Articles

How States Make Race: New Evidence from Brazil

Stanley R. Bailey, Fabrício M. Fialho, Mara Loveman

Sociological Science, November 26, 2018
10.15195/v5.a31


The Brazilian state recently adopted unprecedented race-targeted affirmative action in government hiring and university admissions. Scholarship would predict the state’s institutionalization of racial categories has “race-making” effects. In this article, we ask whether the Brazilian state’s policy turnabout has affected racial subjectivities on the ground, specifically toward mirroring the categories used by the state. To answer, we conceptualize race as multidimensional and leverage two of its dimensions—lay identification and government classification (via open-ended and closed-ended questions, respectively)—to introduce a new metric of state race-making: a comparison of the extent of alignment between lay and government dimensions across time. Logistic regression on large-sample survey data from before the policy turn (1995) and well after its diffusion (2008) reveals an increased use of state categories as respondents’ lay identification in the direction of matching respondents’ government classification. We conclude that the Brazilian state is making race but not from scratch nor in ways that are fully intended.
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Stanley R. Bailey: Department of Sociology, University of California, Irvine
E-mail: bailey@uci.edu

Fabrício M. Fialho: Centre de Recherches Internationales, Sciences Po Paris, France
E-mail: fabriciofialho@gmail.com

Mara Loveman: Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
E-mail: mloveman@berkeley.edu

  • Citation: Bailey, Stanley R., Fabrício M. Fialho, and Mara Loveman. 2018. “How States Make Race: New Evidence from Brazil.” Sociological Science 5: 722-751.
  • Received: September 4, 2018
  • Accepted: September 27, 2018
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Delia Baldassarri
  • DOI: 10.15195/v5.a31


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The Continuing Persistence of Intense Religion in the United States: Rejoinder

Landon Schnabel, Sean Bock

Sociological Science, November 15, 2018
10.15195/v5.a30


In their comment on our article about the persistence of intense religion in the United States, David Voas and Mark Chaves (2018) claimed that “the intensely religious segment of the American population is shrinking.” In this response, we show that intense religion has persisted from the 1970s to the present, with a temporary uptick during the exceptional Reagan years. Voas and Chaves concluded otherwise because their analytical strategy was not sufficiently sensitive to nonlinear patterns. In addition to demonstrating the continuing persistence of intense religion, we also discuss criteria for measuring intense religion over time and the importance of avoiding unfounded assumptions in age–period–cohort analysis. We conclude that aspects of the classic secularization thesis championed by Voas, Chaves, and others are not supported by the data, and we suggest that scholars should look for better ways of thinking about religious change.
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Landon Schnabel: Department of Sociology, Indiana University Bloomington
E-mail: lpschnab@indiana.edu

Sean Bock: Department of Sociology, Harvard University
E-mail: seanbock@g.harvard.edu

Acknowledgements: The authors are grateful to Jason Beckfield, Bart Bonikowski, Mike Hout, Brian Powell, Chris Winship, and the editor for exceptional feedback on this response. Direct correspondence to Landon Schnabel, Department of Sociology, Indiana University Bloomington, 702 Ballantine Hall, 1020 E. Kirkwood Ave., Bloomington, IN 47405.

  • Citation: Schnabel, Landon, and Sean Bock. 2018. “The Continuing Persistence of Intense Religion in the United States.” Sociological Science 5: 711-721.
  • Received: October 25, 2018
  • Accepted: October 29, 2018
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen
  • DOI: 10.15195/v5.a30




The Persistent and Exceptional Intensity of American Religion: A Response to Recent Research

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Even Intense Religiosity Is Declining in the United States: Comment

David Voas, Mark Chaves

Sociological Science, November 15, 2018
10.15195/v5.a29


In their 2017 article, “The Persistent and Exceptional Intensity of American Religion: A Response to Recent Research,” Schnabel and Bock claimed that “intense religion . . . is persistent and, in fact, only moderate religion is on the decline in the United States.” In this article, we show that even the intensely religious segment of the American population is indeed shrinking. Schnabel and Bock mistakenly concluded otherwise because their analytical strategy was not sufficiently sensitive to detect very slow change (leading them to miss signs of declining intense religion on the indicators they examined), they examined a limited set of indicators (missing still more signs of declining intense religion), and they paid insufficient attention to cohort differences. Overall, their empirical conclusion that “only moderate religion is on the decline in the United States” is simply false. And their interpretive conclusion that “intense religion in the United States is persistent and exceptional in ways that do not fit the secularization thesis” should be rejected.
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David Voas: Department of Social Science, University College London
E-mail: d.voas@ucl.ac.uk

Mark Chaves: Department of Sociology, Duke University
E-mail: mac58@soc.duke.edu

Acknowledgements: David Voas received funding from the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council via the Research Centre on Micro-Social Change. The authors thank Tom Smith for helping to detail the changes that occurred in the General Social Survey between 2002 and 2004 and Simon Brauer for suggesting the use of a scale measure of intense religiosity.

