We checked OSF preprint providers on Friday, December 12, 2025, for preprints that the authors had classified under the subject of "Social and Behavioral Sciences". For the period December 05 to December 11, we retrieved 69 new preprint(s).

Politics, Economics, Sociology

No classified.
Voting and Social Conformity in U.S. Presidential Elections (1920 to 2000)—A Social Entropy Analysis at the State Level
Stephen Coleman
Full text
The conformity model and its quantitative predictions The impact of social conformity on voting has been studied extensively and reported in previous research on the United States, Western and Eastern Europe, India, Japan, and Russia. (Coleman, 2004, 2007a, 2007b, 2010, and 2018; Borodin, 2005). Here I present a shortened version of the theory and then show how it applies to American presidential elections from 1920 to 2000 using state-level results.
No classified.
Social Norms, Expectations, and the Power of the Audience: An Experiment with Knowledge Asymmetries
Francesco Bogliacino, Francesco Guala
Full text
Social norms are conventions whose violation generates disapproval. The dependence of behavior on normative expectations is conventionally assessed in experiments where the key manipulation is either a change in description (framing effect) or a plausible deniability treatment. As an alternative we design an experiment that manipulates normative expectations holding the core task, instructions, and action set constant. Our design exploits the contrast between merit-based and equity-based norms. In a Dictator Game with earned endowments, participants are “judged” by an audience. We manipulate information on the source of endowment by varying whether the auditors are instructed outside or inside the main room. We predict and find that dictators’ allocations shift according to the perceived normative expectations of their audience, even in the absence of explicit norm enforcement.
No classified.
Does Parental Dissolution Lower Children’s Educational Outcomes? Exploring Selection and Causation using Adoption and Children-of-Twins Designs
Ruth Eva JĂžrgensen
Full text
Parental partnership dissolution appears to hamper educational outcomes among children, but the question of whether this association reflects a causal effect versus selection mechanisms remains contested. By triangulating two quasi-experimental approaches: Children-of-Twins design (CoT) and adoption design, this study assesses the educational penalties of parental partnership dissolution in Norway. Administrative population registers are used to identify adoptees and a matched sample of non-adopted peers. For the CoT-design, these data are linked to the Norwegian Twin Registry, which includes adult twin pairs and their offspring. Both analyses rely on child cohorts born between 1986 and 2006. The CoT-design compares educational outcomes of offspring of twins, exploiting variation in dissolution within and between twin pairs, while the adoption analysis compares the association in adoptees versus a matched sample of non-adopted peers. Two key educational outcomes are analyzed: grade point average (GPA) at the end of compulsory schooling and high school completion. Results from CoT analyses show that parental dissolution is negatively associated with both GPA and high school completion. Yet, the association attenuates once shared family background and genetic factors are accounted for. The adoption design similarly shows a negative association for both adoptees and non-adoptees, but the notably weaker association among adoptees indicates that genetic confounding partly underlies the observed link. Taken together, the findings suggest that parental separation exerts an adverse effect on children’s educational outcomes, while selection mechanisms also account for a non-trivial share of the association.
No classified.
The Patriarchy Index Ten Years After: The United States around 1900 and the European Comparison
Mikolaj Szoltysek, Mateusz Grzyb, Bartosz Ogorek, Siegfried Gruber, J. David Hacker
Full text
This article revisits the Patriarchy Index (PI) a decade after its introduction, extending its scope to the United States around 1900 and situating it within the broader North Atlantic demographic regime. Using harmonized census microdata from IPUMS USA, NAPP, and Mosaic, we estimate PI values for the 1880 and 1910 U.S. censuses and compare them with contemporaneous European populations. The study provides the first systematic spatial mapping of family-based patriarchy in the United States, disaggregated by race and region, and identifies clusters and anomalies through spatial autocorrelation. Results show that U.S. counties at the turn of the twentieth century generally exhibited low levels of family patriarchy, with most values falling within the “low” range defined by earlier research. Yet beneath this pattern, significant internal variation emerges. Certain regions display PI values consistent with the Northwestern European model of weak family structure, while others—especially the South and West—register markedly higher scores, approaching those of Southeastern and Eastern Europe. Racial disaggregation reveals divergent trajectories: white households in parts of the South show moderately elevated PI values, whereas Black households tend to display lower scores, underscoring distinct family-driven gender dynamics. By 1910, the overall trajectory was one of depatriarchalization, with high-PI zones retreating and low values consolidating across most regions. These findings complicate the assumption that the Northwestern European model was simply transplanted into the United States. American regional profiles position themselves between the lower tails of Eastern European values and those of Ireland and Central Europe, while remaining distinct from the “core” North Atlantic populations. Rather than a straightforward transatlantic transfer, the U.S. family system appears as a composite formation: selectively receptive to Northwestern European norms in some regions, while retaining or intensifying patriarchal structures in others. The study underscores both the utility and the limitations of the PI framework. While effective in capturing family-based patriarchal structures in the period under investigation, the index becomes relatively insensitive once very low levels are reached and may not adequately reflect twentieth-century transformations. Future research should supplement the PI at least with dimensions of male and female wage labor to provide a more nuanced account of long-term depatriarchalization.
No classified.
When Autocracies Dominate International Organizations: Evidence from the UN Committee on NGOs
Christoph Steinert
Full text
Scholars have documented a global trend toward autocratization and demonstrated that autocracies increasingly use their influence to shape decisions in international organizations (IOs). But what happens when autocratic states become so influential that they dominate decision-making in IOs and which types of organizations are most prone to autocratic takeover? The study presents a novel theory on autocratic influence in IOs, which argues that an interplay of IOs’ (i) thematic focus, (ii) membership composition, and (iii) decision rules explains the scale of autocratic influence. The theory further highlights how member selection processes within the UN’s regional groups can facilitate disproportionate autocratic representation. The study leverages evidence from two original datasets on the decisions of the UN Committee on NGOs between 1998 and 2024 to test whether the theorized conditions linked to autocratic influence can translate into autocratic dominance in practice. Multi-pronged evidence demonstrates that autocracies have effectively seized the UN Committee on NGOs and exploit it to systematically defer and reject the applications of liberal NGOs. A comparative analysis with the ECOSOC highlights that a disproportionate autocratic representation in the Committee’s membership is the key mechanism that explains autocratic dominance. The study contributes to our understanding of illiberal challenges to the liberal international order with a new theory, original data, and novel empirical evidence.
No classified.
“Relief empire”: Racial aphasia, colonial unknowing and international organizations in the global governance of refugees
Megan Bradley
Full text
International organizations play vital roles in the global governance of refugees, with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spearheading assistance and protection efforts. Yet UNHCR is part of a larger constellation of international organizations—past and present—created by states to govern displacement. This article deploys the concepts of racial aphasia and colonial unknowing to retheorize international organizations’ roles in the global governance of refugees. Racial aphasia (difficulty speaking meaningfully about race) and colonial unknowing (actively sustained ignorance of the historical and contemporary entanglements of colonialism and racism) provide vital lenses for investigating the power and persistence of racialized hierarchies in the refugee regime. While UNHCR—originally mandated to support select European refugees—has ascended to the alpha position in global refugee governance, international organizations focused on non-white refugees have been relegated to lower rungs of the ladder or shuttered and shunted to the margins of history. This article explores this dynamic through analysis of the United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency (UNKRA), an international organization charged with responding to mass displacement in the Korean War. Probing the “unknowing” of UNKRA and its institutional failures sheds light on the ways in which racialized hierarchies and racial aphasia actively structure the refugee regime.
No classified.
The Ludic Paradox: Why Behavioral Change Through Games Requires Agency, Not Control
Tiziano Antognozzi, Alessandro Crociata, Pier Luigi Sacco
Full text
The global games industry engages nearly three billion players, yet instrumental applications of games for behavioral change, from gamification to serious games, demonstrate a puzzling inconsistency between short-term engagement and long-term outcomes. While these interventions consistently generate initial enthusiasm, meta-analyses reveal that behavioral effects typically diminish beyond three months, with changes rarely persisting after interventions conclude. This pattern contrasts markedly with games' demonstrable cultural influence as evident in community formation, identity development, and sustained engagement over years or decades. We propose that this discrepancy reflects fundamental theoretical inadequacies in how behavioral interventions conceptualize games' influence on human behavior. Drawing on converging evidence from cultural economics, computational neuroscience, cognitive science, and game studies, we develop a framework that reconceptualizes gameplay as cultural meaning-making rather than behavioral conditioning. The framework articulates how sustainable behavioral transformation emerges through dynamic interactions between four interrelated dimensions: games as designed cultural artifacts, play as evolved behavioral disposition, gameplay as situated embodied experience, and re-play as reflective cultural practice. Situating this framework within active inference and free energy principle perspectives provides computational precision to these meaning-making processes, whereas cognitive gadget theory illuminates how play serves as a foundational environment for constructing distinctively human cognitive capacities. Central to our analysis is what we term the ludic dilemma, a tension between play's intrinsically motivated, autotelic nature and attempts to instrumentalize it for predetermined behavioral outcomes. We suggest that this tension helps explain the persistent failures of mechanistic interventions while pointing toward alternative approaches that preserve play's essential qualities and enable behavioral transformation through extended cultural processes. The framework generates testable predictions about temporal dynamics, cross-cultural variations, and developmental trajectories that distinguish cultural meaning-making accounts from mechanistic alternatives, with implications for an understanding of cultural learning, behavioral change interventions, and human cognitive evolution.
No classified.
How should we visualize data? Lessons learned from reviewing high quality graphs in the Socius Special Collection Data Visualization
Paul Cornelius Bauer, Jens Rupprecht, Camille Landesvatter, Louis Friedrich, Marius Fröhle, Sebastian JÀckle, Kira Renée Kurz, Lena Mayer, Judith Reinbold, Niklas Schult
Full text
The Socius Special Collection: Data Visualization aims to publish visually appealing displays of information that illustrate interesting findings and are self-explanatory without reference to the text. We reviewed the corresponding peer-reviewed, high-quality visualizations pursuing three research questions: What types of graphs are used? What errors do people make when visualizing data? What variation can we find across the collection in terms of attractiveness, complexity, innovation and understandability? In total, we analyzed and rated 137 data visualizations published between November 2, 2017 and March 26, 2024. We find that authors most commonly use standard plot types, that flaws are surprisingly frequent and that there is a intriguing variation in terms of perceived attractiveness, understandability, and innovativeness across visualizations. We provide key takeaways and a checklist that may help to improve visualizations in the future.
No classified.
Retraction Under Pressure: A Case Study in Publisher Overreach, Misrepresentation, and the Compromise of Editorial Independence
Riccardo Ciacci
Full text
This paper documents a concerning precedent in academic publishing: the retraction of an article from the Journal of Population Economics (Springer Nature, 2024) after an independent editorial committee had concluded retraction was unwarranted. The reversal occurred following a coordinated harassment campaign and publisher-level intervention that cited “lack of robustness” as grounds for retraction. The published retraction notice compounds this breach by containing demonstrable factual inaccuracies. I argue this constitutes: (1) a misapplication of retraction guidelines, (2) an infringement of editorial independence, (3) susceptibility to external coercion, and (4) violation of basic standards for accurate retraction notices. The case underscores the urgent need to protect editorial processes from reputational pressure and ensure factual accuracy in corrective actions.
No classified.
