Papers

Everyday Conversations About Economic Inequality: A Research Agenda
Sociology Compass 18(9): 1-12 (with David Schieferdecker, Susanne Reinhardt, Graziella Moraes Silva, Chana Teeger, Flavio Carvalhaes, and Jeremy Seekings)

High and rising levels of economic inequality come at a tremendous cost to societies, yet the public is often hesitant to confront these inequalities. Prior research has attempted to explain this paradox, pointing to how it is driven by individuals' misperceptions of the extent of inequality, broader narratives that justify inequality, and distrust in government intervention and redistribution. These beliefs and attitudes are not simply a reflection of individual predispositions; they are also a product of societal debates. The limited scholarship on such debates has focused on elite discourse, examining how discussions about inequality unfold among people in positions of power in formalized contexts such as parliaments or the media. Most of this research has been conducted in the Global North. We know very little about how ordinary people talk about economic inequality, especially in the Global South. Everyday conversations about economic inequality deserve more scholarly attention because of their distinct form and extensive range, covering diverse voices and social situations. They reflect how societies struggle with economic inequality and how some groups are silenced, while others have their voices amplified. Finally, conversations may affect opinion formation differently than unidirectional exposure to information. This article reviews the literature and sets out a research agenda to comprehensively study how ordinary people talk about economic inequality in various contexts.

click for PDF | doi: 10.1111/soc4.70001

Inequality Belief Systems: What They Look Like, How to Study Them, and Why They Matter
Social Indicators Research 174(2): 445-472 (with Arturo Bertero and Gonzalo Franetovic)

This paper purports to enrich the burgeoning field of research on the content of people’s beliefs about inequality by studying the structure of these beliefs. We develop a theoretical and methodological framework that combines Correlational Class Analysis and Exploratory Graph Analysis, and we test it empirically with original survey data collected in the United States and the Netherlands (n = 2,501 and 1,618). Using CCA, we identify groups of individuals who share construals of inequality, while EGA allows us to model these structures as inequality belief systems, which are networks of perceptions, explanations and attitudes about inequality. Results reveal the presence of two distinct belief systems in each country. These systems exhibit structural differences and are related to different sociodemographic factors in the U.S. and the Netherlands. Moreover, we show that inequality belief systems are more socially patterned in the former country. Finally, we demonstrate that belief systems, in both countries, are associated with different levels of support for redistribution. We discuss the significance of our findings for the politics of inequality and stress that overlooking attitudinal structures impedes a full understanding of people’s views on inequality and their support for redistribution.

click for PDF | doi: 10.1007/s11205-024-03352-5 | supplementary materials | replication files

Towards a sociology of recurrent events. Constellations of cultural change around Eurovision in 18 countries (1981–2021)
Poetics (with Luca Carbone, Thijsvan Dooremalen and Stijn Daenekindt)

Sociologists usually conceptualize events as unexpected occurrences bringing about long-lasting transformations of social structures. Following this definition, most empirical studies of events focus on pre/post-measurement strategies. Yet not all events are unexpected (e.g., Eurovision, Oscar nominations, the Olympics). Moreover, pre/post-measurements cannot capture the temporality in which meaning-making processes unfold nor account for the overlap between various events. We address these shortcomings by introducing the concept of ‘recurrent events,’ defined as events occurring with regular and recurrent cadence, charging collective effervescence and anticipation among audiences. Drawing from resonance theory, we conceptualize constellations of cultural change happening around recurrent events. We provide an empirical proof-of-concept, focusing on the case of the Eurovision Song Contest. To do so, we build a unique dataset of Eurovision lyrics and public attitudes in 18 European countries between 1981 and 2021 to study the relationships between attitudes about sexual and gender identity and national identity and the corresponding narratives presented at Eurovision. Our findings complicate common assumptions about the duality of events, by highlighting six different configurations of cultural change. We demonstrate how the concept of recurrent events contributes to the literature on events, consider the theoretical and methodological implications, and provide recommendations for future research.

click for PDF | doi: 10.1016/j.poetic.2024.101889 | Replication data & code

How Segregation Ruins Inference: A Sociological Simulation of the Inequality Equilibrium
Social Forces (with Adaner Usmani)

Why do many people underestimate economic and racial inequality and maintain that theirs is a meritocratic society? Existing work suggests that people are rationalizing, misinformed, or misled. This article proposes an additional explanation: Inequality itself makes economic and racial disparities difficult to understand. In unequal societies, individuals establish their networks at formative institutions patterned by class and race. As a result, they unwittingly condition on key causal pathways when making descriptive and causal inferences about inequality. We use a simple agent-based model to show that, under circumstances typical to highly stratified societies, individuals will underestimate the extent of economic and racial inequality, downplay the importance of inherited advantages, and overestimate the relative importance of individual ability. Moreover, we show that they will both underestimate the extent of racial discrimination and overestimate its relative importance. Because segregated social worlds bias inference in these ways, all individuals (rich and poor) have principled reasons to favor less redistribution than they would if their social worlds were more integrated.

