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Wide Social Influence and the Emergence of the Unexpected: An Empirical Test Using Spotify Data

By on October 23, 2025 in Articles

Martin Arvidsson, Peter Hedström, Marc Keuschnigg

Sociological Science October 23, 2025
10.15195/v12.a29

Abstract

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Social-influence processes not only affect the rate at which behaviors spread but can also decouple adoption behavior from individual preferences, and thereby bring about unexpected collective outcomes that cannot be predicted on the basis of the initial likes and dislikes of the individuals involved. However, the conditions under which social influence can lead to such decoupling are not well understood. We identify a social-influence mechanism that widens individuals’ behavioral repertoires and breaks the link between individuals’ initial preferences and the collective outcomes they jointly bring about. We test the micro-level assumptions of the mechanism in the context of cultural choices on Spotify, combining topic modeling with traditional statistical matching to cultural change. agent-based simulation estimate peer-to-peer influence effects from digital trace data. We then use agent-based simulations to examine the macro-level consequences of “wide” social influence and its importance for explaining cultural change.
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Martin Arvidsson: The Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University. E-mail: martin.arvidsson@liu.se.
Peter Hedström: The Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University. E-mail: peter.hedstrom@liu.se.
Marc Keuschnigg: The Institute for Analytical Sociology, Linköping University and Institute of Sociology, Leipzig University. E-mail: marc.keuschnigg@liu.se.

Acknowledgments: For helpful comments, we thank James Evans, Jacob Habinek, Mark Lutter, Arnout van de Rijt, and Duncan Watts. We are grateful for financial support from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (M12-0301:1) and the Swedish Research Council (2013-7681, 2018-05170, 2019-00245, and 2024-01861). This research was carried out at the Swedish Excellence Center for Computational Social Science, which is also funded by the Swedish Research Council (2022-06611). Resources provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (2024/22-1012) enabled computations.

Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: A replication package has been deposited to OSF (https://osf.io/grsyt/?view_only=133867f728644ba596eb104890cb018f ) that contains code and data required to reproduce the results presented in the article.

  • Citation: Arvidsson, Martin, Peter Hedström, Marc Keuschnigg. 2025. “Wide Social Influence and the Emergence of the Unexpected: An Empirical Test Using Spotify Data.” Sociological Science 12: 715-742.
  • Received: December 16, 2024
  • Accepted: September 10, 2025
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Peter Bearman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v12.a29

0

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

0

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

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

0

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

0

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.
Creative Commons LicenseThis 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).

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

0

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.
Creative Commons LicenseThis 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

0

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.
Creative Commons LicenseThis 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

0

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

0

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

By on June 30, 2025 in Articles

Kristinn Már Ársælsson, John Gastil

Sociological Science June 30, 2025
10.15195/v12.a17

Abstract

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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.
Creative Commons LicenseThis 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”).

Supplemental Materials

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

0

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

By on June 23, 2025 in Articles

Wei-hsin Yu, Kuo-Hsien Su

Sociological Science June 23, 2025
10.15195/v12.a16

Abstract

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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.
Creative Commons LicenseThis 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.

Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: The authors received special permission to use the confidential data of applications of National Taiwan University (NTU) for this publication and are prohibited from sharing the data. Access to the NTU application data should be requested directly from the Office of Admission under NTU’s Office of Academic Affairs (https://www.aca.ntu.edu.tw/w/acaEN/Contact). However, all of the code files and ancillary data generated from publicly available sources are stored in Dataverse and can be obtained through https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/KUVUS8.

  • Citation: Yu, Wei-hsin, Kuo-Hsien Su. 2025. “Evaluation Criteria and Women’s Attainment of Elite STEM Education: Evidence from College Admission Records” Sociological Science 12:357-387.
  • Received: February 24, 2025
  • Accepted: May 1, 2025
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Elizabeth Bruch
  • DOI: 10.15195/v12.a16

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Predictive Algorithms and Perceptions of Fairness: Parent Attitudes Toward Algorithmic Resource Allocation in K-12 Education

By on May 16, 2025 in Articles

Rebecca A. Johnson, Simone Zhang

Sociological Science May 16, 2025
10.15195/v12.a15

Abstract

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As institutions increasingly use predictive algorithms to allocate scarce resources, scholars have warned that these algorithms may legitimize inequality. Although research has examined how elite discourses position algorithms as fair, we know less about how the public perceives them compared to traditional allocation methods. We implement a vignette-based survey experiment to measure perceptions of algorithmic allocation relative to common alternatives: administrative rules, lotteries, petitions from potential beneficiaries, and professional judgment. Focusing on the case of schools allocating scarce tutoring resources, our nationally representative survey of U.S. parents finds that parents view algorithms as fairer than traditional alternatives, especially lotteries. However, significant divides emerge along socioeconomic and political lines—lower socioeconomic status (SES) and conservative parents favor the personal knowledge held by counselors and parents, whereas higher SES and liberal parents prefer the impersonal logic of algorithms. We also find that, after reading about algorithmic bias, parental opposition to algorithms is strongest among those who are most directly disadvantaged. Overall, our findings map cleavages in attitudes that may influence the adoption and political sustainability of algorithmic allocation methods.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Rebecca A. Johnson: Equal first authorship. McCourt School of Public Policy (affiliate:Department of Sociology), Georgetown University
E-mail: rj545@georgetown.edu