The politics of modelling
Andrea Saltelli
Full text
Models are ruled by a politics whereby the epistemic authority borrowed from mathematics offers to modellers a considerable power to make their voice heard in the making, evaluating and monitoring of policy. This may lead to a misuse of models, in that they are used to de-politicize issues that are political. Paradoxically, this type of political use of models is at its greatest when models can be presented as apolitical, based on pure facts and their scientific manipulation, thus veiling the normative assumptions that necessarily underpin any given modelling activity. I illustrate what is peculiar or exceptional in the use of models with examples from various fields, including epidemiology, ecology, economics, and climate change, and reconnect this analysis with existing historical and sociological literature on quantification in general and models specifically. I also consider briefly what existing guidelines and checklists for responsible modelling can and cannot do, cautioning about the medium- and long-term dangers associate with model misuse.
No classified.
DistribuciĂłn, Transversalidad y AlineaciĂłn del Presupuesto de Egresos de la FederaciĂłn 2025 con los ODS: Oportunidades y Retos para el Desarrollo Sostenible en MĂ©xico
JesĂșs Alberto NĂșñez Mendoza
Full text
Este artĂ­culo examina la alineaciĂłn de los programas presupuestarios (PP) del Presupuesto de Egresos de la FederaciĂłn (PEF) para el ejercicio fiscal 2025 con los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible (ODS), evaluando su distribuciĂłn general, las contribuciones tanto directas como indirectas, y el grado de transversalidad en las modalidades presupuestarias. Se analiza cĂłmo las polĂ­ticas pĂșblicas contribuyen a los objetivos de la Agenda 2030 en MĂ©xico, destacando fortalezas notables y oportunidades de mejora. En particular, los resultados revelan una cobertura amplia que abarca todos los ODS, aunque con mayor representaciĂłn en ĂĄreas como la gobernanza y el desarrollo institucional, en comparaciĂłn con temas ambientales y de alianzas, lo que sugiere desequilibrios en la priorizaciĂłn. Para mitigar dichos efectos, se proponen enfoques para reforzar la integraciĂłn y el efecto de estas polĂ­ticas, como ajustes en la asignaciĂłn de recursos, mejoras en el monitoreo y estrategias para una mayor equidad, con el fin de fomentar un desarrollo mĂĄs equilibrado y sostenible en el paĂ­s.
Classified as: Environmental Studies
Pattern Recognition of Ozone-Depleting Substance Exports in Global Trade Data
Muhammad Sukri Bin Ramli
Full text
New methods are needed to monitor environmental treaties, like the Montreal Protocol, by reviewing large, complex customs datasets. This paper introduces a framework using unsupervised machine learning to systematically detect suspicious trade patterns and highlight activities for review. Our methodology, applied to 100,000 trade records, combines several ML techniques. Unsupervised Clustering (K-Means) discovers natural trade archetypes based on shipment value and weight. Anomaly Detection (Isolation Forest and IQR) identifies rare "mega-trades" and shipments with commercially unusual price per-kilogram values. This is supplemented by Heuristic Flagging to find tactics like vague shipment descriptions. These layers are combined into a priority score, which successfully identified 1,351 price outliers and 1,288 high-priority shipments for customs review. A key finding is that high-priority commodities show a different and more valuable value-to-weight ratio than general goods. This was validated using Explainable AI (SHAP), which confirmed vague descriptions and high value as the most significant risk predictors. The model's sensitivity was validated by its detection of a massive spike in "mega-trades" in early 2021, correlating directly with the real-world regulatory impact of the US AIM Act. This work presents a repeatable unsupervised learning pipeline to turn raw trade data into prioritized, usable intelligence for regulatory groups.
Classified as: Urban Studies and Planning, Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration
Demystifying the rental vacancy rate measure: a critical review and policy implications
margaret reynolds, Rupa Ganguli, Zoë Goodall, Liss Ralston, Christian A. Nygaard, Terry Burke, Megan Robinson
Full text
This research is the first critical analysis of the Australian private rental vacancy rate (RVR) — an important, but often unquestioned, housing market signal. It investigates the different methodologies, strengths and limitations of the measure, and how it is used and interpreted. Policymakers and developers commonly use RVRs to guide decisions about where and when to build housing, and for rental providers, they can be a signal to raise rents. A comprehensive understanding of this measure is therefore crucial, particularly during a housing crisis. Yet RVRs are provided only by commercial organisations, using methodologies that are often opaque and produce different outcomes. This research presents a detailed examination of this key housing market indicator to better inform decision-making in public and private sectors.
Classified as: Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research, Higher Education, Educational Leadership, Leadership Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Organization Development
Brilliant Scientist, Struggling Leader: How Unprepared Principal Investigators Endanger Research Team Success in the Academia
Babu George
Full text
This case study examines the leadership challenges faced by Dr. Eleanor Chen a biomedical engineering professor who secured a multi-million-dollar research grant but lacked formal management training. Despite her scientific expertise, Dr. Chen encountered severe difficulties managing a 12-member interdisciplinary team, leading to morale problems, financial mismanagement risks, interpersonal conflicts, and project delays. The case reveals systemic issues in academic research management, including leadership gaps, power dynamics, publication pressures, administrative burdens, and inadequate institutional support. Through Dr. Chen's experiences, the case illustrates how technical excellence does not guarantee effective leadership and explores the critical need for structured leadership development in academia. The study provides a realistic examination of the tensions inherent in grant-funded research teams and offers actionable insights for improving research project outcomes. It serves as a teaching tool for graduate students, early-career faculty, and research administrators seeking to understand the complex intersection of scientific excellence, team management, and institutional support structures. While it depicts real world situations and scenarios, everything about this case study is hypothetical.
Classified as: Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration
PolĂ­tica social y bienestar objetivo en MĂ©xico: un anĂĄlisis desde los derechos sociales
Carlos Alberto Arellano-Esparza
Full text
El bienestar objetivo de las personas estĂĄ estrechamente vinculado con la garantĂ­a de derechos sociales fundamentales como alimentaciĂłn, salud, educaciĂłn y vivienda. Este documento examina la relaciĂłn entre polĂ­tica social y bienestar en MĂ©xico, enfocĂĄndose en cĂłmo los derechos sociales se traducen en mecanismos de polĂ­tica pĂșblica. Se argumenta que el bienestar objetivo puede examinarse a travĂ©s de un marco conceptual que vincula necesidades, derechos y polĂ­tica social. MetodolĂłgicamente, se desarrolla un instrumento cuantitativo para evaluar el cumplimiento de los derechos sociales y su impacto en el bienestar objetivo, permitiendo analizar el desempeño de la polĂ­tica pĂșblica. Los resultados muestran que, a pesar de algunos avances, la polĂ­tica social en MĂ©xico sigue caracterizada por una fragmentaciĂłn estructural que limita su eficacia y genera inequidades en el acceso a derechos bĂĄsicos, produciendo un cumplimiento heterogĂ©neo que se refleja en niveles de bienestar parciales e insuficientes. Abstract Objective well-being is closely tied to the fulfillment of fundamental social rights including food, health, education, and housing. This paper examines the relationship between social policy and well-being in Mexico, focusing on how social rights translate into public policy mechanisms. We argue that objective well-being can be assessed through a conceptual framework linking needs, rights, and social policy. We develop a quantitative instrument to evaluate social rights fulfillment and its impact on objective well-being, enabling analysis of public policy performance across multiple dimensions. Findings reveal that despite some progress, Mexican social policy remains characterized by structural fragmentation that constrains effectiveness and generates inequities in access to basic rights. This results in heterogeneous rights fulfillment reflected in partial and insufficient well-being levels across the population, particularly affecting vulnerable groups who face systematic barriers to accessing adequate services and protections.
Classified as: Higher Education, Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration, Science and Technology Studies
CoARA by numbers: Research assessment reform uptake in European higher education
Janne Pölönen, Alexander Rushforth
Full text
Background: Several international initiatives have emerged to advocate for ‘responsible research assessment’ - practices that “incentivise, reflect and reward the plural characteristics of high-quality research, in support of diverse and inclusive research cultures” (Curry et al., 2020). In 2022, the Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment established 10 commitments and a 5-year action plan for organisational reforms. Aims: Higher education institutions are key implementation actors of the ARRA reforms as they conduct hiring decisions, manage promotions, and set reward structures that directly shape researcher incentives. This study provides a systematic empirical assessment of European higher education institutions’ participation in the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) and develops a replicable monitoring framework for voluntary research assessment reform initiatives. Methods: We merged data from CoARA (signatories retrieved 5 August 2025), the European Tertiary Education Register (ETER), and other publicly available data sources, covering 3,439 European HEIs across 40 countries. Using quantitative analysis, we mapped participation patterns across institutional characteristics and countries, and examined associations between CoARA and other reform initiatives. Findings: 450 European HEIs (13%) have signed CoARA, with uptake concentrated among PhD-awarding (27%) and research-intensive universities (52% of those in the Leiden Ranking). Geographic asymmetries are apparent, with stronger uptake in Western and Northern Europe and so far lower signatory numbers in several Eastern European and Widening countries. CoARA signatories are statistically more likely to have also signed the parallel reform initiatives DORA, HR Excellence, and EQAR audits. Across all four initiatives, 36% of institutions signed at least one, with 14% participating in multiple initiatives. Meta-organizations such as university networks and European University alliances show substantially higher participation rates. Conclusion: Our merged dataset and monitoring framework provide an important foundation for tracking reform momentum over time. It helps to show that in a relatively short time period, CoARA has gained substantial uptake among research-intensive European HEIs where assessment pressures are arguably most acute, and lower engagement in teaching-oriented institutions and several Eastern European systems. It also suggests CoARA operates within a broader reform ecosystem, with institutions often signing more than one complementary initiatives (DORA, HR Excellence, EQAR audits). Meta-organizations appear to play an important role in enhancing participation among institutional peer groups. As investments and commitments from institutions and policymakers continue to grow, such systematic tracking of institutional participation provides essential evidence for evaluating progress and informing strategic priorities.
Classified as: Communication
“There’s Always a Way to Get the Story:” Rural Journalism and Resourcefulness at the Periphery
Gregory P Perreault, Celeste GonzĂĄlez de Bustamante
Full text
US rural journalists face financially precarious circumstances given their lack of resources, which forces many rural journalists to work second jobs to meet their own needs and employ radical resourcefulness in order to meet their communities information needs. Through the lens of journalism at the periphery, the present study explores in-depth interviews with 28 US-based rural journalists in order to understand their experiences with financial precarity and to manifest greater understanding regarding their resource needs.
Classified as: Communication
Key network disruptors: A structural analysis of the #DisruptJMM network influencers and actions
Drew Lewis, Rachel Roca, Stephanie Marshall, Joseph E. Hibdon Jr., Carrie Diaz Eaton
Full text
Twitter (now known as X) has been used by an active group of academic mathematics communities to connect and share ideas and information. Like many other Academic Twitter communities, conference hashtags have been widely used to share information between conference attendees and communicate new ideas presented at conferences to the broader academic community. However, in 2020, Dr. Piper Harris proposed a different kind of academic hashtag --- #DisruptJMM --- as a counternetwork hashtag to an in-person conference. This study looks at the use of this hashtag through and in between the 2020 and 2021 Joint Mathematics Meetings, which are advertised as the largest mathematics gatherings in the wold. Through qualitative coding, we investigate the many ways we can conceptualize and define ``influencers'' in this context. We find that some definitions consistently identify the same individuals as ``community organizers'', whereas some definitions of influencers allow us to identify alternative ways that individuals can influence the growth and propagation of hashtags. This study contributes to our understanding of the myriad ways that individuals can contribute to build hashtag movements that move between in-person and online spaces.