click for PDF | doi: 10.1093/sf/soae033 | supplementary information | replication files

Does informing citizens about the non-meritocratic nature of inequality bolster support for a universal basic income? Evidence from a population-based survey experiment
European Societies (with Thijs Lindner, Willem de Koster and Jeroen van der Waal)

Despite citizens’ precarization and policymakers’ enthusiasm for a universal basic income (UBI), this alternative to targeted welfare has, curiously, received limited popular support. We theorize that this is due to people overestimating society’s meritocratic nature. Accordingly, we field a randomized survey experiment with a representative sample of the Dutch population (n = 1,630) to investigate the impact of information provision about the non-meritocratic nature of wealth and ethnic inequality on support for a UBI. Informed by extant research indicating that citizens respond differently to the same information because of material circumstances or different worldviews, we further estimate conditional average treatment effects to explore moderation by (1) income, (2) economic egalitarianism, (3) welfare chauvinism and (4) institutional trust. We find that support for a UBI is higher among individuals with lower incomes and those who are more egalitarian and less welfare chauvinistic. Nonetheless, while exposure to our factual treatment makes participants more concerned about inequality and supportive of economic redistribution in general, it neither directly nor conditionally affects their support for a UBI. Our findings suggest that a UBI may be deemed too radical an approach to addressing inequality. We discuss theoretical and policy implications and provide suggestions for future research.

click for PDF | doi: 10.1080/14616696.2023.2272263 (open access) | supplementary materials | replication package

Confronting Racism of Omission. Experimental Evidence of the Impact of Information about Ethnic and Racial Inequality in the United States and the Netherlands
Du Bois Review (with Nikki Huang and Will Regan)

The COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement have brought ethnic and racial inequalities to the forefront of public conversation on both sides of the Atlantic. However, research shows that people routinely overestimate the progress made towards equality and underestimate disparities between racial and ethnic majority and minority groups. Common among the American public is a naive belief in equal opportunity that stands in sharp contrast to the reality of structural racial inequity. Across the Atlantic, Dutch people’s self-perception of a tolerant, progressive, and egalitarian society means that racism and discrimination are topics often avoided, rendering invisible the stigmatization of ethnic and racial minorities. The result is racism of omission: ethnic and racial disparities are minimized and attributed to factors other than discrimination, which leads to legitimize inequities and justify non-intervention. Against this background, we field an internationally comparative randomized survey experiment to study whether (willful) ignorance about racial and ethnic inequality can be addressed through the provision of information. We find that facts about ethnic and racial inequality, on the whole, (1) have the greatest impact on people’s perceptions of inequality as compared to their explanations of inequality and policy attitudes, (2) register most strongly with majority-group White participants as compared to participants from minority groups, (3) cut across partisan lines, and (4) effect belief change most consistently in the Netherlands, as compared to the United States. We make sense of these findings through the lens of how ‘shocking’ the information provided was to different groups of participants.

click for PDF | doi: 10.1017/S1742058X23000140 (open access)

Learning About Inequality in Unequal America: How Heterogeneity in College Shapes Students’ Beliefs About Meritocracy and Racial Discrimination
Research in Stratification and Social Mobility 85

As Western nations are increasingly divided by socioeconomic fault lines, how do we learn about the lives of others? Scholarship documents correlates of inequality beliefs but lacks a theoretical framework for studying belief formation. This paper develops an “institutional inference” model describing how adolescents learn about inequality in racially and socioeconomically homogeneous or heterogeneous institutional contexts. The latter expose them to structural sources of inequality that they cannot see in the former. Testing theoretical expectations on ten panels of US college students (n = 141,597), I find that: (1) beliefs about meritocracy and racial inequality change substantially in college, (2) the direction of change is shaped by experiences with same-race or different-race roommates, (3) the impact of which is strongest on campuses that otherwise provide limited exposure to heterogeneity. The inferential process that links institutions to beliefs may help explain why Americans have not rallied against inequality: when growing inequality produces socioeconomically homogeneous settings, people cannot experience its full extent.

click for PDF | doi: 10.1016/j.rssm.2023.100814 (open access)

Income Inequality and Residential Segregation in “Egalitarian” Sweden: Lessons from a Least Likely Case
Sociological Science 10: 374-402 (with Selcan Mutgan)

Drawing on individual-level full-population data from Sweden, spanning four decades, we investigate the joint growth of income inequality and income segregation. We study Sweden as a “least likely” case comparison with the United States, given Sweden’s historically low levels of inequality and its comprehensive welfare state. Against the background of U.S.-based scholarship documenting a close link between inequality and segregation, our study provides an important insight into the universality of this relationship. Using entropy-based segregation measures, we analyze trends and patterns of income segregation between and within income groups along different sociodemographic dimensions—migration background and family type. Our findings reveal that growing income inequality in the last 30 years has been accompanied by a sharp uptake in income segregation, especially for the bottom quartile of the income distribution who are facing increasing isolation. Income segregation is most extensive for individuals with children in the household, among whom it has increased at a higher rate than those without children. Interestingly, income segregation is lower among non-Western minorities than among majority-group Swedes. We conclude that changes to the welfare state, liberalization of the housing market, and rapid demographic changes have led Sweden onto a path that is difficult to distinguish from that taken by the United States.

