SOCIAL STUDIES
Desegregation liberalized
A study found that adults who were under 18 when their county’s schools were subject to court-ordered desegregation are more politically liberal and hold more liberal racial attitudes relative to adults who lived in the same county but were over 18 when the county desegregated and relative to adults born in the same year but living in counties not subject to court-ordered desegregation. The effect only manifests in the South, ostensibly because of the bigger actual change in integration there. The effect translates to an increase in the likelihood of voting for a Democratic presidential candidate by approximately 18 percentage points.
Chin, M., “The Impact of School Desegregation on White Individuals’ Racial Attitudes and Politics in Adulthood,” Education Finance and Policy (forthcoming).
Popular representation
Using national survey data from right before the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, a study found that populist attitudes (as measured by agreement with statements like “The system is stacked against people like me” and “The interests of elites are in conflict with the interests of the people”) decreased from 2016 to 2020 among Trump voters relative to other voters, especially relative to those who had voted for another candidate in the 2016 Republican primary. There was no similar decrease in populist attitudes among those who had voted for Bernie Sanders relative to those who had voted for another candidate in the 2016 Democratic primary. Moreover, the decrease in populist attitudes was larger for those who were more approving of Trump in 2020. This pattern suggests that being represented in government mollifies populist attitudes. Attitudes toward specific elite groups, particularly civil servants and Hollywood, were generally not affected.
Luo, Y., “We Got Our Guy!: Populist Attitudes After Populists Gain Power,” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World (March 2024).
Fallow property
Economists found that in both historical and contemporary cultures, private property rights are less common in places where farmers have to leave their land fallow for longer periods of time. The hypothesis: It’s costly to protect fallow land from outsiders who might squat on it or cultivate it, so there’s real benefit in a communal approach to land ownership in which everyone shares the cost of protection.
Le Rossignol, E. et al., “Fallow Lengths and the Structure of Property Rights,” National Bureau of Economic Research (March 2024).
It’s OK to negotiate
Surveys of hiring managers and university career advisers find that employers generally don’t rescind a job offer when a prospective hire tries to negotiate. Yet prospective hires often don’t try to negotiate, apparently out of fear that doing so will jeopardize an offer. This unjustified reluctance to negotiate even showed up in experiments where people were randomly assigned to employer and employee roles, could negotiate over salary or remotework time, and had a competitive offer from another employer.
Hart, E. et al., “But What If I Lose the Offer? Negotiators’ Inflated Perception of Their Likelihood of Jeopardizing a Deal,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (March 2024).
A step back for equality
Researchers found that cops in Chicago had less chance of being nominated for performance awards after their precincts increased their proportion of female officers. This held for both male and female cops and was true regardless of the proportion of female managers in the district. This did not appear to be explained by changes in duties or by turnover. Instead, the researchers suggest that increasing the proportion of women in a job seen as masculine adds to a sense of mismatch, causing managers to lower their assessments of all subordinates.
Meuris, J. & Merluzzi, J., “A Hidden Barrier to Diversification? Performance Recognition Penalties for Incumbent Workers in Male-Dominated Occupations,” American Sociological Review (forthcoming).