  • Citation: Voas, David, and Mark Chaves. 2018. “Even Intense Religiosity Is Declining in the United States.” Sociological Science 5: 694-710.
  • Received: August 3, 2018
  • Accepted: September 30, 2018
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Stephen Morgan
  • DOI: 10.15195/v5.a29




The Persistent and Exceptional Intensity of American Religion: A Response to Recent Research

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Identity Override: How Sexual Orientation Reduces the Rigidity of Racial Boundaries

Adam L. Horowitz, Charles J. Gomez

Sociological Science, November 7, 2018
10.15195/v5.a28


Although most Americans have limited interpersonal relations with different-race others, interracial ties are notably more common among gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB) individuals. Departing from the modal explanation of intergroup relations theories, which suggests that individual propensities for between-group interactions are driven by demographic groups’ physical location relative to one another, we show that, beyond propinquity, GLB interraciality is spiked through active identification as GLB. We evaluate full romantic/sexual partnership histories along with friendship network racial compositions for respondents in a large, nationally representative sample. We show that GLBs have a greater likelihood and frequency than heterosexuals of forming multiple types of interracial ties and also that this effect applies only to those who actively identify as GLB and not to those who engage in same-sex relations but do not identify as GLB. This discovery refines theories of intergroup relations, isolating how identification serves as a mediating mechanism that can heighten the propensity for intergroup interaction. We argue that active identification with a group that crosses racial boundaries spurs overriding the rigidity of intergroup borders that otherwise dissuade interpersonal diversity.
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Adam L. Horowitz: The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Tel Aviv University, and Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Stanford University
E-mail: ahorowitz@stanford.edu

Charles J. Gomez: Department of Sociology, Queens College, City University of New York.
E-mail: charles.gomez@qc.cuny.edu

Acknowledgements: The authors would like to acknowledge the valuable feedback provided by Monica McDermott, Michael Rosenfeld, Morris Zelditch, Jr., Tomás Jiménez, and Louis Mittel. Adam Horowitz and Charles Gomez made equivalently consequential contributions to this article, and authorship should be considered equal.

  • Citation: Horowitz, Adam L., and Charles J. Gomez. 2018. “Identity Override: How Sexual Orientation Reduces the Rigidity of Racial Boundaries.” Sociological Science 5: 669-693.
  • Received: July 3, 2018
  • Accepted: August 6, 2018
  • Editors: Mario Small
  • DOI: 10.15195/v5.a28


February 2019

This article has been updated after a reader discovered and brought to the authors’ attention a coding error with a control variable. Add Health codes two responses for declining to report income as 9999998 and 9999996. In the original analyses, these responses were not treated as missing. This authors have corrected the error and rerun the analyses, which are presented in the current version.

The most consequential results of this correction are as follows:

  • The number of respondents in the analytical sample changed from 10,721 to 10,281 (p. 674)
  • The descriptive statistics in Table 1 have changed due to the change in sample size. In addition, due to the recoding of income for some respondents to missing, the descriptive statistics for income at the bottom of the table have changed.
  • The correlations reported in Table 2 have changed.
  • Point estimates for coefficients and standard errors for the models reported in Table 3-6 have changed. These changes generally do not involve changes in statistical significance, and are generally not consequential for the interpretations offered, with the following exceptions:
    • In Table 5, the effect of “GLB” in the “All other race” column is no longer significant at the p<.05 letter. As a result, the text on p. 679 has been changed to say "GLBs are estimated to select four [previously: five] of six friendship network composition categories over “all your race" at significantly higher rates than are heterosexuals."
    • In Table 6, the effect of “Less than High School” in the “Almost all other races” column is no longer statistically significant.

The originally published version of the paper is available here.