click for PDF | doi: 10.15195/v10.a12 (open access)

Observing Many Researchers Using the Same Data and Hypothesis Reveals a Hidden Universe of Uncertainty
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119 (44): 1-8 (with Breznau, Nate, Eike Mark Rinke, Alexander Wuttke … 165 authors)

This study explores how researchers’ analytical choices affect the reliability of scientific findings. Most discussions of reliability problems in science focus on systematic biases. We broaden the lens to emphasize the idiosyncrasy of conscious and unconscious decisions that researchers make during data analysis. We coordinated 161 researchers in 73 research teams and observed their research decisions as they used the same data to independently test the same prominent social science hypothesis: that greater immigration reduces support for social policies among the public. In this typical case of social science research, research teams reported both widely diverging numerical findings and substantive conclusions despite identical start conditions. Researchers’ expertise, prior beliefs, and expectations barely predict the wide variation in research outcomes. More than 95% of the total variance in numerical results remains unexplained even after qualitative coding of all identifiable decisions in each team’s workflow. This reveals a universe of uncertainty that remains hidden when considering a single study in isolation. The idiosyncratic nature of how researchers’ results and conclusions varied is a previously underappreciated explanation for why many scientific hypotheses remain contested. These results call for greater epistemic humility and clarity in reporting scientific findings.

click for PDF | doi: 10.1073/pnas.2203150119

Organizing a weak anti-prison movement? Surrogate representation and political pacification at a nonprofit prison reentry organization
Research on Social Movements, Conflicts and Change 46: 87-107

The nonprofit sector has come to deliver the majority of state-funded social services in the US. Citizens depend on nonprofit organizations for these services, and nonprofits depend on government for financial support. Scholars have begun to ask important questions about the political and civic implications of this new organizational configuration. These questions have direct ramifications for the anti-prison movement given the explosive growth of nonprofit prison reentry organizations in recent years. To see how such organizations may impact political engagement and social movements, this chapter turns its focus on the intricate dynamics of client-staff interactions. Leveraging a yearlong ethnography of a government-funded prison reentry organization, I describe how such organizations can be politically active and at the same time contribute to their clients’ political pacification. Staff members engaged in political activities in surrogate representation of their clients. While staffers advocated on their behalf, clients learned to avoid politics and community life, accept injustices for what they are, and focus instead on individual rehabilitation. By closely studying what goes on within a nonprofit service provider, I illustrate the nonprofit organization’s dual political role and its implications for social movements and political change.

click for PDF | doi: 10.1108/S0163-786X20220000046005

Merit and ressentiment: How to tackle the tyranny of merit
Theory and Research in Education 20(2): 173-181

My contribution to this special issue engages with Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit and its significance to the academic conversation about meritocracy and its discontents. Specifically, I highlight Sandel’s diagnosis of the rise of populism and his proposed remedy for the ‘tyranny of merit’. First, building on Menno ter Braak’s writings on the rise of fascism, I explore the sources of ressentiment in contemporary societies as stemming not from disillusionment with meritocracy but from the broken promise of liberalism and democracy more generally. Second, I consider Sandel’s proposals to reform elite university admissions and to ‘recognize work’, explore their wider applicability, and reflect on their limitations to meaningfully change how success and failure is socially experienced and morally understood.

click for PDF | doi: 10.1177/14778785221106837 (open access)

Deliberating Inequality: A Blueprint for Studying the Social Formation of Beliefs about Economic Inequality
Social Justice Research 35(4): 379-400 (with Kate Summers, Fabien Accominotti, Tania Burchardt, Katharina Hecht, and Liz Mann)

In most contemporary societies people underestimate the extent of economic inequality, resulting in lower support for taxation and redistribution than would be expressed by better informed citizens. We still know little, however, about where perceptions and misperceptions of inequality come from. This article takes an important step toward filling this gap by developing a research design to study how people’s beliefs about income and wealth inequality emerge from social interaction. Our approach combines insights from recent scholarship highlighting the socially situated character of inequality beliefs with those of survey experimental work testing how information about inequality changes people’s understandings of it. Specifically, we propose to use deliberative focus groups to replicate the interactional contexts in which individuals process information and form beliefs in real social life. Leveraging an experimental methodology, our design then varies the social makeup of deliberative groups, as well as the information about inequality we share with participants to explore how different types of social environments and information shape people’s perceptions of economic inequality. This lets us test, in particular, whether the low socioeconomic diversity of people’s discussion and interaction networks is to blame for their tendency to underestimate inequality, and whether beliefs about opportunity explain people’s lack of appetite for redistributive policies. In this exploratory article we motivate our methodological apparatus and describe its key features, before reflecting on the findings from a proof-of-concept study conducted in London in the fall of 2019.

click for PDF | doi: 10.1007/s11211-022-00389-0 (open access)