Classified as: Geography, Environmental Studies, Social Work
The social benefits of furniture reuse in the circular economy
Alice Hague, Euan Hague, Kelby Bosma, Tami Wooldridge, Fiona Bender, Laura Kolar, Kathryn Colley, Phoebe Somervail, Tony Craig
Full text
Furniture is important for the circular economy (CE), given large volumes of resources used in the global furniture industry, and the bulky waste created when furniture is disposed. Innovations to make furniture more circular include new product design and business models, yet the reuse of furniture is often overlooked, and has additional benefits beyond environmental and economic impacts. This study draws on insights from semi-structured interviews undertaken in Chicago (USA) and Scotland to identify the social impacts of furniture reuse through non-profit organizations. We identify societal benefits of furniture reuse which contribute to people’s (and society’s) wellbeing including a sense of comfort, and a sense of pride, leading to improved physical, social and emotional health, as well as employment and training opportunities. Our study finds social impacts of furniture reuse not previously identified, and highlights the value of working across disciplines to understand potential social impacts of the circular economy.
Classified as: Other Social and Behavioral Sciences, Psychology, Social Work, Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration, Organization Development
Enhancing Inclusivity and Cultural Responsiveness of Caregiver Peer Support: A Case Study of Promising Practices from a Community-Based Disability Support Organization
Jeffrey McCrossin, Angela Clancy, Laranna Scott, Tracey Humphreys, Symbia Barnaby, Lucyna Lach
Full text
Background: Caregiver peer support fosters resilience and well-being among families of children with disabilities by providing empathic connection embedded in shared lived experience. However, peer support programs have historically struggled to reach families whose experiences of disability intersect with additional diverse identities, such as Indigenous, newcomer, and LGBTQ2S+ families. These groups often face distinct cultural, linguistic, and systemic barriers that shape how, when, and whether peer support feels accessible or relevant. Despite growing recognition of these disparities, there remains limited empirical guidance on how community organizations can embed inclusivity and cultural safety across their structures and practices. Objectives: This study examined how the Family Support Institute of British Columbia (FSI)—a peer-based nonprofit—operationalizes inclusion and cultural responsiveness within its policies, staffing, and relationships. The research addressed three questions: (1) How does FSI identify and respond to inequities in access to peer support across communities with intersecting sociocultural identities? (2) How do its practices align with community-identified needs? (3) What opportunities exist to expand the reach and relevance of its support? Methods: A descriptive single-case study design integrated semi-structured interviews (n = 12) with FSI staff, board members, and Indigenous Advisory Circle representatives, alongside document review of strategic and policy materials. Reflexive thematic analysis guided data interpretation, supported by community-engaged validation and member checking. Results: Four themes captured how FSI advances inclusivity: (1) addressing barriers to equitable peer support, (2) building culturally safe and inclusive support, (3) organizational strategies and change processes, and (4) evidencing early cultural and structural shifts in engagement and impact. Initiatives such as creating an Indigenous Practice Advisor role, Indigenous Advisory Circle, and culturally responsive staff role re-alignment exemplify systemic rather than separate additive approaches to equity. Conclusions: FSI’s experience highlights how community-based organizations can translate reconciliation and equity principles into everyday practice. Sustained relationship-building, Indigenous mentorship, and flexible resource allocation were key drivers of trust and inclusion. Embedding these principles across organizational systems offers a promising pathway to dismantle structural barriers and strengthen culturally safe supports for all families.
Classified as: Psychology
Examining the Multidimensional Structure of Subjective Well-Being: Evidence from Mexico
Carlos Alberto Arellano-Esparza
Full text
Most research on subjective well-being (SWB) relies on the classic tripartite model encompassing life satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect. This convention often obscures the multidimensional and context-dependent character of SWB. Drawing on nationally representative data from Mexico, this study systematically compares alternative models of the construct. Using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, we evaluate configurations that integrate eudaimonic, affective, and cognitive components to assess whether SWB can be represented as a unified or multidimensional structure. The results indicate that several competing models display robust fit, with the correlated three-factor, hierarchical, and bifactor specifications performing best. These findings suggest that SWB is better understood as a system of interrelated but distinct dimensions rather than a single latent trait. Taken together, the results support the view of SWB as a fluid and dynamic phenomenon whose internal configuration may shift with social and individual circumstances, calling for more flexible theoretical and empirical approaches to its study.
Classified as: Philosophy, Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration
Getting Creeped Out? Open Science, Qualitative Methods, and the Dangers of Positivism Creep
Thomas Anthony Graves, Madeleine Pownall, Annayah M.B. Prosser
Full text
Many developments to reform the research landscape have occurred over the past decade. These changes have been made with broad goals to improve the ‘openness’ of research and often assumed to be ‘methodologically -agnostic’; that is, they ostensibly have benefits for all researchers occupying all epistemological and methodological positions. ‘Open science’ initiatives such as study pre-registration (i.e., specifying research aims and analytical plan ahead of data access), open data sharing, open-access publication, and open materials sharing are becoming increasingly mainstream across many fields within social research and the natural sciences. While there has been much criticism of these interventions, largely from the qualitative research community, we want to draw attention to a troubling trend in the promotion of open science: the leaking of standards relevant only to quantitative research to all paradigms. Or, as others refer to it, “positivism creep”. Here, we situate positivism creep (i.e., the creeping of positivist conventions to all research) within research policy, we highlight its increasing prevalence within open science reforms, and we warn against a future which could alienate many non-positivist scholars. We argue that the primary framing of open science as the pursuit of reproducibility and objectivity risks promoting positivism creep in the social sciences and humanities. In particular, we suggest that overly strict open research requirements placed by funders may reduce the range and variety of epistemological positions that can be taken by researchers, with particularly deleterious effects for qualitative researchers.
Classified as: Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration
Harmony in Policy? Stakeholder perceptions in German local heat planning
Anna Billerbeck, Jakob Hoffmann, Markus Fritz
Full text
The fate of the energy transition hinges not only on the existence of well-crafted policies, but also on their successful implementation, oftentimes by conglomerates of local actors. Usually involving both public and private parties without clear hierarchies, local implementation of policy is a process of multi-stakeholder governance and often characterized by difficult collective decision-making due to different perceptions of challenges and priorities. A good example of this process is energy and heat planning, which involves several local stakeholders with different hierarchical structures. In this paper, we study the evaluation of challenges and success factors among municipalities and utilities in the context of heat planning in Germany. Based on a survey of 267 communal stakeholders, we find an effect of inversion in juxtaposing importance and difficulty ratings: While municipalities perceive factors such as effective communication, clearly defined responsibilities and concrete measures and projects as more important than their utility counterparts, utilities see them as more challenging. Such perceptual inversion has the potential to complicate collective goal-setting and decision-making and thus can slow down energy transition governance processes.
Classified as: Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education, Communication
Posthumanist intercultural multilingualism research: Culture as relations and as meanings in an overall meaning-making space
Dominic Busch
Full text
For linguistic subdisciplines focusing on language practice like sociolinguistics and pragmatics, the fields of multilingualism research and intercultural communication for long have been conceptual bridges from language to the social world whereby both concepts often have been perceived as competing. Both strands over the past decade have opened to new, overall social theory strands from poststructuralism and posthumanism that highlight complexities and non-dichotomies. This transition may invite us having a look at how authors transform ‘culture’ as one of the core terms of these schools. It is the interplay with multilingualism research that reveals that intercultural communication research on the one hand sticks with its traditional, semiotic understanding of culture as meaning-making and only partly incorporates a new posthumanist understanding of culture as pure relations. This new interplay of multilingualism and intercultural communication research results in a more integrative view on how culture can be thought of in social theorising without confining and tidying it away to a fixed ‘place’ in a theory.
Classified as: Education Law, Intellectual Property Law, Contracts, Higher Education, Library and Information Science
Federal Grants and Institutional IP Policies
Eric Harbeson
Full text
As a condition of receiving U.S. federal grants, institutions of higher educations must assign the federal government a nonexclusive license to make certain uses of works developed under an award, as part of the U.S. federal policy of providing immediate taxpayer access to taxpayer funded research. In order to comply with this requirement, the institution must have the right to make that assignment of rights. The nature of authorship in educational settings has long been the subject of confusion and some controversy, due to the ongoing question of whether faculty scholarship constitutes work made for hire. This in turn causes uncertainty as to whether, absent adequate policies, institutions have sufficient rights to comply with federal grants. The law may one day be clarified, but institutions need policies that work now. This paper first describes the current state of the law, including the various questions that arise with licensing use of scholarly works under different theories of copyright ownership. It identifies the characteristics of institutional IP policies that account for any of three possible future outcomes, allowing institutions to reliably comply with grant obligations without fear of legal reprisal. The paper concludes with recommendations for such policies, which in many cases would require little or no fundamental alteration of the relationship between faculty and their institutions.
Classified as: Jurisprudence, Philosophy
Responding to the Crises of Symbol and Subject in Modernity: Towards a Generative Nomos of Relational Presence
Wanhong HUANG
Full text
Subjectivity constitutes a fundamental condition for human understanding and participation in the world. Its emergence, construction, presence, and transformation have long preoccupied philosophical inquiry. This paper examines the epistemological and ontological disintegration characteristic of late modernity, which is a condition in which the mediations that once sustained meaning and subjectivity lose coherence. We refer to this condition as the Symbolic Crisis: a rupture in the symbolic order's mediating function that fractures relationality at both the ontological and structural levels. The crisis appears in phenomena such as the erosion of trust, the weakening of shared meaning, and the growing separation between lived relation and symbolic representation. Our intervention centers on two concepts: relationality and generative presence. We introduce these as theoretical orientations: relationality provides an ontological foundation through which existence becomes apprehensible beyond the limits of symbolic articulation. Generative presence describes the epistemic and phenomenological process through which relational being becomes active in lived experience, even as the metaphysical subject remains structurally open. Through presence, relational beings bring forth meaning and allow existence to manifest within concrete situations. Within this framework, law and justice appear as forms of symbolic mediation whose force emerges from the interplay between formal structures and the generativity expressed in interpretive and practical engagement. These structures, however, cannot address the Symbolic Crisis on their own, because the crisis originates in the widening separation between being and its mediation. The juridical movement reorients justice toward relational being and the ongoing processes through which its authority and meaning are produced and sustained. The extra juridical movement cultivates the formation and expressive realization of generative presence within relational existence. Together, these movements offer a pathway for reapproaching the subject and for restoring the resonance between being and meaning under contemporary conditions of symbolic fragmentation.
Classified as: Geography, Environmental Studies
Transitions to low carbon social futures: Achieving net zero aviation in UK Higher Education:
Paul Chatterton, Noah Birksted-Breen
Full text
As part of broader societal shifts to net-zero, this study aims to determine the effectiveness, limitations and impacts, of voluntary individual action in the transition to net zero aviation in the UK Higher Education (HE) sector. This paper studies a ‘fly less’ cohort, overlooked by academic studies to date, offering a real-world case study for conceptualising net zero academic practices. A survey with open and closed questions was designed to analyse the experiences of ‘fly less’ HE staff and post-graduate research students at the University of Leeds (n=86), i.e. self-declared as purposefully reducing their flying for their employment or studies. This study reveals that, first, responsibility for flying less policies need to exist at different scales, weighted more firmly to higher institutional scales; second, flying related to academic fieldtrips and ‘internationalisation’ present major obstacles to fully decarbonizing HEIs; and third, in terms of personal and professional impact on staff and students, the benefits of flying less academic practices are likely to outweigh the harms. In the short-term, HE leadership must engage with whole-institution accountability and ‘hard’ policy interventions, such as carbon budgets. In the longer term, academics and HE leaders must innovate and creatively transition towards net zero academic practices in all areas, as part of degrowth transition that is ethical, participatory, planned and collective.
