Essays
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Alternative Polities - McIntosh, Roderick J.
The prehistoric landscape has exploded with examples, just recently recognized, of alternative polities—heterogeneous communities of interaction, of variable territorial and demographic extent, in which the constituent individuals participate in unifying networks of economic or political obligations or share commonalities of beliefs. Archaeologists are no longer constrained to look for the emergence of complex society in a framework of sequential, evolutionary stages the essential elements of which were defined ethnographically (neo‐evolutionism). We can now begin to appreciate the enormous variability in the courses taken, and in the circumstances leading to more and more people living together and interacting in ever more complex ways. -
Architecture of Markets - Fligstein, Neil
Markets are socially constructed arenas where repeated exchanges occur between buyers and sellers under a set of formal and informal rules governing relations among competitors, suppliers, and customers. These arenas operate according to local understandings and rules that guide interaction, facilitate trade, define what products are produced, indeed constitute the products themselves, and provide stability for buyers, sellers, and producers. Marketplaces are also dependent on governments, laws, and cultural understandings supporting market activity. Our essay provides a brief exposition of this perspective. Then, it considers cutting‐edge work on three topics: (i) the formation of markets and prices, (ii) the organization of capitalism in different societies, and (iii) financialization and globalization. We suggest that in the future, path breaking research will: (i) explore the sociology of consumption, (ii) combine insights from the sociology of markets and from studies of the role of economic thought in constructing markets, and (iii) investigate national and transnational regulations. -
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion - Smith, Buster G.
Research on the topics of atheism, agnosticism, and irreligion has been limited during much of the last century. We explain the reasons for a lack of research in this field and discuss the recent interest in this topic. The most recent wave of research has been concentrated during the past decade and tends to look at the dual issues of who composes the religiously unaffiliated and why they choose this self‐identification. Recent research has begun to take a much wider and deeper view on the subject. This includes research on particular segments of the population such as atheists, as well as understanding how the religiously unaffiliated are viewed by the broader culture. We conclude by describing important directions for future research. In particular, there is a need to break out the separate forms of irreligion and use creative new methodologies to find and study this significant portion of the population. -
Capital Punishment - Lynch, Mona
This essay reviews foundational and cutting‐edge social science research on capital punishment. It first describes policy‐relevant work on the death penalty as legal punishment, and then provides a brief overview of the more recent contributions on capital punishment and social theory. The scope of relevant scholarship is limited to more empirically based social science scholarship on the American death penalty. Specifically, relative to the longstanding, foundational research on capital punishment, it addresses in order, the research on the deterrent effect of the death penalty; racial inequality in the administration of capital punishment capital case processing and jury decision‐making; and the role of public opinion in the death penalty. It then discusses the more recently developed body of research that addresses the culture of capital punishment; and capital punishment and state governance. Finally, it lays out several potential lines for new research, including contextualizing death penalty within a broader punishment framework. -
Causes of Fiscal Crises in State and Local Governments - Kogan, Vladimir
Financial insolvency is a rare occurrence in American state and local governments. However, when it does happen, as in the case of Detroit's historical bankruptcy filing in 2013, the consequences for vital city services, public employees, and taxpayers can be devastating. This essay reviews existing and emerging research on the causes of government fiscal crises, paying particular attention to how social, economic, and legal constraints interact with the electoral incentives faced by public officials to create financial distress. It concludes by identifying a number of open questions that should guide future research, to help identify potential institutional and political reforms that can help avert future problems before they occur. -
Changing Family Patterns - Gerson, Kathleen
All societies have families, but their form varies greatly across time and space. The history of the family is thus one of changing family forms, which result from the interplay of shifting social and economic conditions, diverse and contested ideals, and the attempts of ordinary people to build their lives amid the constraints of their particular time and place. Because the family is a site of our most intimate experiences, the study of families tends to prompt heated theoretical and empirical debate. From the early anthropological charting of kinship systems to current analyses of proliferating family forms, studying the family has been a contested terrain. If the 1950s produced a short‐lived consensus on the “ideal nuclear family,” the current context of rapid family change poses a series of puzzles and paradoxes. What is a family, and why has its definition become so controversial? What are the emerging contours of adult commitment, and what is the future of marriage? How is family life linked to institutions outside the home, and how are the boundaries between public and private spheres blurring? What role does family life play in the structuring of social inequality? In addition, what are the prospects for creating social policies that meet the needs of diverse family forms? These questions draw our attention to the dislocations and contradictions of family change, but they also point to new opportunities to build more just and humane family forms. The challenge will be to find common ground for addressing the needs of diverse families and realigning both public and private institutions to better fit the circumstances of family life in the twenty‐first century. -
Complex Religion: Toward a Better Understanding of the Ways in which Religion Intersects with Inequality - Wilde, Melissa J.