Adolescents' future in the balance of family, school, and the neighborhood: A multidimensional application of two theoretical perspectives
Social Science Quarterly 103(3):534-49 (with Jaap Nieuwenhuis)

Family, school and neighborhood contexts provide children with cultural resources that may foster their ambitions and bolster their academic performance. Reference group theory instead highlights how seemingly positive settings can depress educational performance as well as aspirations and expectations. We test these competing claims by drawing on data from the British Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (N=4,968). We find that, generally, childhood school and neighborhood deprivation is negatively associated with adolescents’ school performance, aspirations and expectations, in line with the cultural resource perspective. However, important exceptions to this pattern point to reference group processes for (1) children from low-educated parents, whose academic aspirations are especially low when they either went to an affluent school or lived in an affluent neighborhood—but not both, and (2) for children from highly-educated parents attending poor schools, whose realistic expectations of the future are higher than their peers in affluent schools.

click for PDF | doi: 10.1111/ssqu.13137 (open access)

Belief in meritocracy reexamined: Scrutinizing the role of subjective social mobility
Social Psychology Quarterly 85(2): 131-141 (in press) (with Stijn Daenekindt, Willem de Koster & Jeroen van der Waal)

Despite decreasing intergenerational mobility, strengthening the ties between family background and children’s economic outcomes, Western citizens continue to believe in meritocracy. We study how meritocratic beliefs about success relate to individuals’ social mobility experiences: is subjective upward mobility associated with meritocratic attributions of success, and downward mobility with structuralist views? Whereas previous studies addressed the relevance of individuals’ current position or objective mobility, we leverage Diagonal Reference Models to disentangle the role of subjective mobility, origin and destination. Surveying a representative Dutch sample (n = 1,507), we find, echoing the Thomas’ theorem, that if people experience social mobility as real, it is real in its consequences: subjective upward mobility is associated with stronger meritocratic beliefs and downward mobility is associated with stronger structuralist beliefs—but has no bearing on people’s meritocracy beliefs. This helps understand the muted political response to growing inequality: a small share of upwardly mobile individuals may suffice to uphold public faith in meritocracy.

click for PDF | doi: 10.1177/01902725211063818 (open access) | supplementary materials

Top 5 most downloaded article in SPQ in 2022, and featured on PodScholars

Sounds like meritocracy to my ears: exploring the link between inequality in popular music and personal culture
Information, Communication and Society 25(5): 707-25 (with Luca Carbone)

Extant research documents the impact of meritocratic narratives in news media that justify economic inequality. This paper inductively explores whether popular music is a source of cultural frames about inequality. We construct an original dataset combining user data from Spotify with lyrics from Genius and employ unsupervised computational text analysis to classify the content of the 3,660 most popular songs across 23 European countries. Drawing on Lizardo’s enculturation framework, we analyze lyrics through the lens of public culture and explore their link with individual beliefs as a reflection of personal culture. We find that, in more unequal societies, songs that frame inequalities as a structural issue (lyrics about ‘Struggle’ or omnipresent ‘Risks’) are more popular than those adopting a meritocratic frame (songs we describe as ‘Bragging Rights’ or those telling a ‘Rags to Riches’ tale). Moreover, we find that the presence in public culture of a certain frame is associated with the expression of frame-consistent individual beliefs about inequality. We conclude by reflecting on the promise of automatic text classification for the study of lyrics, the theorized role of popular music in the study of culture, and by proposing venues for future research.

click for PDF | doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2021.2020870 | replication data & code: osf.io/5427t

Belief change in times of crisis: Providing facts about COVID-19-induced inequalities closes the partisan divide but fuels Republican intra-partisan polarization about inequality
Social Science Research 104(1) (with Willem de Koster & Jeroen van der Waal)

Population-based survey research demonstrates that growing economic divides in Western countries have not gone together with increased popular concern about inequality. Extant explanations focus on ‘misperception’: people generally underestimate the extent of inequality and overestimate society's meritocratic nature. However, scholarly attempts to correct people's misperceptions have produced mixed results. We ask whether COVID-19, by upending everyday life, has made people responsive to information about inequality, even if that entails crossing ideological divides. We field an original survey experiment in the United States, a least-likely case of belief change, given high levels of inequality and partisan polarization. Our informational treatment increases (1) concerns over economic inequality, (2) support for redistribution, and (3) acknowledgement that COVID-19 has especially hurt the most vulnerable. Information provision renders non-significant the partisan gap between moderate Democrats and Republicans but increases that between moderate and strong Republicans. We discuss our findings' implications and suggestions for further research.

click for PDF | doi: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2021.102692 (open access) | replication data & code: osf.io/ub538

Featured on BuzzFeed and MarketWatch

Is America Coming Apart? Socioeconomic Segregation in Neighborhoods, Schools, Workplaces, and Social Networks, 1970 – 2020
Sociology Compass 15(6): 1-16 (with Elizabeth L. Roe)

As income inequality in the United States has reached an all‐time high, commentators from across the political spectrum warn about the social implications of these economic changes. America, they fear, is “coming apart” as the gap between the rich and poor grows into a fault line. This paper provides a comprehensive review of empirical scholarship in sociology, education, demography, and economics in order to address the question: How have five decades of growing economic inequality shaped America's social landscape? We find that growing levels of income inequality have been accompanied by increasing socioeconomic segregation across (1) friendship networks and romantic partners, (2) residential neighborhoods, (3) K‐12 and university education, and (4) workplaces and the labor market. The trends documented in this review give substance to commentators' concerns: compared to the 1970s, rich and poor Americans today are less likely to know one another and to share the same social spaces. The United States is a nation divided.