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Taxation and Citizen Voice in School District Parcel Tax Elections

Isaac William Martin, Jennifer M. Nations

Sociological Science, October 29, 2018
10.15195/v5.a27


Local taxation produces consequential resource inequalities among public school districts, but little is known about how policy design affects taxpayers’ willingness to pay for schooling. We show that voters are more likely to approve local school taxes if the policy is written to require citizen–state consultation on how the funds are spent. In a sample of 236 California school district elections, the promise of indirect consultation with a citizen advisory board was associated with a 3.7 percentage-point greater share of voters and a probability of passage that was 31 percentage points greater, whereas direct consultation with voters was associated with a 5.7 percentage-point greater share of voters and a probability of passage that was 32 percentage points greater, relative to a proposed tax increase with no consultation. These results provide evidence that citizens may trade increased taxation for increased voice even within an established democracy.
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Isaac William Martin: Department of Sociology, University of California, San Diego
E-mail: iwmartin@ucsd.edu

Jennifer M. Nations: Scholars Strategy Network
E-mail: jnations@ucsd.edu

Acknowledgements: This research was supported by the Spencer Foundation (award 201800030) and the National Science Foundation (award 1421993). The authors gratefully acknowledge the research assistance of Jane Lilly López and Lauren Olsen; the generosity of Rod Kiewiet, who shared documents from his own collection of school district parcel tax measures; and the constructive feedback of colleagues at the 2017 Meetings of the Sociology of Education Association.

  • Citation: Martin, Isaac W., and Jennifer M. Nations. 2018. “Taxation and Citizen Voice in School District Parcel Tax Elections.” Sociological Science 5: 653-668.
  • Received: August 2, 2018
  • Accepted: September 24, 2018
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Delia Baldassarri
  • DOI: 10.15195/v5.a27


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Poor State, Rich State: Understanding the Variability of Poverty Rates across U.S. States

Jennifer Laird, Zachary Parolin, Jane Waldfogel, Christopher Wimer

Sociological Science, October 3, 2018
10.15195/v5.a26


According to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, state-level poverty rates range from a low of less than 10 percent in Iowa to a high of more than 20 percent in California. We seek to account for these differences using a theoretical framework proposed by Brady, Finnigan, and Hübgen (2017), which emphasizes the prevalence of poverty risk factors as well as poverty penalties associated with each risk factor. We estimate state-specific penalties and prevalences associated with single motherhood, low education, young households, and joblessness. We also consider state variation in the poverty risks associated with living in a black household and a Hispanic immigrant household. Brady et al. (2017) find that country-level differences in poverty rates are more closely tied to penalties than prevalences. Using data from the Current Population Survey, we find that the opposite is true for state-level differences in poverty rates. Although we find that state poverty differences are closely tied to the prevalence of high-risk populations, our results do not suggest that state-level antipoverty policy should be solely focused on changing “risky” behavior. Based on our findings, we conclude that state policies should take into account cost-of-living penalties as well as the state-specific relationship between poverty, prevalences, and penalties.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Jennifer Laird: Department of Sociology, Lehman College
E-mail: jennifer.laird@lehman.cuny.edu

Zachary Parolin: Herman Deleeck Centre for Social Policy, University of Antwerp
E-mail: Zachary.Parolin@uantwerpen.be

Jane Waldfogel: School of Social Work, Columbia University
E-mail: j.waldfogel@columbia.edu

Christopher Wimer: School of Social Work, Columbia University
E-mail: cw2727@columbia.edu

Acknowledgements: A draft of this article was presented at the 2017 meeting of the American Sociological Association. We are grateful to David Brady and Jake Rosenfeld for their insights on a prior version of this article. This research is supported by generous funding from The JPB Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

  • Citation: Laird, Jennifer, Zachary Parolin, Jane Waldfogel, and Christopher Wimer. 2018. “Poor State, Rich State: Understanding the Variability of Poverty Rates across U.S. States.” Sociological Science 5: 628-652.
  • Received: June 17, 2018
  • Accepted: August 21, 2018
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
  • DOI: 10.15195/v5.a26


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Like Bees to a Flower: Attractiveness, Risk, and Collective Sexual Life in an AIDS Epidemic