Sociologists have long known that religion is deeply interconnected with race, class, and ethnicity in the United States. However, modern sociologists typically study religion as if it is independent from other social structures. Profound class differences remain between American religious groups. Jews, Mainline Protestants and new immigrant groups such as Hindus are at the top of the socioeconomic ladder. Conservative Protestants, both Black and White remain at the bottom. We therefore argue that religion is not independent of class and race and should almost always be examined in interaction with these and other social structures. We call this, theoretical approach “complex religion.” -
Constitutionalism - Whittington, Keith E.
Constitutionalism is the practice of regulating politics with a constitution. The means by which constitutions attempt to regulate politics are various, ranging from the design of political structures to the judicial enforcement of constitutional law. These constitutional features have given rise to robust literatures approaching the subject from both normative and empirical perspectives. Normative debates have focused on the purpose, content, methods, and authority of constitutionalism. Empirical investigations have taken into account both the development of particular constitutional institutions and practices within particular polities and broader questions of constitutional design -
Corruption and Electoral Accountability: Avenues for Future Research - De Vries, Catherine E.
The vast majority of people across the globe lives in countries characterized by high levels of corruption, commonly defined as the public misuse of private gains. Although the exact costs of corruption are difficult to estimate, research suggests that corruption is bad for economic and social development. Not only has corruption been shown to have a detrimental effect on a country's economy, the ability to generate tax revenue and social equality, the political effects of corruption are also considerable. Owing to its association with weak state capacity, corruption may damage the ability of governments to craft and implement policies in areas in which continued intervention and investment is needed and their capacity to respond quickly and effectively to sudden shocks. Owing to these undesirable outcomes, elections are supposed to curb corruption because voters will throw the rascals out. Recent research, however, suggests that more often than not corruption goes unpunished at the ballot box. This essay sets out possible research avenues to find out why this is the case. -
Cultural Heritage, Patrimony, and Repatriation - Handler, Richard
In contemporary usage, the terms cultural heritage and cultural patrimony are synonyms. Both are metaphors that depict the idea that the culture (material and immaterial) of a specific social group is its property, owned collectively and passed on from one generation to the next. In the past 50 years, these terms have come to constitute a discursive space in which academic disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, art history, and philosophy have interacted with professional disciplines such as law, museology, and architecture; and these university‐based fields have had to interface with a much broader public, newly interested in what has come to be called the politics of culture. Repatriation is a term that signifies the return of cultural artifacts, from metropolitan institutions that had “collected” them to local communities that can claim to have created them. Repatriation has gained momentum since the Second World War, as both decolonization and various international conventions have provided a platform for once colonized peoples to claim items of their cultural heritage that had been taken from them. Repatriation is a directional process, from center to periphery. It includes both the return of artifacts and a ceding of control over the interpretation of such artifacts. -
Curriculum as a Site of Political and Cultural Conflict - Rojas, Fabio
Schools are both political and academic institutions. This essay explains the different ways that schools generate conflict because people dispute the content of the school curriculum. This essay begins by noting that schools require the approval of political elites and the public. Without such support, schools can't operate. Also, schools lend legitimacy to particular ideas, which means that people will fight over the content of classroom instruction. The essay then discusses how social movements target schools and the factors contribute to successful curricular challenges in schools. -
Deliberative Democracy - Fishkin, James
At the center of the idea, deliberative democracy is that the “will of the people” should be based on the consideration of competing arguments about their merits of each policy choice. Despite this, partisanship and electoral campaigns are designed to win elections, not promote citizen deliberation. The focus of most modern research on deliberation by ordinary citizens rather than by representatives or office holders raises interesting questions about who deliberates, what is the policy context, what rationale is used, and what criteria should evaluate deliberative processes. Access to accurate information, relevant arguments, and a representative sample are necessary for good conditions. Some criteria for evaluation include demographic and attitudinal representativeness, sample size, the opportunity to engage in arguments for and against proposals, and the elimination of distortion (e.g., misleading information). -
Democracy that Excludes: Persistent Inequalities and the Future of Democratic Governance - Kelly, Nathan J.
