Suchergebnisse

AbstractMany policymakers assume that children's neighbourhoods shape their career trajectories, but the facts are otherwise. Challenges: (1) Because many children in poor postcodes have disadvantaged families, modelling the causal influence of neighbourhood socioeconomic status (SES) requires a comprehensive set of control variables measuring family background. (2) Adults can choose where to live, so dwelling in a high SES postcode is partially a consequence of occupational success, not a cause. Hence, we must focus on childhood postcode SES. (3) Random measurement error in postcode SES can bias estimates. Data: Large, representative national samples from the International Social Science Survey/Australia. OLS and structural equation models. Correlations between a person's childhood postcode SES and their education, adult occupational status (which robustly measures job quality, social status and permanent income) and family income are all modest, around r = .15. Net of family background (fathers' occupational status, fathers' class, mothers' employment, parents' culture, ethnicity, demographics and respondent's IQ) multivariate analyses show that growing up in a low SES postcode is only a slight disadvantage, which arises entirely because children there get about half a year less education than comparable children in high SES postcodes. Otherwise, there is no statistically significant childhood postcode disadvantage in career opportunities.

Public attitudes toward immigrants in the UK, especially prejudice against them, form a strong theme in retrospective media postmortems emphasizing the uniqueness of Brexit, yet similarly hostile public opinion on immigrants forms a recurrent theme in populist politics in many European Union nations. Indeed, if UK residents are not uniquely hostile, then the UK's exit from the EU may be only the first symptom of proliferating conflicts over immigration that will plague EU nations in future years. A well-established symptom (or consequence) of prejudice—aversion to outgroups as a neighbors—shows that prejudice against immigrants, other races, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and Gypsies are all relatively low in the UK. This is as expected from the general decline of prejudice and social distance with socioeconomic development, demonstrated here in broad perspective across many countries. Indeed, UK residents are about as prejudiced against each of these ethno-religious outgroups as are their peers in other advanced EU and English-speaking nations, and much less prejudiced than their peers in less prosperous countries. Confirmatory factor analysis supports the view that a single latent ethno-religious prejudice generates all these specific prejudices, so it is not specific experiences with any one of these groups, nor their specific attributes, that are the wellspring of this deep-seated underlying prejudice. Replication using other measures of prejudice and another cross-national dataset confirms these findings. Data are from the pooled World and European Values Surveys (over 450,000 individuals, 300 surveys, and 100 nations for this analysis) and from the well-known European Quality of Life surveys. Analysis is by descriptive, multilevel (random intercept, fixed effects), and structural equation methods.

How tightly linked are the strength of a country's welfare state and its residents' support for income redistribution? Multilevel model results (with appropriate controls) show that the publics of strong welfare states recognize their egalitarian income distributions, i.e., the stronger the welfare state, the less the actual and perceived inequality; but they do not differ from their peers in liberal welfare states/market-oriented societies in their preferences for equality. Thus, desire for redistribution bears little overall relationship to welfare state activity. However, further investigation shows a stronger relationship under the surface: Poor people's support for redistribution is nearly constant across levels of welfarism. By contrast, the stronger the welfare state, the less the support for redistribution among the prosperous, perhaps signaling "harvest fatigue" due to paying high taxes and longstanding egalitarian policies. Our findings are not consistent with structuralist/materialist theory, nor with simple dominant ideology or system justification arguments, but are partially consistent with a legitimate framing hypothesis, with an atomistic self-interest hypothesis, with a reference group solidarity hypothesis, and with the "me-and-mine" hypothesis incorporating sociotropic and egotropic elements. Database: the World Inequality Study: 30 countries, 71 surveys, and over 88,0000 individuals.

