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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.

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

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.

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

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

By Parker Webservices on September 4, 2025 in Articles

Samuel Coavoux, Abel Aussant

Sociological Science September 4, 2025
10.15195/v12.a24

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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.

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

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.

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

Workplace Networks and the Dynamics of Worker Organizing

By Parker Webservices on August 28, 2025 in Articles

Hana Shepherd, Rebecca Roskill, Suresh Naidu, Adam Reich

Sociological Science August 28, 2025
10.15195/v12.a23

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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.

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

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.

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

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

By Parker Webservices on August 21, 2025 in Articles

Yinxian Zhang, Di Zhou

Sociological Science August 21, 2025
10.15195/v12.a22

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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.

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

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).

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

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

By Parker Webservices on August 19, 2025 in Articles

Fabian Kratz

Sociological Science August 19, 2025
10.15195/v12.a21

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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.

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

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.

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

How to Make a Functionalist Argument

By Parker Webservices on August 14, 2025 in Articles

Andrés Castro Araújo, Nicolás Restrepo Ochoa

Sociological Science August 14, 2025
10.15195/v12.a20

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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.

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

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

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

By Parker Webservices on July 28, 2025 in Articles

Shoudeng Zhang

Sociological Science July 28, 2025
10.15195/v12.a19

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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.

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

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

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

By Parker Webservices on July 7, 2025 in Articles

Delia Baldassarri, Jona de Jong

Sociological Science July 7, 2025
10.15195/v12.a18

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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.

This 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

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

Who Learns from Deliberative Minipublics? Identity-Based Differences in Knowledge Gains across Thirteen Citizens' Initiative Review Experiments

By Parker Webservices on June 30, 2025 in Articles

Kristinn Már Ársælsson, John Gastil

Sociological Science June 30, 2025
10.15195/v12.a17

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Voters often show low levels of accurate policy information owing to misinformation and directional motivated reasoning. Extant research shows that participants in randomly selected deliberative groups—commonly called “minipublics”—can update their beliefs and deliver reasoned policy analysis and recommendations. When distributed to a wider public, such information can bypass motivated reasoning heuristics to improve policy knowledge across the electorate. However, critics posit that these benefits may spread unevenly across demographic, political, and other social subgroups. To investigate that claim, we analyzed survey experiments conducted across 13 realworld minipublics with more than 10,000 respondents and more than 60,000 knowledge scores. Results showed that advisory minipublics boosted policy knowledge evenly across many voter groups, but gains were slightly diminished for racial/ethnic minorities and some income brackets. Further analysis indicates that these differences did not stem from variations in deliberative faith or preexisting levels of policy knowledge.

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

Kristinn Már Ársælsson: Social Sciences, Duke Kunshan University
E-mail:kristinn.mar@dukekunshan.edu.cn

John Gastil: Communication Arts and Sciences, Public Policy, and Political Science, Pennsylvania State University
E-mail: jwg22@psu.edu

Acknowledgments: The authors thank all of those who have made possible this ongoing program of research, including our wider team of collaborators noted at the Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) Research Project site (https://sites.psu.edu/citizensinitiativereview) and Healthy Democracy, which provided open access to the CIR process itself. Funding was made possible by The Democracy Fund (contract “2015-2016 Citizens’ Initiative Review Study and Reporting”), the National Science Foundation (Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences: Decision, Risk and Management Sciences, Award # 1357276/1357444 and Award #0961774), a Kettering Foundation joint learning agreement (“Examining deliberation and the cultivation of public engagement at the 2012 Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review”), and a University of Washington Royalty Research Fund grant (“Panel Survey Investigation of the Oregon Citizen Initiative Review”).

Reproducibility Package: Stata replication code and data are available on the Open Science Framework (OSF), https://osf.io/rnpcq/.

Citation: Ársælsson, Kristinn Már, John Gastil. 2025. “Who Learns from Deliberative Minipublics? Identity-Based Differences in Knowledge Gains across Thirteen Citizens’ Initiative Review Experiments” Sociological Science 12: 388-408.
Received: April 18, 2025
Accepted: May 15, 2025
Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Maria Abascal
DOI: 10.15195/v12.a17

Evaluation Criteria and Women's Attainment of Elite STEM Education: Evidence from College Admission Records

By Parker Webservices on June 23, 2025 in Articles

Wei-hsin Yu, Kuo-Hsien Su

Sociological Science June 23, 2025
10.15195/v12.a16

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Research on women’s underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields rarely addresses the roles of institutional gatekeepers and their screening criteria. Using full application records of the most prestigious university in Taiwan, we examine how the assessment criteria used by departments to determine admissions shape women’s relative chance of entering elite STEM programs. Results from department fixed-effect models indicate that male-dominated STEM programs actually rate female applicants’ written application materials and interviews higher. Female applicants are still less likely admitted to such programs than males because many STEM departments also use major-specific tests, which are not strictly curriculum based and impose great competitive pressure on selected students. Even the highest-achieving female students with a strong STEM interest perform worse than males in this type of tests, especially when the tests are given by male-dominated departments. Because of this gender performance gap, female students’ chances of being admitted to elite STEM programs continue to be obstructed even as the college admission system became holistic and incorporated assessment criteria that could favor females.

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

Wei-hsin Yu: Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles
E-mail: whyu@soc.ucla.edu

Kuo-Hsien Su: Department of Sociology, National Taiwan University
E-mail: khsu@ntu.edu.tw

Acknowledgments: We thank National Taiwan University for sharing application records with the authors for the purpose of academic research. We also acknowledge the valuable input from Yu Xie at an earlier stage of this research project and a grant from the Asia Pacific Center at UCLA awarded to the first author.