Simone Zhang: Equal first authorship. Department of Sociology, New York University
E-mail: simone.zhang@nyu.edu

Acknowledgments: Thanks to the following students for excellent research assistance—Collin Crane, Liz Moison, MorganWelch, and Rosy Zhong—and to Leah Jones, Katherine Christie, and Tyler Simko for related collaborations/discussions. We are also grateful for feedback from the following audiences: Sociology of Education Association annual meeting; Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy seminar series; Georgetown Sociology colloquium; the Notre Dame Center for Research on Educational Opportunity; APPAM and Sean Reardon as a discussant; Lydia Liu’s AI, Society, and Education Seminar at Princeton University; and James Druckman and anonymous reviewers via the TESS process. This research received funding from the Dartmouth Neukom Institute for Computational Science, the NSF TESS Young Investigators Special Competition (NSF Grant 0818839; Jeremy Freese and James Druckman, Principal Investigators), and the Spencer/NAEd Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: The data underlying this article are available as part of our replication materials available at this link: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/EUJ1YZ. The data for the main analyses is the TESS .tab format file at this link: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/file.xhtml?fileId=10796997&version=1.0

  • Citation: Johnson, A. Rebecca, Simone Zhang. 2025. “Predictive Algorithms and Perceptions of Fairness: Parent Attitudes Toward Algorithmic Resource Allocation in K-12 Education” Sociological Science 12: 322-356.
  • Received: November 12, 2024
  • Accepted: January 24, 2025
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Filiz Garip
  • DOI: 10.15195/v12.a15

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Inequality and Social Ties: Evidence from 15 U.S. Data Sets

By on May 12, 2025 in Articles

Cristobal Young, Benjamin Cornwell, Barum Park, Nan Feng

Sociological Science May 12, 2025
10.15195/v12.a14

Abstract

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What is the relationship between inequality and social ties? Do personal networks, group memberships, and connections to social resources help level the playing field, or do they reinforce economic disparities? We examine two core empirical issues: the degree of inequality in social ties and their consolidation with income. Using 142,000 person-wave observations from 15 high-quality U.S. data sets, we measure the quantity and quality of social ties and examine their distribution. Our findings show that (1) the Gini coefficient for social ties often exceeds that of income and (2) social ties are concentrated among those with the highest incomes. We introduce an overall inequality–consolidation curve, demonstrating that social ties generally reinforce economic inequality. However, we identify one key exception: there is no class gradient in the use of social ties for job search. These findings contribute to debates about the role of social ties in perpetuating or mitigating inequality.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Cristobal Young: Department of Sociology, Cornell University
E-mail: cristobal.young@cornell.edu

Benjamin Cornwell: Department of Sociology, Cornell University
E-mail: btc49@cornell.edu

Barum Park: Department of Sociology, Cornell University
E-mail: b.park@cornell.edu

Nan Feng: Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University
E-mail: nf263@cornell.edu

Acknowledgments: We received valuable comments and suggestions from Kendra Bischoff, Paul DiMaggio, Filiz Garip, Lynn Johnson, Sheela Kennedy, Edward O. Laumann, Vida Maralani, Kelly Musick, Anthony Paik, Landon Schnabel, Kim Weeden, Patricia Young, Erin York Cornwell, as well as participants at seminars at Cornell Sociology, the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, the Sociological Science Conference, and the Future of the Social Sciences Conference. Tianyao Qu, Zhonghao Wang, and Haowen Zheng provided exceptional research assistance. We thank the Cornell Center for Social Sciences for providing computing resources and the Cornell Center of the Study of Inequality for generous funding.

Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: All code, and all data that can be publicly shared, is available at OSF (https://osf.io/ky4ws/). The package also includes information about requesting access to confidential data sets, such as the Addhealth restricted-use data.

