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Stylized Facts and Experimentation

By on October 12, 2016 in Articles

Charles Crabtree, Christopher J. Fariss

Sociological Science, October 12, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a39

Abstract
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In this comment, we clarify and extend Hirschman’s (2016) discussion of “stylized facts.” Our focus is on the relationship between stylized facts and experimentation. Given the continued increase in experimentation across the social sciences, we think that it is important to consider the exact role that experiments play in the production and testing of stylized facts. We make three related contributions here. First, we describe how experiments can both provide new evidence to support existing stylized facts as well as produce new stylized facts. Second, we argue that the stylized facts produced through experimentation differ from other stylized facts. Third, we extend Hirschman’s (2016) definition of “stylized facts” so that it distinguishes between those that describe correlation relationships and those that describe causal relationships.

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Charles Crabtree: Department of Political Science, University of Michigan
Email: ccrabtr@umich.edu

Christopher J. Fariss: Department of Political Science, University of Michigan
Email: cjf0006@gmail.com

Acknowledgements: We thank Volha Chykina and Rose McDermott for their helpful comments.

  • Citation: Crabtree, Charles, and Christopher J. Fariss. 2016. “Stylized Facts and Experimentation.” Sociological Science 3: 910-914.
  • Received: August 12, 2016
  • Accepted: August 28, 2016
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
  • DOI: 10.15195/v3.a39


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Predicting Altruistic Behavior and Assessing Homophily: Evidence from the Sisterhood

By on October 3, 2016 in Articles

Michael J. Vernarelli

Sociological Science, October 3, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a38

Abstract

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The persistence of altruism throughout the evolutionary process has been explained by some on the basis of assortation, which requires the ability to detect dispositional altruism in others and voluntary interaction, resulting in altruism homophily. Numerous studies have identified the ability to detect dispositional altruism in strangers, but few have investigated this ability and altruism homophily in social networks. The purpose of this study is to provide additional evidence with regard to the ability to detect dispositional altruism among individuals who have repeated interactions in a collegiate social organization and the extent of altruism homophily. The results indicate that individuals possess an ability to predict dispositional altruism as measured by behavior in the dictator game and that this ability is a function of social closeness. However, the study does not support the hypothesis of an assortation process that results in altruism homophily.

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Michael J. Vernarelli: Department of Economics, Rochester Institute of Technology
Email: mjvgss@rit.edu

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Brent Simpson, Jeffrey Wagner, Audrey Smerbeck, John Edlund, and Gregory DeAngelo for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of the paper. Jesper Sørensen made suggestions that were incorporated in the final version of the manuscript. Yosef Boutakov and Matthew Kehoe assisted with data collection. Jonathan Stone assisted with data collection in the pilot study.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Vernarelli, Michael J. 2016. “Predicting Altruistic Behavior and Assessing Homophily: Evidence from the Sisterhood.” Sociological Science 3: 889-909.
  • Received: May 25, 2016
  • Accepted: June 30, 2016
  • Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v3.a38


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

By on September 26, 2016 in Articles

Kinga Makovi, Ryan Hagen, Peter Bearman

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supplemental Material

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


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

By on September 19, 2016 in Articles

Devah Pager

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

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

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

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

Supplemental Material

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


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Modernization and Lynching in the New South

By on September 15, 2016 in Articles

Mattias Smångs

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

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

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

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

Supplemental Material

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


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

By on September 12, 2016 in Articles

Michelle Maroto

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

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

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

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

Supplemental Material

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


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Measuring Paradigmaticness of Disciplines Using Text

By on August 31, 2016 in Articles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Co-first authors and corresponding authors

Supplemental Material

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


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Opportunity without Equity: Educational Inequality and Constitutional Protections in Egypt

By on August 24, 2016 in Articles

Michelle Jackson, Elizabeth Buckner

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

Abstract
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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.

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

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

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

Supplemental Material

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


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Income and Trustworthiness

By on August 17, 2016 in Articles

John Ermisch, Diego Gambetta

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

Abstract
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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.

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

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

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

Supplemental Material

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


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