The 10 most-cited articles in American Journal of Sociology, 2023

Integration into the international community is typically used to explain liberal outcomes. However, is it possible that such integration can also explain rising illiberalism? Using the case of LGBT+ rights, I argue that backlash to liberal norms is increasingly organized transnationally and that exposure to global norms via integration explains both liberal and illiberal outcomes. I test this argument through extensive original data collection and by using time-series cross-section, multinomial, and cross-lagged panel models. Robust findings reveal how exposure to global norms spurs policy backlashes—not just expansions—depending on how countries are situated within pro- and anti-LGBT+ transnational networks. This study contributes to our understanding of the changing international system by revealing how illiberal actors use mechanisms built by the liberal international community to transnationally organize and advance illiberal norms—ultimately fueling the deinstitutionalization of once-dominant liberal models.

The Trump administration and its supporters were quick to decry the federal civil service as a “deep state” thwarting the president’s agenda. Yet most research describes the career corps as loyal to mission, risk averse, and rarely partisan. Our research asks whether this characterization holds under conditions of budding autocracy and efforts to dismantle the administrative state. Our case study uses data collected over 2017–20 and finds that, despite widespread dissatisfaction with the Trump administration, most civil servants largely sought to comply at work, circumscribed by their conceptions of activities as appropriately within the scope of their mandates. When resistance did occur, it cohered with institutional and professional imperatives. Meanwhile, incentives to exit increased. Our research complicates the conceptual difference between “resistance” and “complicity” under repressive political leadership by underscoring the processes through which bureaucrats make sense of and act in as they negotiate multiple loyalties to personal and professional values, norms and…

The authors use administrative data linked to parish records from northern Sweden to study how persistent inequality is across multiple generations in education, occupation, and wealth, going from historical to contemporary time. The data cover seven generations and allow the authors to follow ancestors of individuals living in Sweden around the new millennium back more than 200 years, covering the mid-18th century to the 21st century. In a sample of around 75,000 traceable descendants, they analyze (a) up to fifth cousin correlations and (b) dynastic correlations over seven generations based on aggregations of ancestors’ social class/status. With both approaches, the authors find that past generations structure life chances many generations later, even though the results align with traditional stratification research in that mobility across multiple generations is high. The results imply that today’s inequality regime may have been formed many generations back.

Social movements must mobilize participation from bystanders to survive, yet there is little research on how bystanders’ evaluations of social movements predict their likelihood to join. Charles Tilly offered a four-part theoretical “scorecard” by which people evaluate movements: worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment. The authors created a novel and psychometrically valid measure (WUNC-12) and then used three online experiments to test its predictive validity for participatory action. They found broad support for WUNC as a mediating mechanism and show that WUNC perceptions are correlated with impressions of the legitimacy and efficacy of a movement. Finally, they found that movements that simultaneously signal a single-issue focus and the presence of a demographically heterogeneous set of members elicit greater WUNC perceptions and higher intentions to mobilize. With these results taken together, the authors demonstrate how social movement signaling translates into WUNC perceptions, which in turn mediate how signaling leads to social movement support and mobilization.

It is widely hypothesized that neighborhood effects on academic achievement are explained by differences in the quality of schools attended by resident children. The authors evaluate this hypothesis using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study and a diverse set of measures to capture a school’s effectiveness, resources, and climate. They implement a novel decomposition that separates the overall effect of neighborhood poverty into components due to mediation versus interaction via these different factors. Results indicate that living in a disadvantaged neighborhood reduces academic achievement. But the authors find little evidence that neighborhood effects are mediated by or interact with any of their measures for school quality. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for theory, research, and policy, addressing the link between concentrated poverty and educational inequality.

This article advances the moral philosophical concept of supererogation as a sociological process through which organizational action outstrips externally imposed evaluative demands. It illuminates this process by following 200 nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area from 2002 to 2016, when they became subject to myriad accountability obligations. Interviews, surveys, and content analyses show that nonprofits chafed against compulsory reporting and evaluative standards, regarding them as ill-suited to their work and goals. Contrary to current perspectives in organizational theory, however, nonprofits neither minimized external scrutiny nor conformed to external criteria. Instead, they disclosed more information than required. Despite nonprofits’ misgivings about oversight obligations, they nevertheless identified with the broader ideal of accountability these demands represented. Navigating this tension, nonprofits repurposed newly salient evaluative practices as tools through which unique goals and values could be given facticity. Through supererogation, nonprofits surpassed mere…

Millennials are often assumed to be economically worse off than previous generations because of more precarious employment and unstable family lives. Using sequence analysis and unconditional quantile decomposition, we analyze the work and family trajectories of late baby boomers and early millennials and relate them to wealth holdings at age 35. We find that the poorest millennials have less wealth than their baby boomer counterparts, but the wealthiest millennials have more. Millennials are less likely to enter high-status occupations and are more likely to work in low-skilled service jobs, and family trajectories show a strong decline of traditional early marriage and parenthood; however, changes in life course trajectories cannot account for the increase in wealth inequality. Instead, the distribution of wealth has become more unequal because the economic returns to typical middle-class trajectories have increased, while the returns to typical working-class trajectories have stagnated or declined.

Ethnic boundary crossing takes two different forms that have distinct triggers, traits, and potential outcomes: transitory crossing, which is typically short-term, reversible, and triggered by microcontextual cues, and durable crossing, which is a longer-lasting, gradual process motivated by macropolitical forces such as social movements and government policies. This theoretical distinction helps explain the unexpected growth in the long stigmatized self-identified indigenous population in Mexico, which has tripled since 2000. Using a demographic projection model, the authors find that natural demographic processes contributed little to this sudden growth. Instead, using experimental and census data, they find that transitory crossing into the indigenous category was activated by phrasing changes to the 2010 census identification question. The authors theorize that durable crossing is being simultaneously activated by the growing salience of the indigenous movement and the Mexican government’s embrace of multiculturalism. These political factors appear to be shaping the social…

Contact theory predicts that interethnic exposure reduces antiminority discrimination. By contrast, conflict theory predicts that interethnic exposure worsens discrimination. Received scope conditions, however, are vague and do not properly differentiate between the domains of the theories. Furthermore, prior evidence is mostly correlational, and supportive field experiments for contact theory have largely accrued in rarefied settings. This begs the question how interethnic contact affects interethnic relations in everyday situations. The authors test the causal effect of interethnic exposure on discrimination under quotidian conditions in a large preregistered randomized field experiment involving N=2,395 students in 39 Hungarian schools. The authors find that neither manipulating the closeness of interethnic exposure between students within classrooms nor variation in ethnic composition across grade levels affects antiminority discrimination. This indicates that the domains of contact and conflict theory are much narrower than previously thought. Interethnic contact may not affect…

Multilateral deliberations are important sites for structuring political relations between countries from the Global North and the Global South. While outcomes of deliberations often reaffirm relations of hegemony and dependence, recent studies demonstrate that marginal actors sometimes leverage international rules and norms to thwart dominant political rationales. Using summary reports of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meetings from 1995 to 2016, the authors leverage computational techniques to examine shifts in national delegates’ positionality and policy preoccupations in these negotiations. After talks briefly collapsed in 2009, traditionally weak nations emerged as subtle but influential players in setting the international climate agenda. The authors claim this surprising outcome is possible because marginal actors cultivated a specific style of deliberation that the authors call “persuading from the periphery.” Building from textual traces, the authors identify a repertoire of relational and discursive strategies these countries use to reconfigure…