As this issue of TSQ goes to press, we report with great sadness the death of our friend and co-editor Peter Mandel Hall on December 8, 2017. We and Peter’s many other friends in the TSQ community, the Midwest Sociological Society, and among the wider sociological discipline will miss his decency, intellect, and good humor.
This issue begins with Deborah White’s presidential address to the 80th annual meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society. She analyzes women’s participation in U.S. electoral politics in the context of the 2016 presidential election. While underrepresentation of women in U.S. elective office relative to other countries persists, White describes evidence of change arising from the recent election. In particular, she points to the grassroots activism represented in public demonstrations, the increased mobilization of diverse marginalized groups in relation to inequalities, and indications of distinct increases in numbers of women interested in running for office. While the outcome of these trends is still uncertain, future elections may witness more women and persons of diverse status elected to U. S. public office.
Using data from a national survey of the U.S., Evan Stewart, Penny Edgell, and Jack Delehanty examine how individuals’ religious culture affects their level of tolerance towards others. They find attitudes supporting the integration of religious expression into public life, as distinct from private religiosity of belief, is associated with negative views toward religious groups outside the American mainstream, and with more generalized expressions of intolerance. In doing this, they clarify which aspects of religious commitments translate into other kinds of social attitudes and behavior.
In another investigation of religion in contemporary U.S. culture, Shiri Noy and Timothy L. O’Brien report on orientations toward religion and science from an intersectional perspective. The use data from the U. S. General Social Survey to examine differences among Latina/os, Blacks, and Whites in these orientations, with a particular focus on variations across gender within group. They find that Black and Latin respondents are more oriented toward religion as opposed to science than Whites, with distinct gender differences appearing among Whites and Latina/os but not among Blacks. They interpret such differences in terms of the “collective memory” arising from the distinct features of groups’ experiences of racism in relation to these institutions.
Whether social media can create a public sphere as envisioned by Habermas is the subject of a study by Lisa M. Kruse, Dawn R. Norris and Jonathan R. Flinchum. Based on depth interview data among Generation X and Millenial informants, they argue that such online communication has not instantiated a public sphere. Interviewees report avoiding online political communication due to concerns about sanctions from others, because they typically in those settings communicate about politics only with persons whose political views resemble their own, and because they view online forums as a place for “happy” interaction.
Hua-Yu Sebastian Cherng and Phoebe Ho analyze whether class-based difference in the pattern and level of parental support of children’s educational activities are similar between immigrant and U.S. born parents. They use data from the 2002 Educational Longitudinal study, and find relatively smaller class-based differences among immigrants as compared to those among U.S. native Whites, thus challenging the idea that immigrant patterns of involvement reflect their class background. The suggested two explanations, one being that an “immigrant habitus” may lead to, on the one hand, increased parental expectations for children regardless of parents’ position, but also, that other aspects of this habitus may lead to a tendency to avoid engaging with school activities and personnel.
The experience of persons in families with a transracial adoption with the others’ reactions to them and their families is the subject of the work Devon R. Goss presents. She contextualizes this topic as one particular form of social reactions to various kinds of families that differ from normative constellations. She relies on interviews with adoptees (age 18-67) who were nonwhite but grew up in white families, as well as their white siblings. Against a cultural background in which family connection is typically perceived as connected to phenotypic similarity, she finds that informants commonly reported others as reacting to their family formations as “incomprehensible,” which, Goss argues, leads to public “hyper-visibility” of transracial families making them “invisible” as a family type. She notes an interesting consequence of transracial families, namely that they alter essentialist understandings of race and ancestry that are dominant features of conventional cultural understandings.
Heather A. O’Connell illuminates how differences in educational background across race among county to county migrants has contributed to Black-White inequality in the U.S. Focusing on disparities of educational attainment between races in U.S. counties as the outcome of interest, she uses county to county migration flows from the 2000 Census to model what the level of disparity would have been had in- and out-migrants stayed where they were. This counterfactual is then analyzed in relation to the actual educational disparity level. She finds that migration, on average, increased racial disparities in education within county but those effects were substantially smaller among counties in the South than elsewhere. In a subtle analysis, she separates the compositional contributions of migration to inequality from the effects of migration on the relationship of county percent Black to the level of disparity, finding the latter relationship particularly important in the South.
Rebecca Hanson’s work on local political organizations in Caracas, Venezuela reveals a paradoxical effect of participatory experiments on support for democracy. Contrary to much research focused on only successful cases of participation, she uses interview and ethnographic data to show how in several instances these organizations increased conflict among community members, led to blame being directed toward local communities rather than the state, and decreased faith in local democratic organizations among various community members. These adverse outcomes, from the perspective of increasing support for democracy, stemmed from both design factors internal to the organizations as well as from the context of local political culture. She argues for more study of the unfortunate effects of both failed and apparently successful attempts to implement democratic participation.