Classified as: Urban Studies and Planning, Linguistics, Communication
The Right to a City without Advertising: How Discursive Contraction Disempowers Local Communities
Elizabeth Nixon, Robert Cluley, Khai Le, Shian Yin
Full text
How can we develop, strengthen and enact democratic voice in the governance of urban public space? While many agree that local communities need a right to the city, this paper explores a long-standing regulatory mechanism within English urban governance that enables - but rarely enacts - such a right. The Area of Special Control of Advertisements (ASCA) powers in the English planning system allow local authorities the legal capacity to prohibit almost all forms of outdoor advertising within a designated zone, thereby restricting corporate use of urban public space for profit. Using documents from a national census of local authorities, we conducted a critical discourse analysis of ASCA reviews which reveals how this right to the city is discursively sacrificed. We develop the concept of discursive contraction to describe the ways planning discourse recruits yet restricts the range of legitimate actors, meanings, and outcomes associated with public space regulation. Three discursive practices underpin the contraction that, in this case, delegitimizes, forecloses, and subsumes civic reservations: 1) invisible actors, active documents 2) consistency as a governing logic and 3) the urbanisation growth assumption. We conclude that, in an age of fragmented urban governance, discursive practices are an increasingly important mechanism of power that require renewed critical analysis.
Classified as: Pacific Islands Languages and Societies, Anthropology, Social Statistics
Identity Mapping Reveals Adaptive Labeling Across Cultural Boundaries
Isabelle Hong, Adrian Viliami Bell, Paul E. Smaldino
Full text
Theory predicts that larger, more ethnically diverse populations will employ a greater breadth of identity categories where ethnicity is the primary focus. Further, in the presence of a clear majority group, out-group observers will select for more coarse-grain labeling while in-group observers will highlight culture-specific roles. We test these expectations by introducing a new empirical approach – identity mapping – where observer-subject free-listing produces a map of label dependencies. After collecting data in Tonga and Salt Lake City, Utah, we produced identity maps to evaluate expectations regarding how Tongan identity shifts across cultural boundaries. Supporting formal theory, a greater number of labels were ascribed in the larger, more complex U.S. population where ethnic labels were also more salient. For Tongan in-group observers, gender, age, and wealth were the most salient identity groups with strong interdependencies, whereas U.S. out-group respondents used a wide variety of categories including wealth, age, ethnicity, but downplayed gender.
Classified as: Pacific Islands Languages and Societies, Anthropology, Linguistics
Language shift in Vanuatu’s 2020 census: Investigation of a national dataset for 250,000 people
Guy A. Lavender Forsyth
Full text
Growing concern surrounds the threats faced by Vanuatu’s famous diversity of Indigenous languages, with particular attention directed towards the pressure that Bislama exerts as the country’s lingua franca. Here, I report the results of exploratory analyses of Vanuatu’s most recent national census, leveraging individual-level data for nearly 250,000 people to gauge the magnitude of the shift away from Indigenous languages and identify the factors implicated in this process. The data reveal that 83.9% of Vanuatu’s population can ‘easily’ speak an Indigenous language and that 74.9% learnt an Indigenous first language. Conversely, 9.6% of people cannot speak an Indigenous language (including 9.4% of Indigenous Ni-Vanuatu), and a severely conservatively-biased estimate shows that Bislama is the first language learnt for at least 14.2% of the population, including 14.3% of Ni-Vanuatu, with the true figure likely closer to 25%. The youngest generations show considerably poorer Indigenous language abilities and substantially greater learning of Bislama as a first language, a pattern consistent with a movement away from Indigenous languages over time. Further patterns that emerge indicate that Indigenous languages fare best in Vanuatu’s rural areas, in the Area Councils with the smallest populations, and in the communities that are the least diverse in terms of people’s island backgrounds. Focusing in on these rural areas, where Bislama likely poses the greatest threat to Indigenous languages, individuals who have a history of migration, who have access to modern communication technologies, who live in economically better-off households, and who live in households without kastom land tenure are less likely to speak an Indigenous language easily and are more likely to learn Bislama as a first language. While strictly correlational and non-causal, these exploratory analyses reflect both the vitality of Indigenous languages in Vanuatu today and the serious challenges they face from a suite of likely interconnected factors.
é©Ÿé©­ć€æ‚æ€§ïŒšćŸșäșŽäž­ć›œæČ»ç†ćźžè·”çš„"èŻŠæ–­-适ćș”"ćž‹ć†łç­–æšĄćž‹ç ”ç©¶
李ć»șćčł
Full text
ïŒšćœ“ć‰ć…Źć…±æ”żç­–ç ”ç©¶ćœšćș”ćŻčçł»ç»Ÿæ€§ă€ć€æ‚æ€§ç€ŸäŒšé—źéą˜æ—¶ïŒŒćžžéąäžŽç†èźșæšĄćž‹äžŽ çŽ°ćźžć†łç­–è„±èŠ‚çš„ć›°ćąƒă€‚æœŹæ–‡ćŸșäșŽäž­ć›œç‹Źç‰č的æČ»ç†ćźžè·”ïŒŒæç‚Œć‡ș侀äžȘ損äžș"èŻŠæ–­ 适ćș”"ćž‹çš„æ žćżƒć†łç­–é€»èŸ‘ă€‚èŻ„é€»èŸ‘äœ“çł»ç”±"漞äș‹æ±‚æ˜Ż-éĄșæ˜Żè€Œäžș-ćźˆæ­Łćˆ›æ–°"侉äžȘ递 èż›çŽŻèŠ‚æž„æˆïŒŒćˆ†ćˆ«ćŻčćș”èź€çŸ„ă€ćźžè·”äžŽä»·ć€Œäž‰äžȘ绎ćșŠă€‚ćœšæ­€ćŸșçĄ€äžŠïŒŒæœŹæ–‡èż›äž€æ­„æ ć‡ș"æƒ…ćąƒ-ćŠżäœ-ç­–ç•„"äž‰ć…ƒćˆ†æžæĄ†æž¶ïŒŒć°†äžŠèż°ć†łç­–é€»èŸ‘æ“äœœćŒ–äžșćŒ…ć«æƒ…ćąƒç•Œćźšă€ćŠż äœèŻŠæ–­äžŽç­–ç•„é€‰æ‹©çš„çł»ç»Ÿæ€§ćˆ†æžć·„ć…·ă€‚é€šèż‡ćŻčè„±èŽ«æ”»ćšæˆ˜çš„æ·±ćșŠæĄˆäŸ‹ç ”究ćč¶èŸ… 仄疫情é˜Č控的ćŻčæŻ”ćˆ†æžïŒŒæœŹæ–‡ć±•ç€șäș†èŻ„æĄ†æž¶ćŠ‚äœ•ćžźćŠ©ć†łç­–è€…ćœšć€æ‚æČ»ç†æƒ…ćąƒäž­æŠŠ æĄäž»èŠçŸ›ç›Ÿă€èŻ„äŒ°çșŠæŸæĄä»¶ćč¶é€‰æ‹©é€‚ćș”æ€§ç­–ç•„ă€‚æœŹç ”ç©¶äžä»…äžșç†è§Łäž­ć›œæČ»ç†æ•ˆèƒœ 提䟛äș†äž€äžȘ理èźș透镜äčŸäžșć…šçƒć€æ‚æ€§æČ»ç†èŽĄçŒźäș†äž€äžȘć…·æœ‰æ“äœœä»·ć€Œçš„æ–čæł•èźș揂 考
Politics
Resistance to Backsliding: The Role of Democratic Conceptions
Noam Gidron, Yotam Margalit, Lior Sheffer, Itamar Yakir
Full text
We examine who mobilizes against democratic backsliding, focusing on mass protests against the judicial overhaul advanced by the Israeli government in 2023. As contemporary subversion of democracy is often driven by governments that won an electoral majority, we posit that protesting against the government's actions requires people to have a thick conception of democracy that goes beyond majority rule. Drawing on panel data collected before and after the overhaul's announcement, we show that citizens vary substantially in their conception of democracy, and that a thick conception not only predicts protesting against backsliding but also moderates the role of other key factors in mobilizing against democratic erosion. The findings highlight the role of small-d democrats in safeguarding democracy.
Politics
Resilience by Design: Adhocracy, Collaborative Governance, and Public-Private-Nonprofit Partnerships in Bergamo’s COVID-19 Economic Recovery
Paolo Valter Caroli, Francesco Longo
Full text
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed the vulnerabilities of traditional bureaucratic governance structures in responding effectively to rapid, large-scale crises. This paper presents a detailed case study of Rinascimento, an innovative urban recovery program launched in Bergamo, Italy—one of the epicenters of the early pandemic. It explores how an adhocratic governance model, characterized by :lexibility, decentralization, and cross-sector collaboration, was employed to mitigate the economic impact of the crisis. The program was implemented through a public-private-nonpro:it partnership involving the Municipality of Bergamo, Intesa Sanpaolo Bank, and CESVI, a local humanitarian NGO. Drawing on collaborative governance and network theories, the Rinascimento initiative combined emergency grants and impact investment loans to support nearly 4,500 small businesses and professionals. The paper analyzes the design and operational mechanisms of the adhocracy, its rapid decision-making capabilities, and its emphasis on real-time learning and adaptation. Empirical evaluation using key performance indicators demonstrates the program’s effectiveness in enhancing business resilience, reducing business mortality rates, and fostering economic regeneration. The :indings underscore the potential of adhocratic models in municipal crisis management and offer scalable insights for future governance frameworks addressing systemic shocks.
Politics Sociology
Winners’ Restraint or Affective Majoritarianism? Elections, Polarization and Political Support
Damjan Tomic, Sergi Ferrer, Enrique Prada Gonzalez, Enrique HernĂĄndez
Full text
Research on the impact of elections on attitudes toward democracy has focused primarily on satisfaction with democracy. Building on this, we analyze how winning and losing elections, along with affective polarization, shapes citizens’ support for norms of democratic restraint and consent. We propose that partisan animus weakens the “reservoir of goodwill” that helps citizens accept democratic norms that may go against their self-interest. Using a comparative study of 35 elections and two quasi-experimental case studies, we find that while differences between winners and losers in their support for norms of restraint and consent can be statistically significant, they are substantively small compared to several benchmarks, even in highly polarized contexts. Thus, while satisfaction with democracy is notably shaped by winner-loser dynamics, especially when polarization is high, their impact on support for core democratic principles is more limited. These findings improve our understanding of the role of citizens in democratic processes.