  • Citation: Young, Cristobal, Benjamin Cornwell, Barum Park, Nan Feng. 2025. “Inequality and Social Ties: Evidence from 15 U.S. Data sets” Sociological Science 12: 294-321.
  • Received: September 5, 2024
  • Accepted: March 17, 2025
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Filiz Garip
  • DOI: 10.15195/v12.a14

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Demographic Differences in Responses to a Two-Step Gender Identity Measure

By on May 6, 2025 in Articles

Christina Pao, Christopher A. Julian, D’Lane Compton, Danya Lagos, Lawrence Stacey

Sociological Science May 6, 2025
10.15195/v12.a13

Abstract

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Strategies for including noncisgender responses in demographic analyses remain subjects of ongoing debate and refinement. The Household Pulse Survey is one of the first data products by the U.S. Census Bureau to incorporate a two-step gender identity measure. This is significant because the survey, although experimental, is one of the largest federal nationally representative samples (n = 668,273) that allows for the enumeration of noncisgender people. These data enable researchers to examine how respondents’ selection of different response categories may differ across their demographic characteristics. Many studies using a two-step gender measure either exclude noncisgender respondents or aggregate them into a single analytic group, obscuring within-group heterogeneity. We find significant socioeconomic differences between cisgender and noncisgender responses, with cisgender individuals generally faring better. There is additional heterogeneity within noncisgender groups; for example, individuals who mark “transgender” are more likely to identify as non-heterosexual and never married, and those outside defined gender categories often report “don’t know” or “something else” about their sexual identity. Although differences persist between cisgender and noncisgender populations, this work emphasizes the need to also perform within-group analyses (e.g., with a two-step measure) to capture the unique and shared experiences of noncisgender populations.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Christina Pao: Department of Sociology, Princeton University
E-mail: christina.pao@princeton.edu

Christopher A. Julian: Department of Sociology, Bowling Green State University
E-mail: cjulian@bgsu.edu

D’Lane Compton: Department of Sociology, University of New Orleans
E-mail: dcompton@uno.edu

Danya Lagos: Department of Sociology, University of California Berkeley
E-mail: dlagos@berkeley.edu

Lawrence Stacey: Department of Sociology, Vanderbilt University
E-mail: lawrence.stacey@vanderbilt.edu

Acknowledgments: This publication was supported by the Princeton University Library Open Access Fund.

Reproducibility Package: Stata replication code is available on the Open Science Framework (OSF), https://osf.io/vk36p/. At the time of writing, data are publicly available via the U.S. Census Bureau website: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/household-pulse-survey/data/datasets.html. Please contact the authors if there are difficulties accessing the data.

  • Citation: Pao, Christina, Christopher A. Julian, D’Lane Compton, Danya Lagos, Lawrence Stacey. 2025. “Demographic Differences in Responses to a Two-Step Gender Identity Measure” Sociological Science 12: 277-293.
  • Received: February 12, 2025
  • Accepted: March 24, 2025
  • Editors: Arnout van de Rijt, Kristen Schilt
  • DOI: 10.15195/v12.a13

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What Are You Talking about? Discussion Frequency of Issues Captured in Common Survey Questions

By on May 2, 2025 in Articles

Turgut Keskintürk, Kevin Kiley, Stephen Vaisey

Sociological Science May 2, 2025
10.15195/v12.a12

Abstract

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Social science surveys regularly ask respondents to generate opinions or positions on issues deemed to be of political and social importance, such as confidence in government officials or federal spending priorities. Many theories assume that interpersonal deliberation is a primary mechanism through which people develop positions on such issues, but it is unclear how often the issues captured by such questions become a topic of conversation. Using an original survey of 2,117 American adults, we quantify how often people report discussing the issues tapped by 88 questions in the General Social Survey’s core questionnaire, as well as how often respondents say they individually reflect on these issues, how important they believe them to be, and how sensitive they believe it would be to discuss those issues. We find that the majority of respondents report discussing the majority of issues fewer than once or twice a year, with the modal response that respondents have never discussed an issue in the past year. At the same time, some topics—such as religious beliefs and generic appraisals of political leaders—come up quite frequently, and a small number of respondents report frequently discussing most items. We consider the implications of these findings for theories of belief formation.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Turgut Keskintürk: Contributed equally. Department of Sociology, Duke University
E-mail: turgut.keskinturk@duke.edu

Kevin Kiley: Contributed equally. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, North Carolina State University
E-mail: kkiley@ncsu.edu

Stephen Vaisey: Department of Sociology and Political Science, Duke University
E-mail: stephen.vaisey@duke.edu

Supplemental Materials

Reproducibility Package: The data and code to reproduce the full set of analyses are provided at https://osf.io/u8b7v.

  • Citation: Keskintürk, Turgut, Kevin Kiley, Stephen Vaisey. 2025. “What Are You Talking about? Discussion Frequency of Issues Captured in Common Survey Questions” Sociological Science 12: 256-276.
  • Received: January 2, 2025
  • Accepted: March 26, 2025
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Peter Bearman
  • DOI: 10.15195/v12.a12

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