Margaret Frye, Nina Gheihman

Sociological Science, September 26, 2018
10.15195/v5.a25


We examine how men’s shared understandings of women’s physical attractiveness are influenced by concerns about risk in the context of a generalized AIDS epidemic. Using 180 conversational journals—descriptions of informal conversations about sex occurring in Malawi between 1999 and 2011—we show that men deploy discourses of risk to question and undermine the status advantages enjoyed by attractive women. Men simultaneously portray attractive women as irresistibly appealing and as destructive to men. Men engage in two types of collective responses: First, men work to discipline themselves and each other, reframing attractiveness as illusory and unworthy of pursuit; and second, men endeavor to discipline attractive women themselves, portraying them as evil temptresses that must be suppressed and reasserting their masculine dominance through harassment and violence. These findings reveal how men’s classifications of women as sexual objects operate as forms of symbolic violence, legitimating and naturalizing their gendered domination over women.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Margaret Frye: Department of Sociology, University of Michigan
E-mail: mtfrye@umich.edu

Nina Gheihman: Department of Sociology, Harvard University
E-mail: nina.gheihman@fas.harvard.edu

Acknowledgements: We are grateful to Asad L. Asad, Bart Bonikowski, Larissa Buchholz, Caitlin Daniels, Paul DiMaggio, Mitchell Dunier, Pablo Gastón, Michele Lamont, YaWen Lei, Omar Lizardo, Terence McDonnell, Orlando Patterson, Ann Swidler, Lorne Tepperman, and Jocelyn Viterna for their feedback and suggestions for revision. Previous versions of this were presented at Notre Dame’s Sociology Departmental Colloquium and African Studies Workshop, Princeton University’s Notestein Seminar Series (through the Office of Population Research), Harvard University’s Culture and Social Analysis Workshop, the Sociology of Development Conference at Brown University, and the Eastern Sociological Society Annual Meeting.

  • Citation: Frye, Margaret, and Nina Gheihman. 2018. “Like Bees to a Flower: Attractiveness, Risk, and Collective Sexual Life in an AIDS Epidemic.” Sociological Science 5: 596-627.
  • Received: July 23, 2018
  • Accepted: August 21, 2018
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v5.a25


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The Labor Market Value of Taste: An Experimental Study of Class Bias in U.S. Employment

Kyla Thomas

Sociological Science, September 12, 2018
10.15195/v5.a24


This article investigates cultural forms of class bias in the middle-income U.S. labor market. Results from an audit study of employment discrimination in four U.S. cities reveal that cultural signals of class, when included in résumés, have a systematic effect on the callback rates of women applying to customer-facing jobs. For these women, displays of highbrow taste—the cultural signals of a higher-class background—generate significantly higher rates of employer callback than displays of lowbrow taste—the cultural signals of a lower-class background. Meanwhile, cultural signals of class have no systematic effect on the callback rates of male and/or non–customer-facing job applicants. Results from a survey-experimental study of 1,428 U.S. hiring managers suggest that these differing patterns of employer callback may be explained by the positive effect of higher-class cultural signals on perceptions of polish and competence and their negative effect on perceptions of warmth.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Kyla Thomas: Center for Economic and Social Research, University of Southern California
E-mail: kylathom@usc.edu

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Paul DiMaggio for his intellectual guidance and support as well as Viviana Zelizer, Devah Pager, Susan Fiske, David Pedulla, Patrick Ishizuka, René Flores, and participants of the University of Michigan’s Inequality and Family Working Group for their valuable insights and feedback. This research was supported by the Fahs-Beck Fund for Research and Experimentation, Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Social Organization, and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship.

  • Citation: Thomas, Kyla. 2018. “The Labor Market Value of Taste: An Experimental Study of Class Bias in U.S. Employment.” Sociological Science 5: 562-595.
  • Received: November 17, 2017
  • Accepted: July 15, 2018
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
  • DOI: 10.15195/v5.a24


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Unions and Nonunion Pay in the United States, 1977-2015

Patrick Denice, Jake Rosenfeld

Sociological Science, August 15, 2018
10.15195/v5.a23


We provide the most extensive investigation into the connection between union power and nonunion worker pay to date. Leveraging nearly four decades of Current Population Survey (CPS) data on millions of U.S. workers, we test whether private sector union density, measured at the occupation and occupation region levels, helps raise average wages among unorganized private sector workers. We find stable and substantively large positive effects of private sector union strength on nonunion private sector workers’ wages, especially for men. These results are robust to the inclusion of controls for the risk of automation, offshoring, the related rising demand for skill, overall employment levels, industry, and the strength of public sector unions. Disaggregating the results by occupation reveals positive and substantively large union spillover effects across a range of occupations, including those not transformed by automation, offshoring, or rising skill demands. These disaggregated results also indicate that occupational segregation limits the positive spillover effects from unions to nonunion women workers: in highly organized occupations, nonunion women benefit, but there are comparatively few women in these segments of the labor market.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Patrick Denice: Department of Sociology, The University of Western Ontario
E-mail: pdenice@uwo.ca

Jake Rosenfeld: Department of Sociology, Washington University in St. Louis
E-mail: jrosenfeld@wustl.edu

Acknowledgements: Partial support for this research came from a Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development research infrastructure grant (P2C HD042828) to the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington.