Featured in The Atlantic, Sociology Lens and on BuzzFeed, MarketWatch and Wisconsin Public Radio.

click for PDF | doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12884

How Information About Inequality Impacts Belief in Meritocracy: Evidence from a Randomized Survey Experiment in Australia, Indonesia and Mexico
Social Problems 69(1): 91-122 (with Christopher Hoy)

Most people misperceive economic inequality. Learning about actual levels of inequality and social mobility, research suggests, heightens concerns but may push people’s policy preferences in any number of directions. This mixed empirical record, we argue, reflects the omission of a more fundamental question: under what conditions do people change their understanding of the meritocratic or non-meritocratic causes of inequality? To explore mechanisms of belief change we field a unique randomized survey experiment with representative populations in Australia, Indonesia, and Mexico—societies with varying levels of and popular beliefs about economic inequality. Our results highlight the importance of information, perceived social position, and self-interest. In Indonesia, information describing (high) income inequality and (low) social mobility rocked our participants’ belief in meritocracy. The same information made less of a splash in Mexico, where unequal outcomes are commonly understood as the result of corruption and other non-meritocratic processes. In Australia, the impact of our information treatment was strongest when it provided justification for people’s income position or when it corrected their perception of relative affluence. Our findings reveal asymmetric beliefs about poverty and wealth and heterogeneous responses to information. They are a call to rethink effective informational and policy interventions.

Featured in Inequalities blog.

click for PDF | doi: 10.1093/socpro/spaa059 (open access)

Meritocracy, Elitism and Inequality
The Political Quarterly 91(2): 397-404 (with Mike Savage)

The appeal of meritocracy is plain to see because it appears to promote equality of opportunity. However, in this paper we argue that meritocracy is also a deeply elitist project. Firstly, we place Michael Young in context to show how his critique of meritocracy should be understood as a socialist vision to ameliorate class divides. Secondly, we show how economic inequality in the UK has not generated systematic resistance: in fact, inequality and belief in meritocracy have gone hand in hand. Thirdly, we argue that people see their own lives as meritocratic rather than ascribed, and that such values are deeply embedded in popular life. We offer two explanations for how such views have come about, and show how they have helped construct a more unequal society.

Featured in the NewStatesman and on the “Meritocracy” Wikipedia page

click for PDF | doi: 10.1111/1467-923X.12828

Earning Rent with Your Talent: Modern-Day Inequality Rests on the Power to Define, Transfer and Institutionalize Talent
Educational Philosophy and Theory 53(8): 810-18

In this article, I develop the point that whereas talent is the basis for desert, talent itself is not meritocratically deserved. It is produced by three processes, none of which are meritocratic: (1) talent is unequally distributed by the rigged lottery of birth, (2) talent is defined in ways that favor some traits over others, and (3) the market for talent is manipulated to maximally extract advantages by those who have more of it. To see how, we require a sociological perspective on economic rent. I argue that talent is a major means through which people seek rent in modern-day capitalism. Talent today is what inherited land was to feudal societies; an unchallenged source of symbolic and economic rewards. Whereas God sanctified the aristocracy’s wealth, contemporary privilege is legitimated by meritocracy. Drawing on the work of Gary Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jerome Karabel, I show how rent-seeking in modern societies has come to rely principally on rent-definition and creation. Inequality is produced by the ways in which talent is defined, institutionalized, and sustained by the moral deservingness we attribute to the accomplishments of talents. Consequently, today’s inequalities are as striking as ever, yet harder to challenge than ever before.

click for PDF | doi: 10.1080/00131857.2020.1745629

Do changes in material circumstances drive support for populist radical parties? Panel data evidence from The Netherlands during the Great Recession, 2007–2015
European Sociological Review 35(5): 637-50 (with Noam Gidron)

Political developments since the 2008 financial crisis have sparked renewed interest in the electoral implications of economic downturns. Research describes a correlation between adverse economic conditions and support for radical parties campaigning on the populist promise to retake the country from a corrupt elite. But does the success of radical parties following economic crises rely on people who are directly affected? To answer this question, we examine whether individual-level changes in economic circumstances drive support for radical parties across the ideological divide. Analyzing eight waves of panel data collected in The Netherlands, before, during, and after the Great Recession (2007–2015), we demonstrate that people who experienced an income loss became more supportive of the radical left but not of the radical right. Looking at these parties’ core concerns, we find that income loss increased support for income redistribution championed by the radical left, but less so for the anti-immigration policies championed by the radical right. Our study scrutinizes more directly than extant research the micro-foundations of support for radical parties across the ideological divide.

