020__eu-edition.html.

  • Citation: Kratz, Fabian. 2025. “Rising Educational Divides in Attitudes: How Polarization across Cohorts Can Mask Age-Related Polarization” Sociological Science 12: 486-510.
  • Received: May 23, 2025
  • Accepted: July 6, 2025
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Peter Bearman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v12.a21

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How to Make a Functionalist Argument

By on August 14, 2025 in Articles

Andrés Castro Araújo, Nicolás Restrepo Ochoa

Sociological Science August 14, 2025
10.15195/v12.a20

Abstract

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Sociologists have an awkward relationship with functionalist explanations. Despite having declared “functionalism” to be obsolete, some form of functionalist argument still remains cryptically present in much substantive research. We argue that the resulting inability to talk plainly about functions is a major hindrance for theory building in the discipline. As such, this article has two goals. The first is disambiguation. What does it mean to attribute a function to something? We answer this question by elaborating on the distinction between proper functions (responding to why-is-it-there questions) and role functions (responding to how-does-it-work questions). The second is to introduce a typology of functional arguments that builds upon this distinction, allowing us to recast “functionalism” as a set of general explanatory strategies and not as a substantive theory about society. Importantly, these forms of argument are not burdened by the problems with the organicist framework that many sociologists associate with functionalism.
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Andrés Castro Araújo: Department of Sociology, Duke University. E-mail: andres.castro.araujo@duke.edu.
Nicolás Restrepo Ochoa: Department of Anthropology, University of California-Davis. E-mail: nrestrepoochoa@ucdavis.edu.

Acknowledgments: We would like to thank Kieran Healy, Braulio Güémez, Turgut Keskintürk, Juan R. Loaiza, Gunnar Babcock, Elizaveta Sheremet, Martin Ruef, and Steve Vaisey for all the helpful feedback given throughout the long amount of time it took to write this.

  • Citation: Araújo, Andrés Castro, and Nicolás Restrepo Ochoa. 2025. “How to Make a Functionalist Argument” Sociological Science 12:456-485.
  • Received: May 1, 2025
  • Acceptedd: June 9, 2025
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Elizabeth Bruch
  • DOI: 10.15195/v12.a20

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Outlier or Not? The Birth Order Effects on Educational Attainment in China

By on July 28, 2025 in Articles

Shoudeng Zhang

Sociological Science July 28, 2025
10.15195/v12.a19

Abstract

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This study examines birth order effects in China using sibling fixed-effect models and cohort analysis. It reveals that birth order’s net effect is negative when adjusting for educational expansion and gendered sibling structures. The findings resonate with Western patterns but challenge earlier positive birth order effects documented in China. Notably, gender plays a significant role, as negative birth order effects are more pronounced in females due to gender preference in fertility and parenting. These complex findings highlight the necessity to explore the mechanisms behind birth order effects amid evolving societal norms and parental behaviors. Moreover, this study contributes novel insights by disentangling macro-level trends from birth order effects and deal with bias from sibling size and sibling gender structures by introducing newly designed adjusted birth order indices.
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Shoudeng Zhang: Graduate School of Education, Peking University, China. Department of Sociology, University of Oxford, the United Kingdom
E-mail: pkuzsd@pku.edu.cn
Reproducibility Package: Stata replication code is available at the link: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RZVEMI. The data used in this article can be achieved via application through the CFPS website: https://cfpsdata.pku.edu.cn/.

  • Citation: Shoudeng Zhang. 2025. “Outlier or Not? The Birth Order Effects on Educational Attainment in China” Sociological Science 12: 431-455.
  • Received: November 22, 2023
  • Accepted: June 4, 2025
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Andreas Wimmer
  • DOI: 10.15195/v12.a19

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Partisanship Meets Social Networks: How Politically Heterogeneous Acquaintances and Close Relationships Buffer Partisan Animosity

By on July 7, 2025 in Articles

Delia Baldassarri, Jona de Jong

Sociological Science July 7, 2025
10.15195/v12.a18

Abstract

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Politically heterogeneous social networks have long been considered as a safeguard against political division. However, in today’s polarized political climate, the effectiveness of cross-partisan interactions in mitigating animosity is increasingly questioned. Prior research emphasizes the importance of hearing-the-other-side through cross-partisan discussions with close ties. We confirm that these discussions still take place and are related to lower inter-partisan animosity. Moreover, we propose a complementary mechanism, seeing-the-other-side, according to which even brief interactions with out-partisan acquaintances serve to reduce distorted views of out-partisans, thereby lowering inter-partisan hostility. Using original data from the United States, we find that both close tie and acquaintance networks display significant political heterogeneity and this heterogeneity is associated with lower partisan animosity. Experimentally, we show that reducing misperceptions by increasing the salience of similarities between in-partisan and out-partisan acquaintances further reduces hostility. These findings highlight the continued relevance of everyday political diversity in tempering partisan divisions and nuance worries about partisan echo chambers.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Delia Baldassarri: Professor, Department of Sociology, New York University
E-mail: delia.b@nyu.edu

Jona de Jong: Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Sociology, Utrecht University
E-mail: j.f.dejong2@uu.nl

Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: Data and related code necessary to produce the results are publicly available here: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/6ISNQQ.

  • Citation: Baldassarri, Delia, Jona de Jong. 2025. “Partisanship Meets Social Networks: How Politically Heterogeneous Acquaintances and Close Relationships Buffer Partisan Animosity” Sociological Science 12: 409-430.
  • Received: March 17, 2025
  • Accepted: March 28, 2025
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Stephen Vaisey
  • DOI: 10.15195/v12.a18

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