How do some families manage to entrench themselves in the upper class for many generations while others do not? Bringing together economic sociology, political sociology, and stratification, I introduce a concept for the study of multigenerational persistence at the top of a stratified society: kinship interlocks. Kinship interlocks are portions of a kinship network that closely combine great wealth, status, and power. Just as board interlocks connect corporate elites through overlapping board memberships, kinship interlocks connect economic, social, and political elites through family ties. Using a mixed-methods analysis, I find that the intimate exchange of resources in kinship interlocks generates upper-class persistence via two primary mechanisms: it protects kin from economic, legal, and social risk, and it propels kin into higher strata. Processes of kin formation and intimate exchange are co-constitutive with systems of gender, sexuality, and race, such that the most durable portions of an upper class are especially heteronormative and racially dominant. The analysis is based on a unique dataset consisting of the full upper class and all economic, political, and social elites in the first 122 years of Dallas, Texas, along with all mutual family ties.

Political leaders play a potentially important role shaping behaviors and beliefs during crises. In the pandemic, a number of high-status politicians, notably leaders of populist parties, were seen to diminish compliance with institutional recommendations by casting doubt on COVID guidelines. But what happens when such leaders change position and endorse previously discouraged behaviors? Using longitudinal data from the Understanding Coronavirus in America panel with fixed-effects modeling, this article examines how Trump’s unexpected endorsement of facemasks in July 2020 affected individuals’ likelihood of wearing a facemask and belief in masks’ efficacy. I find that Trump’s pivot lifted Republicans’ use of facemasks, closing 40 percent of the preexisting gap with Democrats and with stronger effects among individuals who were more exposed to the early-summer spike in COVID cases. Additionally, I provide evidence for the unique significance of this moment in the history of the pandemic, showing that at almost no other time did partisan behaviors converge as sharply. However, in contrast to expectations from most dominant theoretical models of behavioral change, especially the health belief model, no corresponding shift in beliefs about facemasks can be detected. These results have important theoretical implications for understanding how pivots can shape behaviors during crises, the validity of existing models in public health, pandemic populism’s causes, and directions of future research.

This article argues that folklore (orally transmitted group knowledge) shapes far-right voting by inculcating feeling rules that resonate with nativist and autocratic ideas. Drawing on recently rediscovered archives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century folklorists, we pair a dataset of local support for the far-right in all Reichstag elections in Germany’s Weimar period, with unique information on the prevalence of ethnic bogeymen in local folktales. Using spatial autoregressive models, we find a robust and considerable effect of the presence of fearful folktales on radical right voting. These effects are particularly strong for localities where citizens face political and economic threats. We use an instrumental variable analysis drawing on folklore data from the 1860s to establish the long-term roots of this pattern, disentangle the effect of folktales from contemporary political influences, and establish causal order. Our findings suggest that folklore plays a key role in aligning the supply and demand for far-right movements by shaping how citizens see and feel the world around them. In addition, we illustrate that folklore archives provide a unique opportunity to unpack affective-discursive canons across space and time.

Prevailing theories about the nature and development of the democratic party system fail to account for the important case of the United States. Using a novel dataset on legislators and roll call votes in the New York State Assembly after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, we show that, contrary to existing accounts, legislative parties had already formed at this early stage. Yet these parties did not arise from the translation of social cleavages such as economic or social class into political oppositions, as sociologists might expect, nor were they merely networks of powerful elites disconnected from the polity, as political scientists and historians have suggested. Instead, these parties coalesced around formal issues—structural questions like the procedures for election and appointment, questions whose answer would determine the rules of the game for future contests. Parties emerged, we argue, not because of an inherent need to adjudicate conflicts between sectors of the polity, but because of the organizational affordances of the modern democratic state. Our findings suggest the formation of party systems is an integral part of the formation of the modern state.

Honor killings, which occur when women are perceived to have broken purity norms and bring “dishonor” to their family, pose profound moral and societal problems and underrecognized sociological puzzles. Given the immense cost, why do families murder their own daughter, niece, or cousin? Conversely, given the tragic consequences, why are norms broken in the first place? Drawing on accounts of honor killings, we characterize the key actors, actions, and incentives, and develop two interlinked theoretical models, one on norm-enforcement and another on norm-breaking. The former specifies the conditions under which honor norms should hold, the latter, counterintuitively, predicts that honor killings occur most frequently when honor norms are contested; not when they are strictest. Analyzing data from 24 countries and ~26,000 individuals and building a unique dataset of honor killings from Turkey, we find support for the hypotheses. Honor norms are stronger when laws offer leniency for honor killings, families’ loss of reputation is more consequential, and community cohesion is higher. Actual killings have an inverse-U-shaped link with the prevalence of honor norms. Our work advances the theoretical understanding of honor norms and killings and offers one of the most comprehensive empirical analyses of the factors influencing honor killings.