Featured in the The Monkey Cage (Washington Post), De Kanttekening and on Stuk Rood Vlees (podcast)

click for PDF | doi: 10.1093/esr/jcz023

The Paradox of Inequality: Income Inequality and Belief in Meritocracy go Hand in Hand
Socio-Economic Review 19(1): 7-35

Inequality is on the rise: gains have been concentrated with a small elite, while most have seen their fortunes stagnate or fall. Despite what scholars and journalists consider a worrying trend, there is no evidence of growing popular concern about inequality. In fact, research suggests that citizens in unequal societies are less concerned than those in more egalitarian societies. How to make sense of this paradox? I argue that citizens’ consent to inequality is explained by their growing conviction that societal success is reflective of a meritocratic process. Drawing on 25-years of International Social Survey Programme data, I show that rising inequality is legitimated by the popular belief that the income gap is meritocratically deserved: the more unequal a society, the more likely its citizens are to explain success in meritocratic terms, and the less important they deem non-meritocratic factors such as a person’s family wealth and connections.

Featured in The Washington Post, The Guardian (here and here), NewStatesman, Financial Times (here and here), The Independent, Work in Progress blog, the LSE blog on American Politics and Policy, Left Foot Forward and Harvard Business Review.

click for PDF | doi: 10.1093/ser/mwy051

Visualizing Belief in Meritocracy, 1930—2010
Socius 4(1)

In this figure I describe the long trend in popular belief in meritocracy across the Western world between 1930 and 2010. Studying trends in attitudes is limited by the paucity of survey data that can be compared across countries and over time. Here, I show how to complement survey waves with cohort-level data. Repeated surveys draw on a representative sample of the population to describe the typical beliefs held by citizens in a given country and period. Leveraging the fact that citizens surveyed in a given year were born in different time-periods allows for a comparison of beliefs across birth cohorts. The latter overlaps with the former, but considerably extends the time period covered by the data. Taken together, the two measures give a "triangulated" longitudinal record of popular belief in meritocracy. I find that in most countries, popular belief in meritocracy is (much) stronger for more recent periods and cohorts.

Featured in Center for Labour and Social Studies blog Why Don't We Care About Growing Inequality?

click for PDF | doi: 10.1177/2378023118811805 (open access)

Inequality is a problem of inference: How people solve the social puzzle of unequal outcomes
Societies 8(3): 64

A new wave of scholarship recognizes the importance of people’s understanding of inequality that underlies their political convictions, civic values, and policy views. Much less is known however about the sources of people’s different beliefs. I argue that scholarship is hampered by a lack of consensus regarding the conceptualization and measurement of inequality beliefs, in the absence of an organizing theory. To fill this gap, in this paper I develop a framework for studying the social basis of people's explanations for inequality. I propose that people observe unequal outcomes and must infer the invisible forces that brought these about, be they meritocratic or structural in nature. In making inferences about the causes of inequality, people draw on lessons from past experience and information about the world, both of which are biased and limited by their background, social networks, and the environments they have been exposed to. Looking at inequality beliefs through this lens allows for an investigation into the kinds of experiences and environments that are particularly salient in shaping people’s inferential accounts of inequality. Specifically, I make a case for investigating how socializing institutions such as schools and neighborhoods are inferential spaces that shape how children and young adults come to learn about their unequal society and their own place in it. I conclude by proposing testable hypotheses and implications for research.

click for PDF  |  doi: 10.3390/soc8030064 (open access)

Neoliberalism and Symbolic Boundaries in Europe: Global Diffusion, Local Context, Regional Variation
Socius 2: 1-8 (with Elyas Bakhtiari and Michèle Lamont)

Studies suggest that the rise of Neoliberalism accompanies a foregrounding of individual responsibility and weakening of community. We provide a theoretical agenda for studying the interactions between the global diffusion of neoliberal policies and ideologies, on the one side, and cultural repertoires and boundary configurations, on the other, in the context of local, national, and regional variation. Exploiting variation in the rate of adoption of neoliberal policies across European societies, we show how levels of neoliberal penetration co-vary with the way citizens draw symbolic boundaries along the lines of ethno-religious otherness and moral deservingness.

Featured in The Conversation, the Harvard Gazette, on the Epicenter blog, and in de Volkskrant.

click for PDF  |  doi 10.1177/2378023116632538 (open access)

The Missing Organizational Dimension of Prisoner Reentry: An Ethnography of the Road to Reentry at a Nonprofit Service Provider
Sociological Forum 31(2): 291-309

Prisoner reentry has received great interest in political sociology, criminology, and beyond. Research documents the struggles of individuals trying to find their way back into society. Less attention has been given to the organizational aspects of reentry. This is unfortunate given the rapid growth of nonprofit reentry organizations in the U.S., which introduces a new set of questions about the context and challenges to prisoner reentry. Drawing on an ethnography of Safe, a nonprofit reentry organization in the Northeast, I describe the organization's pivotal role in institutionalizing the pathway to prisoner reentry: a road to reentry, which takes former prisoners through a process that reconfigures their morality, identity, and social relationships. The road to reentry concept helps bring together scholars of the welfare state and criminology by highlighting how the challenges of prisoner reentry rely on how this process is organized. The way in which prison reentry is organized, in turn, affects former prisoners' agency and shapes the relationship between these men and women and their respective families and communities.

