Tag Archives | Welfare States

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In this rejoinder to Kristian Bernt Karlson (KBK), we maintain that there are substantial differences in intergenerational educational mobility between Denmark and the United States. In fact, when we include additional parental information from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) for the United States, as suggested by KBK, the gap between Denmark and the United States increases. To confirm our findings, we show that the same conclusion about markedly higher educational mobility in Denmark holds when data from the General Social Survey are substituted for the NLSY97.

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

Stefan B. Andrade: The Danish National Centre for Social Science Research
E-mail: sba@vive.dk

Jens-Peter Thomsen: The Danish National Centre for Social Science Research
E-mail: jpt@vive.dk

Citation: Andrade, Stefan B., and Jens-Peter Thomsen. 2021. “Yes, Denmark Is a More Educationally Mobile Society than the United States: Rejoinder to Kristian Karlson.” Sociological Science 8: 359-370.
Received: September 19, 2021
Accepted: September 21, 2021
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Filiz Garip
DOI: 10.15195/v8.a18

Is Denmark a Much More Educationally Mobile Society than the United States? Comment on Andrade and Thomsen, "Intergenerational Educational Mobility in Denmark and the United States" (2018)

By Parker Webservices on November 17, 2021 in Articles

Kristian Bernt Karlson

Sociological Science November 17, 2021
10.15195/v8.a17

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I evaluate Andrade and Thomsen (A&T)’s (2018) study, which concludes that Denmark is significantly more educationally mobile than the United States. I make three observations. First, A&T overstate the difference in educational mobility between Denmark and the United States. Both in international comparison and compared with differences in intergenerational income mobility, A&T’s reported country differences in educational mobility are negligible. For example, whereas income mobility estimates reported in the literature differ by 300 to 600 percent between the two countries, the corresponding educational mobility estimates that A&T report differ by 10 to 20 percent. Second, I provide evidence suggesting that A&T’s use of crude categorical education measures leads them to overstate these negligible differences. Third, A&T’s empirical analyses of the U.S. data contain several statistical and data-related flaws, some so severe that they potentially undermine the credibility of their analyses. In sum, A&T’s results are perfectly consistent with the existence of a mobility paradox very similar to what Sweden–United States comparisons show: although Denmark and the United States are dissimilar with respect to income mobility, they are similar with respect to educational mobility. Understanding the nature of this paradox should be a key concern for future mobility research.

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

Kristian Bernt Karlson: Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen
E-mail: kbk@soc.ku.dk

Citation: Karlson, Kristian Bernt. 2021. “Is Denmark a Much More Educationally Mobile Society than the United States? Comment on Andrade and Thomsen, ‘Intergenerational Educational Mobility in Denmark and the United States’ (2018).” Sociological Science 8: 346-358.
Received: June 11, 2021
Accepted: July 11, 2021
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Filiz Garip
DOI: 10.15195/v8.a17

American Exceptionalism Revisited: Tax Relief, Poverty Reduction, and the Politics of Child Tax Credits

By Parker Webservices on July 8, 2016 in Articles

Joshua T. McCabe, Elizabeth Popp Berman

Sociological Science, July 8, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a24

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In the 1990s, several liberal welfare regimes (LWRs) introduced child tax credits (CTCs) aimed at reducing child poverty. While in other countries these tax credits were refundable, the United States alone introduced a nonrefundable CTC. As a result, the United States was the only country in which poor and working-class families were paradoxically excluded from these new benefits. A comparative analysis of Canada and the United States shows that American exceptionalism resulted from the cultural legacy of distinct public policies. We argue that policy changes in the 1940s institutionalized different “logics of appropriateness” that later constrained policymakers in the 1990s. Specifically, the introduction of family allowances in Canada and other LWR countries naturalized a logic of income supplementation in which families could legitimately receive cash benefits without the stigma of “welfare.” Lacking this policy legacy, American attempts to introduce a refundable CTC were quickly derailed by policymakers who saw it as equivalent to welfare. Instead, they introduced a narrow, nonrefundable CTC under the alternative logic of “tax relief,” even though this meant excluding the lowest-income families. The cultural legacy of past policies can explain American exceptionalism not only with regard to CTCs but to other social policies as well.