Historically, elite schools have selected students in ways that reproduce advantages for dominant groups and exclude groups deemed undesirable. The specific outgroup in question has changed over time, but the underlying logic used to exclude these groups is often related to disability. Yet, disability as a social category has received minimal attention in discussions of elite reproduction. In this article, we draw on qualitative data collected from elite independent pre-K–12 schools to show that disability is indeed a salient basis of selection into elite educational environments, one that begins at the earliest moments of educational sorting: admission to elite early childhood programs. Through interviews with admissions personnel, we show that elite independent schools explicitly structure their admissions processes to identify—and exclude—children who are perceived as having or being at risk of developing any type of disability, regardless of impairment type or support needs. We argue that admissions practices at elite independent schools (1) serve as a form of social closure intended to restrict enrollment to young children perceived as able-bodied and neurotypical, and (2) represent a case of essentializing merit , in which elite gatekeepers construct merit as an intrinsic, rather than achieved, property of individuals.

We track how temporal mappings of climate change relate to individuals’ actions to address the climate crisis. We consider multiple aspects of temporal maps and so make two innovations over the literature to date. First, we examine how individuals coordinate their actions across both their own expectations of the future (first-order futures) and their sense of others’ expectations (second-order futures). Second, we examine past effects of climate change, as well as the turning points past which respondents believe climate change can no longer be addressed. We show how both everyday actions, such as recycling, and political behaviors, such as protesting, are coordinated across these temporal maps, conceptualized as beliefs about past, present, and future, and the turning points across them. A core finding is that individuals’ own concern about the climate future is associated with increased climate action, whereas believing others to be concerned depreciates individuals’ own climate action. This study is therefore a conceptual contribution to understanding action and temporality, while also providing empirical insight into how individuals navigate the climate crisis.

This article reassesses the classic thesis linking the globalization of production to union decline. Our argument is three-fold. First, prior literature does not appreciate how the exchange conditions characterizing global value chain (GVC) relations between leading firms in rich democracies and supplier firms in less developed countries (LDCs) can undermine unionization through trade. Second, the worldwide entrenchment of GVCs as an organizational form over time, and cross-national variation in the strength and scope of two key labor market institutions (wage-coordination and Ghent systems), should moderate the effect of LDC trade on unionization. Third, trade with LDCs is endogenous in models of union decline, because high unionization often leads to offshoring. Empirically, we use an instrumental variable (IV) design and a panel dataset covering the longest historical period studied to date. IV estimates suggest that trade with LDCs reduces unionization in rich democracies; these estimates are nearly three times as large as results obtained by OLS, and they increase in size as GVCs entrench worldwide. Estimates also weaken in countries with highly coordinated wage-setting institutions and Ghent systems. Nevertheless, conditional effects and counterfactual histories suggest that GVCs cause union decline even in countries with the most union-friendly institutions, and were more important for union decline overall than either wage-coordination or Ghent systems.

Decades of research shows that holding and maintaining multiple social roles leads to better mental health and well-being overall, but role-accumulation theory has not proposed or considered whether effects vary at different stages in the life course. Rather, the current theory assumes that social roles’ positive influence on mental health should be similar at all ages. In addition, extant work suggests that accumulating roles that are more voluntary than obligatory is the best strategy for mental health, regardless of age. In contrast, socioemotional selectivity theory suggests that in later life, adults tend to reduce their number of social roles, especially voluntary ones, as a strategy to maximize mental health. Using 21 waves/years of longitudinal data on Australian adults, we examine the effect of role-accumulation across the entire adult life course. Fixed-effects models show that the types of roles matter, with obligatory role-accumulation associated with better mental health at most ages, but not in late adulthood. In contrast, voluntary role-accumulation is beneficial at all ages, and especially for the mental health of older adults. The findings mostly support role-accumulation theory’s predictions and highlight the importance of voluntary roles for lifelong well-being. Our results suggest that creating more voluntary role opportunities that are accessible to all ages can benefit older individuals, communities, and population health more broadly.