Politics
Views on Democracy and Political Violence in the United States in 2025: Findings from a Nationally Representative Survey
Garen Wintemute, Sonia L Robinson, Andrew Crawford, Julia P Schleimer, Daniel J. Tancredi, Aaron B. Shev, Elizabeth A. Tomsich, Mona A. Wright, Bradley Velasquez, Shaina Sta Cruz
Full text
Background: From 2022 to 2024, an annual, nationally representative, longitudinal survey in the United States (US) found high prevalences of support for and willingness to engage in political violence, with differences by party affiliation. The November 2024 US federal election replaced a Democratic administration with a Republican one, led by a president who has repeatedly endorsed use of force by the government against civilians. This study examines changes in support for and willingness to engage in political violence from mid-2024 to mid-2025. Methods: Survey participants were adult (age ≄ 18 years as of recruitment in 2022) members of Ipsos Knowledge Panel. Wave 4 was conducted May 23-June 13, 2025. The primary analysis generated findings for the cohort as a whole. In a secondary analysis, respondents were categorized by self-reported political party and Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement affiliations. Principal outcome measures comprised self-reported justification for political violence, personal willingness to engage in political violence, and expectation of firearm use in future political violence. Results for 2025 were presented as weighted prevalences with 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Change from 2024 to 2025 was estimated based on the means of aggregated individual change scores for each outcome measure. Results: The 2025 completion rate was 89.9% (8,248 respondents/9,179 invitees). For the cohort as a whole, there were only small increases from 2024 to 2025 in the prevalence of the belief that violence was usually or always justified to advance at least 1 of 20 political objectives (2024: 32.3%, 95% CI 31.0%, 33.6%; 2025: 35.6%, 95% CI 34.1%, 37.0%) and to advance 16 of 20 specified objectives when these were assessed individually. There were no changes in the prevalence of high-level personal willingness to commit political violence or in expectation of firearm use in future political violence. Despite some increases in support for political violence from 2024 to 2025 among Democrats, MAGA Republicans in 2025 were substantially more likely than strong Democrats to consider violence usually or always justified to advance at least 1 of 20 political objectives (MAGA Republicans 52.2%, 95% CI 48.4%, 56.1%; strong Democrats 32.1%, 95% CI 28.6%, 35.6%) and to advance 10 of those objectives when objectives were considered individually. MAGA Republicans and strong Democrats did not differ in 2025 in the percentages that were very or completely willing to commit political violence by level of severity or against any target population. A small group of non-Republican MAGA supporters had higher prevalences than most other groups on many measures. Conclusions: Support for and willingness to commit political violence increased only modestly from 2024 to 2025 and, where differences existed, remained generally higher among MAGA movement affiliates and Republicans than among Democrats. These findings can help focus prevention efforts.
Politics Sociology
Mobilization for and Against Democracy
Mohammad Ali Kadivar
Full text
This review examines the expanding body of scholarship on contentious mobilization and its dual role in shaping democratization and democratic decline. It synthesizes research on the conditions under which mass mobilization contributes to democratic transitions, deepening, and consolidation, as well as when it facilitates authoritarian resurgence and democratic backsliding. The review covers key debates on tactics, class composition, organizational infrastructure, ideological framing, and regime type. It also analyzes the evolving role of civil society, digital media, and participatory institutions in both enabling and constraining democratic outcomes. While much of the earlier literature emphasized the democratizing potential of collective action, recent studies reveal a more ambivalent picture in which mass mobilization can bolster authoritarian incumbents or lead to fragmented political settlements. The essay concludes by outlining key directions for future research, including attention to discursive contestation, and the organizational strategies of both pro- and anti-democratic movements.
Politics Sociology
Who Runs? Who Wins? Descriptive Representation in German Federal Elections
Bernhard Clemm von Hohenberg, Sebastian Stier
Full text
Descriptive representation—the extent to which political elites mirror the population on key demographic characteristics—is considered a foundational element of democratic legitimacy. While most existing research has examined the composition of elected political bodies, especially with regard to gender, this study broadens the scope to include both elected and non-elected candidates, and explores the effects of gender, age and immigrant origin. Using newly harmonized data from the four most recent German federal elections, we investigate whether representation gaps emerge during the candidacy or electoral stage, and explore how gender, age, and immigrant origin interact in shaping political representation. The findings show inconsistent biases across the two electoral stages, the most pronounced effect being an under-representation of younger and older citizens.
Politics
Taking Part without Blending In: Legalization Policies and the Integration of Immigrants
Stephanie Zonszein
Full text
How do legal institutions shape immigrant incorporation? Theories of assimilation neglect the state's role in shaping the relationship between structural assimilation (into host institutions) and cultural assimilation (adopting host society rather than origin markers). I argue that legalization enables simultaneous structural assimilation and cultural maintenance. Unauthorized status creates institutional barriers that stall structural assimilation, while deportation threat compels legal passing—concealing ethnic markers to avoid detection. Legalization reverses both dynamics, enabling institutional participation while removing enforcement costs of cultural expression. Using regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences designs, I examine DACA (2012) and IRCA (1986). Both policies improve structural assimilation: English ability, employment, and civic participation, while enabling cultural maintenance (reflected in naming distinctiveness). This effect is strongest in high-deportation counties, consistent with abandonment of legal passing. The findings suggest immigrants inherently value their culture: when enforcement threat is removed, choices reflect authentic preferences, challenging theories framing cultural maintenance as reactive or instrumental.
Politics Sociology
æ–‡æ˜Žçł»ç»Ÿèźș的新视野䞀äžȘćŸșäșŽâ€œć››ç»Žäž€äœ“â€çš„ćŠšæ€ćčłèĄĄćˆ†æžæĄ†æž¶
李ć»șćčł
Full text
æ—ąæœ‰çš„ćŽ†ćČç€ŸäŒšć­Šç†èźșćœšè§Łé‡Šé•żæ—¶æź”æ–‡æ˜ŽæŒ”èż›ïŒŒć°€ć…¶æ˜Żäž­è„żæ–‡æ˜Žćˆ†ćČ”äžŽćœ“ä»Łć…šçƒæ€§ć›°ćąƒæ—¶ïŒŒćžžé™·ć…„èż˜ćŽŸèźșæˆ–ć•äž€ć†łćźšèźș的çȘ è‡Œă€‚æœŹæ–‡èŻ•ć›Ÿæž„ć»ș侀äžȘç»Œćˆæ€§çš„ćˆ†æžæĄ†æž¶â€”â€”â€œæ–‡æ˜ŽćŠšæ€ćčłèĄĄèźșâ€ïŒŒä»„ćŒ„èĄ„èż™äž€äžè¶łă€‚èŻ„æĄ†æž¶ä»„é©Źć…‹æ€äž»äč‰ć…łäșŽç€ŸäŒšæœ‰æœșäœ“ćŠçŸ›ç›ŸèżćŠšçš„ćŸșæœŹćŽŸç†äžșæ čćŸșćč¶ćˆ›é€ æ€§èžæ±‡äș†äž­ćŽäŒ ç»Ÿçł»ç»Ÿæ€ç»ŽäžŽçŽ°ä»Łć€æ‚性理èźșă€‚æˆ‘ä»Źć°†æ–‡æ˜Žè§†äžș侀äžȘć€æ‚è‡Ș适ćș”çł»ç»ŸïŒŒć…¶ć­˜ç»­äžŽć‘ć±•äŸè”–äșŽâ€œćŒ•éą†ćŠ›â€ïŒˆæˆ˜ç•„èź€çŸ„äžŽć†łç­–ïŒ‰ă€â€œé©±ćŠšćŠ›â€ïŒˆç”Ÿäș§ćˆ›é€ äžŽæ°‘äŒ—æŽ»ćŠ›ïŒ‰ă€â€œç†æ™șâ€ïŒˆćˆ¶ćșŠè§„èŒƒäžŽæł•æČ»ïŒ‰ă€â€œæƒ…æ™șâ€ïŒˆæ–‡ćŒ–ä»·ć€ŒäžŽć…±èŻ†ïŒ‰èż™ć››äžȘć­çł»ç»Ÿé—Žçš„ćŠšæ€ćčłèĄĄäžŽććŒæŒ”èż›ă€‚æœŹæ–‡çł»ç»Ÿé˜èż°äș†èŻ„æšĄćž‹çš„ć“Čć­ŠćŸșçĄ€ă€æ žćżƒæž„ćż”ćŠć†…ćœšäœœç”šæœșćˆ¶ïŒŒćč¶é€šèż‡äžŽç»ć…žç†èźș的æ‰čćˆ€æ€§ćŻčèŻïŒŒä»„ćŠćŻčć€§ć”çŽ‹æœć…ŽèĄ°çš„ć…žćž‹æ€§ćˆ†æžïŒŒćˆæ­„ć±•ç€șäș†èŻ„æĄ†æž¶ćœšè§Łé‡Šæ–‡æ˜ŽéŸ§æ€§ă€èŻŠæ–­çł»ç»Ÿç—…ć˜æ–č靱的理èźșæœœćŠ›ă€‚æœŹç ”ç©¶æ—šćœšäžșè·šæ–‡æ˜Žçš„æŻ”èŸƒćŽ†ćČćˆ†æžæäŸ›äž€ć„—æ–°çš„æŠ‚ćż”èŻ­æł•äžŽćˆ†æžć·„ć…·ă€‚
Politics Sociology
Extractive Authoritarianism: Medical Apartheid in U.S. Immigration Detention
Nadine R. Jackson
Full text
This article examines U.S. immigration detention as a revenue-generating legal system that profits from prolonged confinement and bodily deterioration. The second Trump administration has systematized this violence through unprecedented expansion, dismantling of oversight, and concentration of executive authority. Drawing on government policy, administrative datasets, facility records, and case documentation, the analysis demonstrates how detention institutionalizes medical neglect, retaliation, solitary confinement, reproductive coercion, language exclusion, deathbed releases, and jurisdictional manipulation as routine administrative practice. Bilateral transfer agreements extend this system extraterritorially, outsourcing custody to sites of documented torture where U.S. officials create conditions meeting the legal definition of enforced disappearance. The article theorizes this configuration as extractive authoritarianism, a mode of governance where legal formalism enables capital accumulation through the exploitation of civil vulnerability. This framework advances critical socio-legal scholarship by demonstrating how procedural compliance produces structural violence within formally lawful systems. It reveals the persistence of detention’s harms across cycles of reform and establishes the necessity of abolitionist responses.
Politics Economics Sociology
How Conflict Aversion Can Enable Authoritarianism: An Evolutionary Dynamics Approach
Chad M. Topaz
Full text
We use evolutionary game theory to examine how conflict-averse centrism can facilitate authoritarian success in polarized political conflicts. Such conflicts are often asymmetric: authoritarian actors can employ norm-breaking or coercive tactics, while democratic resistance faces stronger normative constraints on acceptable behavior. Yet formal models typically treat sides symmetrically and rarely examine conflict-averse behavior. Drawing on empirical research on protest backlash, civility norms, and authoritarian resilience, we model these dynamics as a three-strategy evolutionary game. This framework yields two outcomes—cyclic authoritarian resurgence through a heteroclinic cycle and a stable centrist–authoritarian coalition excluding resistance—depending on confrontation responses. We demonstrate how an established dynamical framework with empirically grounded behavioral assumptions clarifies conditions under which conflict aversion can diminish the effectiveness of democratic resistance.
Politics Sociology
Bipartisan Campaign Messages are Credible Policymaking Signals
Colin Case, Emily Cottle Ommundsen, Rachel Porter
Full text
Bipartisan cooperation is essential to congressional productivity and democratic legitimacy, yet bipartisan campaign rhetoric is widely dismissed as an electioneering tactic that offers voters unreliable information about future governance. This skepticism calls into question the informational role of campaigns and, in turn, the quality of democratic representation. We challenge this view, arguing that bipartisan campaign appeals function as issue-specific signals that credibly forecast cross-party collaboration. Drawing on issue-level statements from U.S. House candidates (N=43,465; 2018--2022), we document that bipartisan messaging is common across candidates, but deployed selectively within campaigns. Linking these commitments to all legislation introduced in the 116th--118th Congresses, we show that candidates who emphasize bipartisan cooperation on particular issues subsequently engage in meaningful cross-party policymaking in those domains, which translates to legislative success. We demonstrate that candidates’ issue-specific bipartisan commitments structure the selective cross-party cooperation that persists in a polarized era.
Politics
Political Social Distance in Europe
Marco Improta, Elisabetta Mannoni
Full text
In this study, we build on Emory Bogardus’ classical sociology of distance to develop a relational framework for understanding attitudes related to democratic coexistence. Extending his insight into the political realm, we frame political social distance as the (dis)comfort citizens feel toward supporters of the party they would never vote for, as in-laws, friends, co-workers, or neighbors. Using original survey data from eight European democracies, we show that social trust consistently reduces distance toward political outgroups, while ideological orientation influences this disposition asymmetrically: respondents on the left exhibit higher political social distance than those on the right. Moreover, citizens who attach strong importance to democracy display greater distance toward opponents, a paradox we term democratic exclusivism, grounded in a moral rather than procedural conception of democracy. These findings have important implications for democratic quality, as they reveal both the social foundations that may enable peaceful democratic coexistence and the attitudinal barriers that may gradually weaken it.