Exposure to books and high culture provides important academic advantages. But the reasons for this are hotly disputed. Elite closure theory posits that culture merely signals children's elite status to gatekeepers who then grant them unjust advantages. But other theories suggest that scholarly culture provides cognitive skills that improve academic performance, which schools justly reward. We attempt to adjudicate between these theories using data on academic performance from 42 national samples with 200,144 cases from OECD's PISA. We find that a key aspect of scholarly culture, the number of books in the family home, exerts a strong influence on academic performance in ways consistent with the cognitive skill hypothesis, regardless of the nation's ideology, political history, or level of development.

Exposure to books and high culture provides important academic advantages. But the reasons for this are hotly disputed. Elite closure theory posits that culture merely signals children's elite status to gatekeepers who then grant them unjust advantages. But other theories suggest that scholarly culture provides cognitive skills that improve academic performance, which schools justly reward. We attempt to adjudicate between these theories using data on academic performance from 42 national samples with 200,144 cases from OECD's PISA. We find that a key aspect of scholarly culture, the number of books in the family home, exerts a strong influence on academic performance in ways consistent with the cognitive skill hypothesis, regardless of the nation's ideology, political history, or level of development.

How does population size affect social life? In accord with Durkheim's classic argument about the shift from the rigid "mechanical" solidarity of small societies to the more differentiated and interdependent "organic" solidarity of large societies, data from 30 nations and 19,568 respondents shows that the citizenry of large societies prefer more inequality in earnings than do citizens of small societies, net of the level of economic development. One reason for this is that citizens of large countries support larger rewards for education and occupational success. In most societies, the actual level of inequality is close to the ideal level, or a little higher. Data are from the World Inequality Study, which pools data from many excellent international survey projects; analysis is by OLS and multi-level regression.

This paper investigates subjective social status using data from surveys collected from representative nationwide samples in 21 countries (N = 50,955). We find that in all societies there is a pronounced tendency to see oneself as being in the middle of the social hierarchy; that this tendency holds among those at the top & at the bottom of the educational distribution, as well as among those actually in the middle; & that this tendency holds in rich nations as well as poor ones. The objective position of individuals, the wealth of nations, & the national level of unemployment all have substantial effects on subjective status. But their effects are muted by the tendency to see oneself as being in the middle of the hierarchy. This has important implications for class identity & democracy. 4 Tables, 2 Figures, 92 References. Adapted from the source document.

Australians have reservations about formal childcare which have some impact on their approval of maternal employment, although concerns about deleterious effects of employment on mothering have an even stronger impact.

What brings credit & prestige to a nation in the eyes of its citizens? Taking a multidimensional approach, we investigate national pride in the country's science, economy, arts, literature, & sport. Data from the International Social Survey Programme's 24 nation "National Identity" module show that people throughout the developed world feel national pride in all these things, contrary to most globalization hypotheses. Pride in the economy shows the most variation among nations, & pride in science also varies greatly, while pride in the arts & literature, & in sport vary less. Regression analyses show that linkages of pride to national attachment also vary cross-culturally: pride in science is more consequential in English-speaking countries but pride in arts less consequential; pride in sports matters especially in smaller nations; & pride in economic achievements matters everywhere. 6 Tables, 124 References. Adapted from the source document.

Class has long been the preeminent source of political conflict in industrial society, but its electoral influence has declined in recent years. The sources of the decline are not yet firmly established, and moreover the implications for political parties remain unclear. The decline-of-class hypothesis states that parties on the left will decline as the working class becomes more affluent and adopts middle-class styles of conduct. By contrast, the party-appeals hypothesis suggests that as the electorate becomes more middle class, parties of the left will alter their appeals to encompass the growing middle class and so offset the shrinkage of their traditional working-class constituency. This article applies multivariate anaysis to survey data collected in England between 1964 and 1979 to test four specific hypotheses derived from the two scenarios. The results support the decline-of-class theory's prediction that economic development erodes the working-class bases of left-wing parties, but not its claim that the left-wing party's vote declines proportionately. Rather, the results suggest that parties are apparently able to change their appeals to reduce their losses, as argued by the party-appeals theory, but not to eliminate them. It seems that there are restraints on parties' ability to change their appeals, limitations not envisioned by the party appeals theory.