Featured in Contexts magazine and The Crime Report.

click for PDF  |  doi: 10.1111/socf.12254

Blurred Lines: Structure/Agency, Presence/Vacancy in Detroit's Urban Museum
City & Community 14(2): 183-5

Detroit has come to symbolize the end of American hegemony in manufacturing. Faced with globalization, market competition, and political change, Detroit's citizens seem the victims of structural forces beyond their control. Yet, this photographic essay explores Detroit precisely through the lens of agency, highlighting citizens’ creativity, entrepreneurship, and play. The photographs highlight the ways Detroit's citizens have blurred the boundaries between ruins and art, presence and vacancy, and structure and agency.

click for PDF  |  doi: 10.1111/cico.12101

Detroit’s wealth of ruins
Contexts 13(2): 62-69

Detroit’s fall has been long in the making. The biggest city ever to declare bankruptcy, Detroit has suffered out-migration since the 1950s, as people followed the jobs that started to leave the city. Auto manufacturing declined and eventually collapsed, and with it did Motor City. Detroit is a victim, symbol, sign of the times, but it is something else, too. Detroit’s citizens have made the city an urban museum. Part of the attraction for tourists is what also entices millions to flock to Rome and Athens every year: a chance to see the glory of times past. Like classical cities, Detroit symbolizes the end of an era—in this case, of American manufacturing. The dramatic ruins of wealth sit alongside a wealth of ruins.

click for PDF  |  doi: 10.1177/1536504214533503

Achievement Inequality and the Institutional Structure of Educational Systems: A Comparative Perspective
Annual Review of Sociology 36: 407-428 (with Herman G. van de Werfhorst)

We review the comparative literature on the impact of national-level educational institutions on inequality in student achievement. We focus on two types of institutions that characterize the educational system of a country: the system of school-type differentiation (between-school tracking) and the level of standardization (e.g., with regard to central examinations and school autonomy). Two types of inequality are examined: inequality in terms of dispersion of student test scores and inequality of opportunity by social background and race/ethnicity. We conclude from this literature, which mostly uses PISA, TIMSS, and/or PIRLS data, that inequalities are magnified by national-level tracking institutions and that standardization decreases inequality. Methodological issues are discussed, and possible avenues for further research are suggested.

click for PDF  |  doi: 10.1146/annurev.soc.012809.102538

Meritocracy or Plutocracy? Finding Explanations for the Educational Disadvantages of Moroccan Immigrants Living in the Netherlands
Amsterdam Social Science 1(1): 44-70

Moroccan immigrants in the Netherlands have, throughout the last decades, been relatively unsuccessful in both schooling and job attainment. Although later generations of immigrants are doing better than those of their parents (and grandparents), young Moroccan men tend to do worse than both native Dutch and other immigrant groups (especially those from Surinam and the Netherlands Antilles). Educational failure and high (youth) unemployment rates are seen as explanatory variables for their disproportionate dominance in the Netherlands’s crime statistics. This fact especially underlines the importance of an empirical investigation in the causes of, and policy resolutions for, Moroccan immigrants’ position within the Dutch educational system. In this paper a theoretical approach is formulated which integrates elements of the competing traditions of Human Capital Theory and Cultural Reproduction Theory into one theoretical framework. It is shown how social locations account for initial differences in educational opportunity, which tend to be reinforced through peer pressure in schools and neighborhoods, and through specific institutional characteristics of the Dutch educational system, namely, tracking and school segregation. It is only by taking into account these three factors that we can come to a comprehensive understanding of immigrants’ educational disadvantages. Furthermore, it is argued that such an understanding has profound consequences for questions of meritocracy and plutocracy relating to the educational system and to how we perceive the Moroccan immigrant position in Dutch society. 

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Het onderwijsstelsel en kansengelijkheid: op zoek naar een meritocratie
pp.199-218 in Sociologen over Onderwijs: Inzichten, praktijken en kritieken (with Herman G. van de Werfhorst)

Centraal in dit hoofdstuk staat het denken over en het onderzoek naar de inrichting van het onderwijsstelsel: hoe ontwerpen we een schoolsysteem dat zo goed mogelijk zijn publieke doelstellingen bereikt? In hoofdstuk 1 is een overzicht gegeven van de verschillende doelstellingen die het onderwijs kan dienen. In dit hoofdstuk beperken wij het inrichtingsvraagstuk tot het volgende: hoe, op basis van theorie en onderwijspraktijk, richten we het onderwijsstelsel zo in dat het gelijke kansen biedt aan alle leerlingen, ongeacht hun sekse, sociale herkomst en etniciteit? Om die vraag te kunnen beantwoorden aan het slot van dit hoofdstuk, volgt eerst een schets van datgene waar het ons om te doen is: meritocratie. Vervolgens bespreken we de basis van waaruit de vergelijkende onderwijssociologie verschillende onderwijsstelsels onderzoekt en analyseert. Daarop volgt een overzicht van de lessen die we uit de wetenschappelijke literatuur kunnen trekken en de beleidsimplicaties van dat onderzoek.