Politics
Measuring Insurer Vulnerability to Catastrophe Risk
Vaibhav Anand, Yu-Luen Ma, Yayuan Ren
Full text
We develop an empirical measure of U.S. property-liability insurers’ vulnerability to catastrophe risk. Using underwriting outcomes and property damage data from 1991 to 2021, we first estimate state–line sensitivities that quantify how unexpected disaster damages translate into insured losses. Sensitivity varies widely across lines and states: homeowners and allied lines, and the Gulf and Southeastern states, show the strongest transmission. Loss ratios rise sharply in high-damage years, but decline only modestly in low-damage years. Combining sensitivities with insurers' portfolio compositions, we construct an insurer-level vulnerability metric and find that vulnerability is highly skewed. Insurers in the top quintile are roughly four times more exposed than the next group, and their vulnerability has grown by 50 percent over time. While most insurers manage catastrophe exposure through diversification, highly vulnerable insurers, typically smaller and concentrated, rely heavily on reinsurance. Our metric also reconciles prior evidence on diversification and reinsurance: while concentration lowers reinsurance demand on average, for vulnerable insurers, reinsurance usage increases with geographic concentration.
Economics
Are Farmers Algorithm-Averse? The Case of Decision Support Tools in Crop Management
Anna Massfeller, Daniel Hermann, Alexa Leyens, Hugo Storm
Full text
The advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has the potential to improve farming efficiency globally, with decision support tools (DSTs) representing a particularly promising application. However, evidence from medical and financial domains reveals a user reluctance to accept AI-based recommendations, even when they outperform human alternatives. This is a phenomenon known as “algorithm aversion” (AA). This study is the first to examine this phenomenon in an agricultural setting. Drawing on survey data from a representative sample of 250 German farmers, we assessed farmers’ intention to use and their willingness-to-pay for DSTs for wheat fungicide application either based on AI or a human advisor. We implemented a novel Bayesian probabilistic programming workflow tailored to experimental studies, enabling a joint analysis that integrates an extended version of the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology with an economic experiment. Our results indicate that AA plays an important role in farmers’ decision-making. For most farmers, an AI-based DST must outperform a human advisor by 11–30% to be considered equally valuable. Similarly, an AI-based DST with equivalent performance must be 21–56% less expensive than the human advisor to be preferred. These findings signify the importance of examining AA as a cognitive bias that may hinder the adoption of promising AI technologies in agriculture.
Economics
Cognitive Dominance in U.S. Labor Markets: Harmonizing Task Intensities, 1980–2014
Santiago Garcia-Couto
Full text
This paper constructs harmonized, multi-dimensional measures of occupational task intensities for the United States from 1980-2014 by reconciling the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and O*NET. The resulting indices allow task intensities to vary within occupations over time and are linked to Census and ACS microdata. I document a pronounced rise in the importance of cognitive tasks -"cognitive dominance"- driven by both increasing task intensity and higher associated wage gradients. This mechanism helps explain three major labor-market trends: wage polarization, the rising college wage premium, and the narrowing gender wage gap, with most task changes occurring within occupations.
Economics
The making of ‘green’ capitalism in Europe’s marginal regions: renewable energy production as territory grabbing for accumulation
Samadhi Lipari
Full text
It is no mystery that we are living in times of multiple ecological crises. Not only are phenomena such as climate change, widespread pollution, biodiversity loss, and soil artificialisation threatening irreversibly the ‘natural’ world. They imperil human society too, for human society is part of nature. Taking a historical materialist perspective, this thesis understands those crises as originating in capitalist social relations, which maximise the exploitation of both human labour and the ecosystems. The thesis maintains that mainstream responses to the crises are fully framed within the capitalist paradigm of perpetual and privatised ‘accumulation for accumulation’s sake’, only now legitimised through ‘green’ credentials. Building on theoretical and political approaches calling for the incorporation of an ‘ecological’ rationality within capitalist relations, these responses articulate faith in and commitment to the modernisation of productive cycles and governance systems, from which a more sustainable – ‘green’ – capitalist economy can apparently arise. Differently, this thesis interprets such a ‘green’ turn as capitalism’s adaptation and expansion in the context of the ecological crises. The thesis deploys and innovates a range of historical materialist categories to analyse the relationship between the ‘green’ as an accumulation opportunity and its leveraging as a legitimation framework. Empirically, the thesis investigates the accumulation of surplus value in and around renewable energy generation at the level of production areas, the enclosure and trans-formative processes it triggers, the class and factional cleavages it entails, and the regulatory mechanisms and legitimation narratives to which it is associated. Methodologically, it combines a comprehensive theoretical elaboration with case studies in southern Italy on wind energy and in eastern Germany on agricultural biogas. The thesis maintains that under capitalism, renewable energy generation expands accumulation frontiers over not yet or ‘inefficiently’ commodified spaces and natures. This occurs through their privatisation and abstraction into fictitious capital –that is through their commodification and financialization. In contrast with marginalist approaches, this thesis reconciles the socially necessary labour time theory of value with political ecology. It rejects the assumption that privatised spaces and natures might ‘innately’ provide exchange value, maintaining that they serve as a collateral to capture –by way of rent- surplus value produced in society at a different point in time and space. Secondly, the thesis defines ‘green’ capitalism as a hegemonic project in the making. This is characterised by two dialectics: one tending to restructure the forces and relations of production; the other to re-build hegemonic narratives and apparatuses, around re-significations of the ‘green’ made compatible with sustained accumulation.
Economics Sociology
EXTENDING THEORIES OF TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE: SUBSYSTEM-DRIVEN INNOVATION FOR TECHNOLOGICAL SYSTEM MACROEVOLUTION
Mario Coccia
Full text
Forecasting technological trajectories requires understanding the mechanisms that accelerate systemic innovation. This study develops a macroevolutionary framework, positing that host technologies evolve through the microevolution of embedded subsystems. A longitudinal analysis of the iPhone (2007–2025) and Bluetooth technologies reveals that subsystem advancements consistently precede and enable major system-level innovations, with integration lags shrinking from three to one year—evidence of accelerating co-evolution. Subsystem improvements in camera resolution and display quality exhibit exponential growth, significantly shaping the macroevolution of smartphone capabilities. Hedonic pricing models further highlight battery life and display resolution as dominant drivers of innovation and market value. Theoretical implications include extending evolutionary models of technological change by identifying subsystem evolution as a fundamental mechanism of systemic progress. Managerial implications emphasize the strategic importance of aligning subsystem development with host technology integration to reduce innovation delays and sustain competitive advantage. This approach enhances technology forecasting and informs resource allocation in dynamic innovation ecosystems.
Economics
Delegating governmental authority to private actors: Lordships, state capacity and development
Daniel Oto-PeralĂ­as
Full text
This paper investigates the consequences of delegating governmental authority to private actors through the study of lordships, a pivotal political institution in historical Europe. I first document a negative relationship between being a seigneurial town and central state capacity in ancien-regime Spain. Next, I focus on the Kingdom of Granada after its conquest by Castile in 1492 to leverage on that the initial distribution of lordships was conditionally exogenous, with the results corroborating the negative effect of lordships on state capacity. I further show two additional important results. First, the effect is very persistent, with former lordships towns featuring less state capacity almost a century after the abolition of the seigneurial regime. Second, there is a non-monotonic effect on economic growth. Contrary to conventional wisdom, lordships towns did not underperform royal towns during the Ancien RĂ©gime. Yet, despite not having started with disadvantage, former seigneurial towns experienced lower population growth from the 1910s onwards, a period in which the Spanish state started to play a bigger investment role. Thus, towns with historically less state presence benefited less from state’s investments, lagging behind.
Economics
BIAS, BENEFIT, OR BOTH? SURVEYING PERCEPTIONS OF AI IN HEALTHCARE
Ela Adhikari, Anitza Lopez, Lifeng Lin, Fiona Li
Full text
Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping healthcare, presenting new opportunities in diagnostics, clinical decision support, workflow optimization, patient engagement, and population health. Yet important concerns remain about trust, transparency, bias, privacy, and the adequacy of existing regulatory frameworks. The objective of this study was to compare the perspectives of Healthcare Professionals (HCPs) and non-HCPs on the integration of AI in healthcare, with a focus on identifying perceived benefits, risks, ethical concerns, and barriers to adoption. Methods: We conducted an IRB-approved cross-sectional survey of adults aged ≄18, sampling both HCPs and non-HCPs. The questionnaire assessed perceived benefits and risks of AI, trust in AI systems, health bot applications, privacy and ethical concerns, regulatory priorities, and views on AI’s role in clinical decision-making. Responses from HCPs and non-HCPs were compared using descriptive statistics and group-level difference testing. Results: A total of 297 participants completed the survey, including 189 HCPs and 108 non- HCPs. Both groups expressed strong agreement that AI can improve efficiency, enhance access to care, support diagnosis, reduce medical errors, and aid early disease detection. However, trust in AI systems remained limited: nearly two-thirds of respondents expressed no confidence in AI’s ability to ensure privacy, safeguard data, or make unbiased ethical decisions. HCPs demonstrated greater emphasis on safety, accountability, transparency, and regulatory oversight, particularly in high-risk clinical environments, whereas non-HCPs were more likely to endorse shared responsibility when AI causes harm. Across groups, the majority believed that AI should serve primarily as an assistive tool, with humans retaining decision-making authority. Concerns about cost, infrastructure, and digital literacy were prominent barriers to equitable AI adoption. Conclusions: Despite recognizing AI’s potential benefits, both clinicians and the public remain cautious about its risks and ethical limitations. These findings highlight the need for robust governance, transparent design, targeted education, and human-centered approaches to promote trustworthy, safe, and equitable AI integration in healthcare.
Economics Sociology
UNIVERSAL ADAPTIVE NORMALIZATION SCALE (AMIS): A METHODOLOGY FOR INTEGRATING HETEROGENEOUS SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL METRICS
Kravtsov Gennady Grigorievich
Full text
The integration of heterogeneous indicators from diverse sources and units of measurement presents a significant challenge in modern data analysis. Established normalization techniques, such as percentage scaling and standardization, suffer from fundamental limitations: the former disregards the underlying data distribution, while the latter compromises interpretability and does not yield a true interval scale. This paper introduces the Universal Adaptive Normalization Scale (Adaptive Multi-Interval Scale — AMIS), a novel method designed to address this methodological gap. The key advantage of AMIS is its ability to construct a unified metric space, enabling mathematically sound arithmetic operations between inherently disparate datasets—a capability absent in existing approaches. The method transforms absolute values into a unified 0 to 100 scale through a hierarchical computation of control points, derived from mean values within data distribution intervals. This ensures inherent adaptability to the specific shape of any source dataset. In contrast to percentages, which merely represent a position within a fixed range, AMIS defines a value's position relative to the actual statistical distribution, all while preserving the rigorous properties of an interval scale. We demonstrate the method's practical efficacy through two real-world case studies: eliminating aggregation errors when averaging student grades across different subjects, and constructing a robust scale for the heavily skewed global GDP distribution. The results confirm that after AMIS normalization, heterogeneous data become directly comparable and suitable for correct computation of averages and weighted indices. The proposed approach holds substantial promise for a wide range of applications, including interdisciplinary research, big data analytics, and machine learning, offering a fundamentally new pathway for integrating heterogeneous metrics into a coherent measurement system.