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

Joshua T.McCabe: The Freedom Project, Wellesley College
Email: jmccabe@wellesley.edu

Elizabeth Popp Berman: Department of Sociology, University at Albany, SUNY
Email: epberman@albany.edu

Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Nadya Hajj, Sarah Quinn, and audiences at the University of Toronto and Social Science History Association for comments on various versions of this article.

Citation: McCabe, Joshua T., and Elizabeth Popp Berman. 2016. “American Exceptionalism Revisited: Tax Relief, Poverty Reduction, and the Politics of Child Tax Credits.” Sociological Science 3: 540-567.
Received: March 16, 2016
Accepted: March 27, 2016
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
DOI: 10.15195/v3.a24

The Missing Main Effect of Welfare State Regimes: A Replication of ‘Social Policy Responsiveness in Developed Democracies’ by Brooks and Manza

By Jesper Sorensen on August 17, 2015 in Articles

Nate Breznau

Sociological Science, August 17, 2015
DOI 10.15195/v2.a20

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This article reports the results of a replication of Brooks and Manza’s “Social Policy Responsiveness in Developed Democracies” published in 2006 in the American Sociological Review. The article finds that Brooks and Manza utilized an interaction term but excluded the main effect of one of the interacted variables. This model specification has specific implications: statistically, that the omitted main effect variable has no correlation with the residual error term from their regression; theoretically speaking, this means that all unobserved historical, cultural, and other characteristics that distinguish liberal democratic welfare regimes from others can be accounted for with a handful of quantitative measures. Using replicated data, this article finds that the Brooks and Manza models fail these assumptions. A sensitivity analysis using more than 800 regressions with different configurations of variables confirms this. In 99.5 percent of the cases, addition of the main effect removes Brooks and Manza’s empirical findings completely. A theoretical discussion illuminates why these findings are not surprising. This article provides a reminder that models and theories are coterminous, each implied by the other.

Nate Breznau: Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences, University of Bremen, Germany. Email: breznau.nate@gmail.com

Acknowledgements: This research took place during my doctoral studies at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences at the University of Bremen. I thank Olaf Groh-Samberg, Steffen Mau, Jonathan Kelley, Judith Offerhaus, Nadine Schöneck- Voß, M.D.R. Evans, Philip Lersch, Olli Kangas, and Timm Fulge for their helpful comments.

GitHub replication materials: https://github.com/nbreznau/Replication-Brooks-Manza

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Citation: Breznau, Nate. 2015. “The Missing Main Effect of Welfare State Regimes: A Replication of ’Social Policy Responsiveness in Developed Democracies’ by Brooks and Manza.” Sociological Science 2: 420-441.
Received: March 20, 2015.
Accepted: March 24, 2015.
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
DOI: 10.15195/v2.a20

Disability and the Worlds of Welfare Capitalism

By Jesper Sorensen on January 12, 2015 in Articles

Rourke O’Brien

Sociological Science, January 12, 2015
DOI 10.15195/v2.a1

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A higher proportion of working- age persons receive disability assistance in the Nordic countries and the Netherlands than in other European countries. Whereas current research emphasizes the connection between disability assistance and rates of labor force exit, to date there has been no exploration of how welfare state context influences individual self-reported disability. Using nationally representative data from 15 countries (n = 88, 478), I find that residents of generous welfare states are significantly more likely to report a disability net of self-reported health, sociodemographic, and labor force characteristics and, notably, that this association extends to younger and more educated workers. I argue that welfare state context may directly shape what it means to be disabled, which may have consequences for evaluations of welfare state performance and social exclusion.

Erratum: Versions downloaded prior to January 30th, 2015 omitted Figure 3. As a result, those versions also have incorrect pagination. Please use the current version.

Rourke O’Brien: Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. Harvard University E-mail: robrien@hsph.harvard.edu