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Nieuw systeem, nieuwe kansen? Ouders in Amsterdam-West over (de)segregatie in het basisonderwijs
Beleid en Maatschappij 43(3): 4-22 (with Bowen Paulle and Anja Vink)

Sinds 2015 heeft Amsterdam een nieuw toelatingssysteem primair onderwijs. Het systeem is geworteld in diverse desegregatie pilots, waaronder twee gebaseerd op de ‘gecoördineerde keuzebenadering’. In het kader van één van deze pilots in Amsterdam West hebben wij in 2008 onderzocht hoe ouders denken over (de-)segregatie in het basisonderwijs en wat ze zouden vinden van een gecoördineerde keuzebenadering. Door politieke ontwikkelingen tussen 2008 en 2011 dachten we jarenlang dat de door ons verzamelde data hun nut voor beleidsdiscussies hadden verloren. Echter, met de komst van het nieuwe toelatingsbeleid zijn onze data plots meer dan relevant. In dit artikel beschrijven we hoe ouders in sociaaleconomisch diverse wijken aankijken tegenover segregatie en keuzevrijheid in het onderwijs. De 249 ouders die wij spraken of enquêteerden waren voorstanders van een “goede mix” maar hadden uiteenlopende meningen over hoe deze menging moest worden aangeduid. Ouders waren (voorzichtig) optimistisch gestemd over een gecoördineerde keuzebenadering om tot beter gemengde basisscholen te komen, zelfs als dit enigszins ten koste zou gaan van hun keuzeruimte. We concluderen dat de politieke weerstand tegen desegregatie in het basisonderwijs niet mag worden gerechtvaardigd met uit de lucht gegrepen uitspraken over de percepties en wensen van ouders en spreken de hoop uit dat de hier gepresenteerde bevindingen kunnen bijdragen aan een eerlijke evaluatie van de vergaarde kennis en een op feiten gebaseerde discussie over toekomstig onderwijsbeleid.

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Meritocratie in drie momenten: loterijen, waarzeggers en losse teugels in het Nederlandse onderwijs
Tijdschrift voor Hoger onderwijs en Management TH&MA 22(2): 17-19

Meritocratie is misschien wel dé leidraad voor beleidsmakers in de naoorlogse geschiedenis: hoe ontwerpen we spelregels en instituties zó dat inzet, talent en beloning als van nature samengaan? Bestuurders in verschillende landen hebben deze vraag op uiteenlopende wijzen uitgewerkt, maar met één gemene deler: het onderwijs als de motor van de meritocratische samenleving. In de naoorlogse jaren was onze streven naar meritocratie vooral ingegeven door de noodzaak van economisch herstel: hoe zorgen we dat talent goed terecht komt op de arbeidsmarkt? De koude oorlog voegde daar een strategisch belang aan toe: hoe winnen we de wedloop met het rode gevaar? Hoewel beide motieven nog altijd een grote rol spelen in beleidsoverwegingen, kunnen we vandaag een derde doelstelling toevoegen: hoe organiseren we een eerlijke competitie waarin de winnaars hun succes hebben verdiend?

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Van terecht onrecht naar pluriform talent
Beleid en Maatschappij 38(3): 327-333

Oprah Winfrey kondigde eerder dit jaar haar afscheid van de beeldbuis aan. 25 jaar lang was zij het toonbeeld van sociale mobiliteit in Amerika. Zwart, arm en vaderloos groeide zij op in het rauwe Milwaukee. Toch lukte het Oprah, against all odds, een mediaimperium op te bouwen, schatrijk te worden, alsook de publiekslieveling van zwart én wit Amerika. Niet voor niets rekent TIME Magazine haar sinds 2004 tot de groep van meest invloedrijke personen op deze aardbol. De Raad voor Maatschappelijke Ontwikkeling (hierna: de raad) moet zich hebben afgevraagd of Oprah ook de Oprah was geworden waartoe zij zich in Amerika heeft kunnen ontwikkelen, als zij in Nederland was geboren. Het rapport Nieuwe ronde, nieuwe kansen laat zien dat Oprah en de haren (lage komaf, hoog risico ) in het verzilveren van de belofte van sociale stijging in Nederland de nodige obstakels moeten overkomen. Ik vat hieronder de belangrijkste constateringen van de raad samen en vul ze aan. In het daaropvolgende deel van mijn betoog laat ik mij kritisch uit over het beleidsadvies van de raad en stel ik een alternatief voor dat afdoet met ‘terecht onrecht’ en recht doet aan pluriform talent.

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