Economics Sociology
Continental Genetic Ancestries as Predictors of Socioeconomic and Cognitive Variation Across the Americas
John Fuerst, Emil Ole William Kirkegaard
Full text
We draw upon newly compiled subnational indicators from fifteen countries to revisit relationships between continental genetic ancestry, cognitive ability (CA), and socioeconomic outcomes (S) in the Americas. Across national and subnational analyses, West Eurasian ancestry, in contrast to Amerindian and African, correlates robustly and positively with CA and S. In models including country fixed effects a shift from 0% to 100% West Eurasian genetic ancestry corresponds to an estimated increase of approximately 1.0–1.3 in either CA or S in units of standard deviation. Models that include both country fixed effects and random slopes produce similar estimates. These associations remain stable when controlled for geoclimatic variables (e.g., annual temperature, precipitation, UV-radiation). Although the cross-sectional nature of the data precludes formal causal inference, the results are consistent with CA mediating roughly 50% of the association between West Eurasian ancestry and S. The findings provide additional support for the “deep roots” hypothesis that continental ancestry is systematically linked to regional variations in cognitive and socioeconomic outcomes across the Americas.
Economics Sociology
A Simulation Study Comparing Handling Missing Data Strategies
Scott Oatley, Vernon Gayle, Roxanne Connelly
Full text
Missing data is a threat to the accurate reporting of substantive results within data analysis. While handling missing data strategies are widely available, many studies fail to account for missingness in their analysis. Those who do engage in handling missing data analysis sometimes engage in less than-gold-standard approaches. These gold-standard approaches: multiple imputation (MI) and full information maximum likelihood (FIML), are rarely compared with one another. This paper assess the efficiency of different handling missing data techniques and directly compares these gold-standard methods. A Monte Carlo simulation is performed to accomplish this task. Results confirm that under a missing at-random assumption, methods such as listwise deletion and single use imputation are inefficient at handling missing data. MI and FIML based approaches, when conducted correctly, provide equally compelling reductions in bias under a Missing at Random (MAR) mechanism. A discussion of statistical and time-based efficiency is also provided.
Sociology
Dissimilation: Shifting the Perspective on Migrant Outcomes
Nathan I. Hoffmann
Full text
Drawing on the fields of migration mechanisms, immigrant incorporation, and causal inference, this paper develops a dissimilation framework for estimating causal effects of migration on migrant outcomes. This framework quantifies how migrants become different from stay-at-homes in their countries of origin as they experience cultural change, material change, and a new set of public goods. Using flexible machine learning techniques, this paper applies this framework to academic test score data from the 2012, 2015, and 2018 Programme for Student Assessment, comparing 8,754 15-year-old migrants in 43 destination countries to 681,094 counterparts in 60 countries of origin. Overall, migrant students obtain lower scores on these exams than similar stay-at-homes, but children who migrate to wealthier countries with larger co-ethnic communities see positive effects of migrating. Despite their weaker performance than stay-at-homes, these migrants’ dissimilation results paint a rosier picture than assimilation-style comparisons to local non-migrants, where estimates are more negative.
Sociology
Homosexual Exclusions: Homonormativity, Elite Distinction, and Failed Assimilation in Pre-Nazi Germany
Andrew J Shapiro
Full text
Despite the Third Reich's efforts to rewrite German history, post-WWII scholars and activists have worked valiantly to unearth the inspiring legacies of Magnus Hirschfeld's Scientific Humanitarian Committee (WhK) before Nazi takeover. But by lionizing Hirschfeld, these same scholars/activists have too often erased (1) WhK’s limitations, (2) other, less savory competitor groups like the masculinist Community of the Self-Possessed (GdE) and collaborationist Human Rights League (BfM), and (3) surprisingly generative critiques put forth by these latter groups. In a comparative-historical analysis of WhK, GdE, and BfM organizers, I suggest that fin-de-siùcle German capitalism inculcated an illusory proximity to power that limited organizers' insights into bourgeois heteronormative German society and their precarious place within it. Despite criticizing some particulars, all of these activists nonetheless identified with and demonstrated adherence to classist models of normative Germanness by excluding other gender- and sexually-nonconforming people. WhK medicalists constructed themselves as upright, learned "homosexual" professionals against criminalized "pseudohomosexual" sex workers; GdE masculinists constructed their Hellenistic literary circle of enlightened "homoerotic" against crude, hypersexual, effeminate decadents. BfM homonormatives constructed themselves as respectable, everyday middle-class citizen-subjects against perverse, pathological, in-your-face activists. These attempts to gain inclusion at one another’s expense undermined their ability to work together and with other oppressed groups. Apart from a brief rapprochement, these competing groups constantly distinguished themselves from and denigrated one another. Hidden beneath this impulse is, to borrow from current discourse about Trump supporters, a sense of being “temporarily embarrassed elites" that obscured friend from foe and obscured their extreme vulnerability to the coming storm of fascist reaction. I conclude by bringing the strengths and limitations of these three groups to bear on the current fascist, genocidal moment, suggesting that learning from their mistakes and capitalizing on their strengths is essential for bringing about a non-fascist movement, society, and world.
Sociology
Rethinking Repeatability in Observational Social Science
Jonathan Ben-Menachem, Ari Galper, Nic Fishman
Full text
Sociology has remained relatively insulated from debates about the ‘replication crisis.’ Heeding calls to consider replication more deeply, we introduce a distinction between two types of research reforms that have emerged in the wake of the crisis: specification-restricting reforms and specification-expanding reforms. Specification-restricting reforms—the more popular of the two—aim to increase the repeatability of research findings by controlling false positives. We show how these reforms’ internal logic breaks down outside of randomized experiments; in observational contexts, they risk enshrining fragile or misspecified models. We further argue that the premise of these reforms is flawed. Replication rates cannot be reduced to the purported prevalence of false positive findings. In their place, we propose a replication framework centered on specification-expanding reforms, stronger incentives for confirmatory research, and meta-analysis. This approach equips sociology to assess the repeatability of findings and build a more cumulative discipline.
Sociology
Moral Citizenship of Care in India: Testing the Boundary of a Western Theory of Philanthropy
John CH Godfrey
Full text
This paper demonstrates that Paul Schervish and colleagues’ theoretical modelling of philanthropic behaviour is applicable outside its original US boundary. The research uses empirical data collected from interviews with elite Indian philanthropists to test whether this theory can be extended to Indian elite philanthropy. The paper initially proposes that the Schervish model is the most appropriate for this test of the theories currently developed for understanding the values, beliefs, and motives of elite philanthropists. Testing against the data from India found that it was a suitable model for understanding the philanthropic behaviour of the Indian elite, and could be considered by fundraisers and policy makers globally.
Sociology
The political ecology of biogas generation in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Value extraction in and around agriculture substrates
Samadhi Lipari
Full text
This paper discusses the extraction, distribution, and accumulation of surplus value in and around industrial scale biogas from agricultural substrata in eastern Germany, as a case of “green” capitalism. Specifically, it builds on the findings of an eight-month case study in the lĂ€nder of Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommer, between May 2018 and January 2019. The paper develops a value and class analysis showing that investing in “green” energy generation in a marginal area or territory can be an effective accumulation strategy aimed at capturing sustained value streams from public subsidisation while keeping costs low thanks to land cheapness and concentration. This type of strategies, the paper argues, imply the use of land as a financial asset and its incorporation within value extraction chains at multiple scales.
Sociology
Complicity of the Oppressed: A Socially Patterned Defect that Reproduces Inequality
Andrew J Shapiro
Full text
The workers of the world have not united. In three successive elections, white workers in the US voted for Donald Trump, many hoping that he would deport immigrant workers who were “taking their jobs.” A century earlier, US labor unions regularly disparaged and excluded Black and Asian workers from their ranks and later berated them as strikebreakers. In anti-oppression movements globally, infighting and backstabbing are rampant: western leftist coalitions have been coopted and pacified by centrist party machines while the center of mainstream politics shifts sharply to the right; Third World revolutions have given way to despotic postcolonial governments that punch down at indigenous people, racial/ethnic minorities, women, and queer people; and once-victims of genocide have today become perpetrators. Why is it so hard for oppressed peoples to come together in solidarity and sustain movements for change? What role do oppressed groups play in oppressing others, and what role can we all play in bringing forth emancipatory political alternatives? Questions like these have been raised by social psychologists and Marxist organizers, black feminists and social movement theorists. Answers, however, too often fail to make connections across academic literatures and levels of analysis. Some blame capitalist ideology, while others blame material conditions, and still others point to psychological predispositions. Erich Fromm, I argue, offers a way out of the impasse. More than most, Fromm explored why and how people act contrary to rational self-interest. Why did the German masses choose Nazism over Marxian class solidarity? Why did the US populace allow itself to be taken in by mediocre consumerism? To answer both questions, Fromm suggests that our fundamental human need for relatedness leads us to seek social acceptance by conforming to the dominant character of our society. Individual personalities are brought into alignment with the wider character structure by way of social filters that inculcate some traits and suppress others. Unhealthy societies tend to produce similarly unhealthy relational patterns, which Fromm terms socially-patterned defects, while repressing more productive orientations. Putting Fromm—and those he influenced, like Paulo Freire and bell hooks—into conversation with Marx, Foucault, Collins, and others, I develop a model of complicity of the oppressed wherein marginalized people seek to elevate themselves by cooperating in the oppression of others. Insofar as capitalism fosters competition and filters out solidaristic tendencies, marginalized people tend to choose narrow self-advancement over broad movements for change. Complicity of the oppressed is a socially-patterned defect, a byproduct of intersecting oppressions that turn people against one another. The challenge, then, is to readjust our filters toward love and solidarity.
Sociology
Diskriminierung von Konsument:innen in Deutschland. Eine Bestandsaufnahme
Matthias Schneider, Friederike Rosenbaum
Full text
Der vorgelegte Bericht untersucht kritisch den Zusammenhang zwischen Konsum und Diskriminierung in Deutschland. Auf Basis eines systematischen Desk Reviews werden neun marktbezogene Sektoren (Arbeits‑ und Wohnungsmarkt, Gesundheit, Finanzdienstleistungen, Einzelhandel, MobilitĂ€t, digitale MĂ€rkte, algorithmische Systeme sowie Freizeit‑ und Kulturangebote) analysiert. Dabei stĂŒtzt sich die Studie auf soziologische Diskriminierungstheorien und intersektionale AnsĂ€tze, um die Wechselwirkungen von Macht‑ und Ungleichheitsstrukturen im Konsum zu verstehen. Die Autor:innen konstatieren eine dĂŒnne empirische Datenlage: Konsum und Diskriminierung werden kaum gemeinsam untersucht, weshalb der Bericht vor allem qualitative Befunde aus Antidiskriminierungsstellen und NGOs synthetisiert. Er zeigt, dass Benachteiligungen entlang von Alter, Behinderung, Geschlecht, sexueller IdentitĂ€t, Herkunft, Staatsangehörigkeit und Religion in allen betrachteten MĂ€rkten auftreten. Diskriminierung Ă€ußert sich interaktional, ökonomisch und strukturell‑technologisch, was sich in emotionalen Belastungen, eingeschrĂ€nkter Kaufkraft und reduziertem Vertrauen niederschlĂ€gt. Zugleich bestehen erhebliche rechtliche und institutionelle SchutzlĂŒcken: Das Allgemeine Gleichbehandlungsgesetz ist fĂŒr Verbraucher:innen schwer durchsetzbar, Beratungsstellen verfĂŒgen ĂŒber begrenztes Wissen, und ein Verbandsklagerecht fehlt. Der Bericht schließt mit der Forderung nach einer integrierten Verbraucher:innenforschung und‑politik, die Diskriminierung als sozialen und ökonomischen Faktor ernst nimmt und strukturelle Barrieren – insbesondere in digitalen und algorithmischen Kontexten – abbaut.