Democracy is often reduced to the presence of a particular set of institutional rules and practices. We argue that democracy also implies a promise of more just outcomes, and define systems that are institutionally democratic but fail to fully incorporate all citizens as exclusionary democracies. We argue here that the practice of exclusionary democracy may produce broad and mostly negative implications for the future of democratic governance. In particular, we explore how variation in political and economic exclusion in institutionally democratic states may shape a variety of political attitudes and behavior, including political participation, democratic values, tolerance, and trust in government. -
Deterrence - Apel, Robert
This essay reviews the evidence on the deterrent effect of police and imprisonment. Studies of changes in police presences, whether achieved by changes in police numbers or in their strategic deployment, consistently find evidence of deterrent effects. Studies of the deterrent effect of increases in already long prison sentences find at most a modest deterrent effect. Three high priority areas for future research are identified: developing and testing an integrated model of the effects of the threat and experience of punishment, measuring perceptions of sanction regimes, developing and estimating the deterrent effect of shorter prison sentences, and identifying high deterrence policies. -
Diffusion: From Facebook to (Management) Fashion - Strang, David
Diffusion refers to the spread of ideas and behaviors across a population. The field does not cohere around a central question whose solution would clarify fundamental issues. Instead, what we see is the constant and fruitful exploration of new social worlds, and the adaptation of research methods and theoretical concepts to capture central realities of these worlds. We begin by describing two lines of diffusion research whose core assumptions and analytic strategy are diametrically opposed: network models of online behavior and translation studies of organizational fashion. We then survey contemporary trends in organizational research that broaden the scope of diffusion studies, focusing, in particular, on the study of politically contested practices that pit the interests of organizations and elites against various stakeholders such as current and prior employees, customers, and the public at large. -
Distributive Politics: Federal Outlays - Gordon, Sanford C.
We provide an interpretive review of theoretical and empirical research on the distribution of federal outlays in the United States and their political antecedents. We argue that the foundational scholarly research on the subject to date can be classified to a great extent according to the perspectives it takes respecting legislative organization, political parties, and the executive branch. After reviewing theoretical and empirical research in these areas, we discuss some cutting‐edge research in this area of research. One of the most exciting trends in the study of distributive politics is a much greater focus on issues of causal identification in empirical tests of theories concerning the allocation of federal resources. Finally, we describe five questions that we believe ought to motivate future research in this area. These questions concern the relationship between entitlement and discretionary spending; how to integrate research on distributive politics with research on political business cycles; how best to measure executive discretion in specific assistance programs; how to understand the relationship between spending in an area and support for that spending; and how to capture the mechanism relating spending and electoral benefits. -
Divorce - Härkönen, Juho
There is by now a large literature on divorce which seeks to understand the underlying reasons behind trends in divorce rates and establish the predictors of divorce as well as its consequences for adults and children. Early research examined divorce over time and across societies, and developed conceptual models to understand which factors affect partners' decisions to divorce. Recent cutting edge research has expanded on this literature and examined the multiple causes and consequences of divorce, heterogeneity in causes and effects, and the role of new demographic trends such as the increase in cohabitation. Future advances can build on (i) the use of new data, cutting edge methods, and cross‐fertilization across disciplines, (ii) continued focus on emerging demographic realities, (iii) heterogeneity of divorces and their consequences, (iv) the mechanisms and processes that predict divorce and can help in understanding its effects, and (v) focus on cross‐national differences and societal contexts. -
Does the 1 Person 1 Vote Principle Apply? - Turner, Ian R.
In this essay we address the puzzle that exists in American politics based on the tension of convergence to the electoral mean because of the MVT (mean voter theorem) and the studies showing divergence in candidate positioning. We provide a model in which voters and states are not treated equally because of vast regional differences. In contrast with the MVT, candidates who campaign in each state may converge to the national electoral mean while adopting diverging positions in different states, as they take differences in voter preferences and valences across states into account. At the state level, we show that while candidates give maximal weight in their policy position to pivotal voters, they give minimal weight to those voting for them with almost certainty; and that in their national position while candidates give maximal weight to swing states they give minimal weight to nonpivotal states. Something that remains hidden when differences across states are ruled out as they are in MVT. Then we adapt the variable choice set logit model of Gallego et al. (2013) to study the 2008 Presidential election and find that even though Obama's and McCain's position in swing states differs from the national electoral mean, their national position are close but on opposite sides of the national mean. Given the differential treatment candidates give voters and states in their national position, incorporating the Electoral College vote in the model, the “one person, one vote” principle may fail to obtain in the 2008 US Presidential election when candidates' valences and campaign spending differ across states. -
Does the Winner Take it All? Increasing Inequality in Scientific Authorship - Rauhut, Heiko
Scientific authorship has become a hot topic in the social sciences. We present three avenues addressing this topic from different perspectives to illustrate in which direction research on inequalities in the context of scientific authorship and academic publications may move. We draw on data from the Web of Science focusing on the field of sociology. We demonstrate that (i) the alphabetical order of co‐authors' names sends out an ambiguous signal about the actual contributions of each team member, (ii) attention is increasingly paid to a few contributions that are widely cited, and (iii) well‐connected authors tend to work together. In short, this essay suggests a rise in authorship inequalities regarding the attention authors and their articles receive. Sociology and related social sciences are arguably developing into academic winner‐take‐all markets. -