  • Citation: Denice, Patrick, and Jake Rosenfeld. 2018. “Unions and Nonunion Pay in the United States, 1977–2015.” Sociological Science 5: 541-561.
  • Received: June 12, 2018
  • Accepted: July 10, 2018
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
  • DOI: 10.15195/v5.a23


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Schools as Moderators of Genetic Associations with Life Course Attainments: Evidence from the WLS and Add Health

Sam Trejo, Daniel W Belsky, Jason D. Boardman, Jeremy Freese, Kathleen Mullan Harris, Pam Herd, Kamil Sicinski, Benjamin W. Domingue

Sociological Science, August 2, 2018
10.15195/v5.a22


Genetic variants identified in genome-wide association studies of educational attainment have been linked with a range of positive life course development outcomes. However, it remains unclear whether school environments may moderate these genetic associations. We analyze data from two biosocial surveys that contain both genetic data and follow students from secondary school through mid- to late life. We test if the magnitudes of the associations with educational and occupational attainments varied across the secondary schools that participants attended or with characteristics of those schools. Although we find little evidence that genetic associations with educational and occupational attainment varied across schools or with school characteristics, genetic associations with any postsecondary education and college completion were moderated by school-level socioeconomic status. Along similar lines, we observe substantial between-school variation in the average level of educational attainment students achieved for a fixed genotype. These findings emphasize the importance of social context in the interpretation of genetic associations. Specifically, our results suggest that though existing measures of individual genetic endowment have a linear relationship with years of schooling that is relatively consistent across school environments, school context is crucial in connecting an individual’s genotype to his or her likelihood of crossing meaningful educational thresholds.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Sam Trejo: Graduate School of Education, Stanford University
E-mail: samtrejo@stanford.edu.

Daniel W. Belsky: Duke University School of Medicine and Social Science Research Institute
E-mail: dbelsky@duke.edu

Jason D. Boardman: Institute of Behavioral Science and Sociology Department, University of Colorado Boulder
E-mail: boardman@colorado.edu

Jeremy Freese: Department of Sociology, Stanford University
E-mail: jfreese@stanford.edu

Kathleen Mullan Harris: Department of Sociology and Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
E-mail: kathie_harris@unc.edu

Pam Herd: Department of Sociology and La Folette School of Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin–Madison
E-mail: pherd@lafollette.wisc.edu

Kamil Sicinski: Center for Demography of Health and Aging, University of Wisconsin–Madison.
E-mail: ksicinsk@ssc.wisc.edu

Benjamin W. Domingue: Graduate School of Education, Stanford University
E-mail: bdomingue@stanford.edu

Acknowledgements: This work has been supported (in part) by award 96-17-04 from the Russell Sage Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under grant DGE-1656518 (Trejo), the Institute of Education Sciences under grant R305B140009 (Trejo), and a Jacobs Foundation Early Career Research Fellowship (Belsky). This research uses Add Health GWAS data funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant R01 HD073342 to Kathleen Mullan Harris and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and National Institutes of Health grant R01 HD060726 to Harris, Boardman, and McQueen. Add Health is a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; it is funded by grant P01 HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study is directed by Pamela Herd, and the work conducted herein was supported by the National Institute on Aging (R01 AG041868-01A1 and P30 AG017266). This research benefitted from GWAS results made available by the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium. Any opinions expressed are those of the author(s) alone and should not be construed as representing the opinions of each foundation.

  • Citation: Trejo, Sam, Daniel W. Belsky, Jason D. Boardman, Jeremy Freese, Kathleen Mullan Harris, Pam Herd, Kamil Sicinski, and Benjamin W. Domingue. 2018. “Schools as Moderators of Genetic Associations with Life Course Attainments: Evidence from the WLS and Add Health.” Sociological Science 5: 513-540.
  • Received: March 20, 2018
  • Accepted: April 16, 2018
  • Editors: Kim Weeden
  • DOI: 10.15195/v5.a22


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