Sociology
Staying on in Education: Longitudinal Comparisons of Young People’s First Transition in Britain using Cohort and Synthetic Cohort Data
Scott Oatley, Vernon Gayle, Roxanne Connelly
Full text
This paper investigates the changing role of young people’s transition to adulthood. We investigate young people’s first major transition from school-to-work. We accomplish this by studying a young person’s transitionary pathway at age 16 – to stay on within education or to leave it. This paper compares five birth cohorts that range from 1974-2013 to investigate the longitudinal comparisons of young people’s first transition to adulthood. We find evidence of remarkable social change across British youth. Historically, a young person’s first transition was characterised as a heavily stratified transitionary experience that saw individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds less likely to stay within education. Time has degraded these stratifying influences. Social inequalities such as sex, housing tenure, and social class have continued to decline in their influence during this period of transition. Educational Attainment has continued to have an effect – though it has weakened severely. The single largest impact on a young person staying on within education is now the cohort in which they are born in. Our paper has for the first time extended the investigation of youth across the entire mid-20th century using longitudinal social survey data. The changes that young people experienced during the 1980s have been solidified and furthered in the 1990s onwards.
Sociology
Gradational gender identification across European gender regimes
Pia Schober, Marie-Fleur Philipp, Silke BĂŒchau
Full text
By using mostly binary measures of individuals’ sex or gender category, most existing quantitative social science literature has underestimated variations in gender self-concepts among cisgender individuals as well as increasing transgender or non-binary identifications. Some recent mostly non-representative studies from the US, Germany and Sweden have proposed novel gradational measures based on self-rating of masculinity and femininity. We extend these studies by systematically exploring how gender identification and self-perceived (non-)conformity relate to gender socialisation and performance in different domains as well as to gender equality in political, economic and normative dimensions across European regions. We draw on European Social Survey data collected in 2023/24 and apply multi-level regression models for 37,587 individuals across 199 regions of 26 European countries. The results show the expected associations of gender identification and non-conformity with bodily characteristics and personality traits, regional gender regimes and partly with relationships but not with labour market- and care-related aspects. We find some systematic variation in these associations across gender regimes pointing to altered meanings of masculinity and femininity. On the whole, gradational measures of gender identification are promising to include in future quantitative studies to complement gender category and domain-specific beliefs but contextual comparisons require adjustments to improve comparability.
Sociology
The Relationship Between Political Orientation and Childbearing in Western Europe
INVEST Flagship, Erik Carlsson
Full text
In recent years, prominent politicians and commentators have attributed low and declining fertility to values associated with the political left, such as social liberalism, feminism, and secularism. Exploring how political orientation relates to childbearing can improve the understanding of the role values play in contemporary fertility patterns. Yet, empirical evidence on this relationship remains limited. This study examines how multiple dimensions of political orientation relate to the achieved number of children among individuals aged 40-79 in 16 Western European countries, using data from round 9 of the European Social Survey (collected in 2018-2020). A significant positive association between right-leaning self-placement on the left/right scale and fertility is found in Finland, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Spain, whereas the association is non-significant in the other 12 countries. Social conservatism is positively associated with fertility in most countries, whereas economic egalitarianism, immigrant hostility, and pro-environmentalism are, in most cases, not significantly related to fertility. The strongest associations between party preference and fertility appear in Finland and Spain, where voters for right-wing parties tend to have more children than voters for left-wing parties. In half of the examined countries, voters for conservative or Christian democratic parties have significantly more children than voters from at least one leftist or liberal/centrist party family. However, several countries show no significant fertility differences by party preference. Overall, the findings highlight substantial variation in the relationship between political orientation and fertility, across countries and across different dimensions of political and value orientation. Keywords: political preferences, fertility, value orientation, social conservatism, nationalism, climate change, environment, European Social Survey
Sociology
Effekte der Preiserhöhung des Deutschlandtickets auf die Nachfrage und Verkehrsmittelnutzung
Claudia Schmiedeberg, Felix Ries, Jette Schröder
Full text
Das Deutschlandticket gilt als eine der bedeutendsten Innovationen der jĂŒngeren Verkehrspolitik in Deutschland. Seit seiner EinfĂŒhrung 2023 hat es die Nutzung des öffentlichen Verkehrs stabilisiert und den Umstieg vom Auto gefördert. Mit der ersten Preiserhöhung von 49 auf 58 Euro im Januar 2025 stellt sich die Frage, wie empfindlich die Nachfrage auf PreisĂ€nderungen reagiert und welche Auswirkungen sich auf das MobilitĂ€tsverhalten ergeben. Basierend auf Daten des Deutschen Umweltpanels GLEN, einer deutschlandweiten Befragung zu Umweltverhalten, analysiert diese Studie die Folgen der Preiserhöhung von 49 auf 58 Euro fĂŒr den Ticketbesitz und die Verkehrsmittelnutzung. Die Daten wurden unmittelbar vor und nach der Preiserhöhung erhoben und erlauben eine direkte Messung der VerĂ€nderungen im Verhalten der Befragten. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass der Anteil erwachsener Personen mit Deutschlandticket von Dezember 2024 auf Januar 2025 um rund 1,5 Prozentpunkte sank, was einem RĂŒckgang um ca. 8 Prozent entspricht. Personen, die ihr Ticket nach der Preiserhöhung kĂŒndigten und zuvor regelmĂ€ĂŸig den ÖPNV genutzt hatten, verwenden das Auto anschließend im Durchschnitt an 2,7 Tagen pro Monat hĂ€ufiger, ohne ihre GesamtmobilitĂ€t einzuschrĂ€nken. Dagegen verringern seltene ÖPNV-Nutzer ihre GesamtmobilitĂ€t leicht. Insgesamt fĂŒhrt die beobachtete Verkehrsverlagerung zu zusĂ€tzlichen CO₂-Emissionen von rund 172.000 Tonnen jĂ€hrlich. Auch wenn die Effekte der Preiserhöhung damit deutlich geringer ausfallen als prognostiziert, verdeutlichen die Ergebnisse, dass Preissteigerungen beim Deutschlandticket das MobilitĂ€tsverhalten der Menschen verĂ€ndern und dessen soziale und ökologische Zielsetzungen gefĂ€hrden können.
Sociology
Age of Parent or Timing of Birth? Addressing the Challenge of Identifying and Interpreting Parental-Age Effects in Studies of Child Outcomes
Gordey Yastrebov
Full text
Do children of older parents do better because their parents are older, or because they are born into “better times”? Recent debates on parental age and offspring outcomes suggest that this analytical distinction is harder to make than it may seem, and that existing analyses attempting this do not resolve the identification problem. The problem is that any serious attempt to address confounding must condition on parents’ birth year, which makes parental age at birth and child birth year perfectly collinear. I contribute to these debates in two ways. First, I formalize a general mechanism: under flexible, nonparametric specifications, the joint effect of two linearly dependent dimensions is mechanically reallocated in favor of the relatively more finely measured dimension, while their idiosyncratic effects remain unidentified. Using NLSY79 Child and Young Adult Survey (NLSY-CY), I illustrate this mechanism focusing on children’s educational attainment in early adulthood. Second, I recast parental-age analyses based on the Generations and Gender Survey as an age-period-cohort-type identification problem and adapt Fosse and Winship’s recently developed bounding approach to obtain partial but transparent identification of parental-age and child–birth-year effects on educational outcomes in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Across a wide range of plausible assumptions, child-birth-year effects are non-trivial but cannot convincingly account for the key features of parenthood-age gradients, particularly the net advantages of later parenthood. Taken together, these findings add nuance to interpretations that period improvements largely explain delayed-parenthood advantages.
Sociology
The widening political divide over science
Philip N. Cohen
Full text
Gauchat (2012) reported that political conservatives in the United States lost confidence in the scientific community from the 1970s to 2010, but political liberals and moderates did not. As a result, a political divide opened up so that by 2010 conservatives had the lowest level of confidence in science. This analysis extends the analysis through the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS). I find that political conservatives, Republicans, and Americans who attend religious services regularly, all report falling levels of confidence in the scientific community – and now moderates do as well. In the Trump era, with an assault on facts and truth defining the president and his party, the growing political divide over confidence in science seems likely to further undermine political processes that rely on common knowledge and understanding. This updates the original 2018 and 2020 versions of this paper with the 2024 GSS data.
Sociology
Tweeting migration: A decade of shifting sentiment across local areas of Great Britain
Matt Mason, Francisco Rowe
Full text
Public opinion towards migration increasingly shapes political discourse and policy agendas. Yet, traditional surveys lack spatial and temporal granularity needed to detect local variation and rapid shifts in sentiment. Leveraging a dataset of 925,000 tweets from 2013-2022, we examine how local contexts influence sentiment towards migration across Great Britain. Using natural language processing, we extract sentiment from tweets, linking them to demographic and socioeconomic characteristics at the district level. Our analysis reveals stark geographical divides: anti-migration sentiment is more prevalent in areas that are older, less diverse and with lower rates of higher education. We find an intensification of polarisation after the 2016 Brexit referendum, with rises in both pro- and anti-migration expression and identify short-term fluctuations in sentiment corresponding to real-world events. Contrary to group threat theory, we find no association between short-term migration and negative sentiment. Instead, long-term demographic factors – particularly the presence of migrants – are positively associated with sentiment, supporting contact-based explanations. By capturing both the structural and dynamic dimensions of migration sentiment, we advance understanding of how local contexts mediate public sentiment. These findings demonstrate the value of digital trace data in complementing surveys and offer a methodological blueprint for future research.
Sociology
Partnership penalties for working in gender-atypical occupations? Observational and experimental evidence from Germany
Lena Hipp, Sandra Leumann, Pia Schober
Full text
Does your job affect your dating prospects—and could these dating penalties contribute to persistent gender inequalities in the labor market? This study examines whether working in a gender-atypical occupation reduces individuals’ chances of finding a different-sex romantic partner and whether people anticipate such disadvantages. Drawing on three complementary studies in Germany—including analyses of nationally representative survey data (Study 1), a dating app field experiment (Study 2), and a choice experiment conducted on a national probability sample (Study 3)—we find the following: Women and men in gender-atypical jobs are less likely to be partnered; having a gender-atypical job causally reduces dating success for moderately attractive individuals; and young, highly educated women anticipate these “occupational partnership penalties.” These results suggest that romantic considerations contribute to gender segregation in the workplace as occupational choices may not just be shaped by wages and interests but also by hidden social costs.
Sociology
School Choice in Italy between Family Preferences and School Characteristics
Matteo Piolatto, Gabriele Ballarino, Emmanuele Pavolini
Full text
This paper investigates the matching process between pupils and schools for lower secondary schools in Italy by taking into account the characteristics of both families and schools, and the way they interact in school choices. It uses a brand new and unique database, including individual-level, geo-referenced data for students’ residence and school location, as well as information concerning the characteristics of both parents and schools. First, we ask which is the impact of home-school distance in school choice. Second, we investigates the role of family background in terms of social class and education. Third, we test whether school characteristics in terms of inputs (composition) and outputs (performance) play a role in shaping family preferences. Our findings highlight the several factors influencing lower secondary school choice in Italy, pointing especially at the role of home-school distance and family background (social class and parental education). Finally, school’s characteristics appear to affect significantly only the choices adopted by middle and upper classes.
Sociology