Domestic Political Institutions and Alliance Politics - Mattes, Michaela
Military alliances are one of the most important tools states can use to counter international threats, exert influence over other countries, and accomplish broad foreign policy goals, including peace and stability in the international system. Alliance scholarship can provide valuable insights to policy‐makers by answering questions such as which states are likely to ally, when alliances will be upheld, and whether they will be effective. Traditional alliance research focused on international considerations rather than domestic politics as drivers of alliance politics. More recently, however, scholars have shifted their attention to uncovering the ways in which domestic political institutions affect alliance behavior. The main questions underlying this research include: Are states with similar regime types, especially democracies, more likely to ally? Are democracies more reliable alliance partners? Do wartime coalitions involving democracies have a higher chance of victory? Do domestic institutional changes affect alliance maintenance? While the literature has provided conclusive answers to some of these questions, others are characterized by mixed findings. Recently published work has taken on unresolved issues and provided new and original insights. Future research should take these efforts further by unpacking the concepts of “domestic politics” and “alliance politics”. -
Domestic Politics of Trade Policy - Aklin, Michaël
Domestic politics shape international trade policy, but exactly how and why remains an open question. We explore the cutting‐edge literature that focuses on how agents' interests are formed, whose interests are organized, and how those interests interact with each other via domestic political institutions to generate both trade policy and international cooperation over trade more broadly. In turn, trade policies operate as a feedback loop. International cooperation generates information via international organizations, treaties, and more informal regimes, which affects the domestic politics conflict in substantive ways. We explore each of these topics and suggest future research paths. -
Early Childhood Education and Care Services and Child Development: Economic Perspectives for Universal Approaches - Spiess, C. Katharina
This essay analyses universal early childhood education and care (ECEC) services from an economic perspective focusing on universal ECEC approaches. First, it examines the effectiveness of ECEC expansions, reviewing research using quasi‐experimental approaches. It then discusses the possible mechanisms underlying the measured effects. These are related to both direct effects from ECEC services on children and indirect ones occurring via maternal employment and well‐being. When ECEC‐positive effects are detected, they mostly pertain to children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. This raises the question as to whether this group of children is reached by universal ECEC services. The second part of the essay focuses on this issue, describing differences in ECEC attendance by socioeconomic background, distinguishing between different age groups and different aspects of ECEC attendance. The challenges for future research are summarized at the end. -
Economic Models of Voting - Anson, Ian G.
The economic vote provides a widely available tool for gauging electoral accountability. Yet in many cases, this search for electoral accountability appears elusive. A large literature has yielded conflicting and unstable empirical results. While there appears to be an association between the economy and citizens' voting behavior, we are unsure of its foundation. Do citizens reflect on the performance of the economy when choosing between candidates in democratic elections? What determines the existence and size of the economic vote: individual attributes, the wider politico‐economic context, or messages received from trusted elites? Scholars have unearthed some answers by turning outward to consider context, theorizing the cross‐national, individual‐level, and temporal conditions under which economic voting is likely to be strongest. In addition, more recently, researchers have turned inward to reassess the mechanism that drives the link between economic performance and voting behavior. Future scholarship must continue to interrogate core theoretical questions in an effort to better understand how citizens' subjective economic evaluations are reflected in their decisions as voters. -
Economics of Early Education - Steven Barnett, W.
Economic research has established that public investments in early childhood programs providing education can yield high rates of return. A substantial portion of these returns are spillover effects that benefit society generally but not the child and family creating a classic instance of market failure. Benefits include improvements in school progress and achievement, health and health behaviors, social behavior, and employment and earnings for children and improvements in maternal employment and career paths. The weight of the evidence indicates that disadvantaged children benefit more than others. While programs can produce benefits from increased maternal employment (child care function) as well as from improved child development (education function), child development benefits look to be the larger part of the potential gain. Studies of large‐scale public policies and programs find much smaller benefits indicating that there may be substantial government failure in putting this knowledge into practice. One point that is immediately obvious is that public programs often fail to replicate the successful programs from research because government funds them inadequately. However, this is not the only problem as the costs and benefits of programs depend on the details of policy and program design and implementation. These details are not all well understood. Recent research has provided some insights, but has by no means answered all the key questions definitively. Key issues for further research include the advantages and disadvantages of means‐tested v. universal programs, and the nature and size of investments that are most productive at each age. -
Economics of Privacy and User‐Generated Content - Tucker, Catherine
The Internet has allowed an unprecedented expansion of the data firms can collect and the amount of content users can upload. Understanding the forces that shape the demand and supply of this content is critical for understanding the likely evolution of the Internet. We review foundational and cutting‐edge research on the economics of privacy and user‐generated content (UGC), and sketch out issues for future research.