This issue’s first article, by Joseph O. Baker, David Carñarte, and L. Edward Day, is a study of attitudes toward punishment of criminals in relation to xenophobia, political and religious attitudes, and race/ethnicity. Using data from a 2014 survey of the U.S. adult population, they find that xenophobia is a strong predictor of punitiveness, especially among white Anglos, but substantially less among African-American and Hispanics. They further point to the role of xenophobia as a key mediator among several variables (e.g., education, religious service attendance, gender) and punitiveness. On this basis, they argue that attitudes toward immigrants, as an aspect of racial attitudes, merits more prominence in our understanding of punitiveness.
Dara Shifrer’s contribution uses data from the National Educational Longitudinal Survey of 2002 to explore the causes of the known disproportionate placement of males and persons of racial minority status into special education programs for the learning disabled. Shifrer finds that the higher prevalence of such classifications among minority students is substantially consistent with those individuals’ educational performance. The influence of clinically nonrelevant factors, such as school characteristics or individuals’ immigration and language background, play a smaller role in classification. She further finds that, after adjusting for academic performance and social class, minority students are less likely than whites to be classified as learning disabled. The excess prevalence of disability classification among males, however, is not explained by the academic performance variables available in this study. A further bias shows that minority students are more likely to be classified as disabled when they are in schools with relatively smaller minority representations.
Eric Bjorklund, Andrew P. Davis, and Jessica Pfaffendorf analyze factors affecting whether U.S states adopted drug testing between 2009 and 2015 as a requirement for persons receiving public assistance. Using a discrete event history approach to state-level data, they find that a percentage of minority-status individuals in the state was not substantially related to the adoption of testing policies. However, they found that downward changes in the labor force involvement among whites, the overall level of political conservatism among elected officials in the state, and the election of a Republican party governor were all positively related to adoption. They interpret these results in the context of group competition between dominant and subordinate groups, the partisan character of welfare regulation in the United States, and a general movement toward an increasingly punitive poverty policy in the United States.
Gender-based inequality in the access to food is the subject of a cross-national longitudinal analysis of a countries’ levels of hunger in the article by Aarushi Bhandari and Rebekah Burroway. They use a sample of 42 developing countries during the 1990 to 2010 period, construct an index of women’s property and constitutional rights, and estimate a fixed-effect regression model with this index as a predictor of average calorie consumption, while controlling for adequacy of the food supply, irrigated land area, and urbanization. They find that the property and constitutional rights possessed by women are indeed important factors for promoting food security in these countries.
Kristin Haltinner explores variations in political ideology within the so-called “Tea Party” conservative political movement based on interviews with party activists and other party meeting participants. Noting that previous work has described conservative Christianity, libertarianism, and U.S. sovereignty as key ideological emphases among movement followers, Haltinner discovered two more ideological perspectives emerging within this movement: “constitutionalism” and “reformed liberalism.” These two perspectives have not previously been identified as components within the broader perspective of Tea Party followers, and Haltinner’s article thus offers a more detailed understanding of current conservative political narratives.
In an article exploring the classic sociological problem of variations across countries in suicide rates, Sylwia J. Piatkowska investigates the influence of socieconomic variables on age and gender-specific suicide rates among a panel of western European nations during the period of 1956 to 2012. Piatkowska’s work carefully explores various theories of suicide (from Durkheim forward) using modern statistical approaches and should be of wide interest to sociological analysts of suicide. Across several models, Piatkowska finds that both long- and short-term socioeconomic change (e.g., changes in GDP per capita) have their most substantial effects on suicide rates among males of working age, but less of an effect among women. Female labor force participation is positively associated with the female suicide rates among women, but also with the male and total suicide rates as well.
Rachel Allison and Margaret Ralston offer a “structuralist” analysis of contemporary sexual and romantic relationships of college students by linking individual survey data from the Online College Social Life Survey to contextual variables characterizing the schools those students attend. They find, for example, that higher frequency of “hookups” and dates among students are associated with larger school size, but that size is negatively related to forming such relationships with other students at their own institutions. The racial composition of colleges’ student populations also affects these behaviors but with differences across race: On campuses with larger percentages of white students, black women have fewer hookups, but Asian women and all Hispanic students tend to have more hookups when the percentage of white students is higher. These and similar findings are interpreted in the context of both structural and cultural variations across colleges.
In the final article of this issue, author Seth Abrutyn examines how American baseball sportswriters’ activities have produced and given cultural meaning to major league baseball as a distinct institutional domain. He works from a conceptual framework focused on the relative importance and autonomy of institutional domains within societies, while emphasizing the role of “institutional entrepreneurs” in the development of those domains. As data, Abrutyn uses recent writings of well-known baseball writers. He finds their activities as entrepreneurs center around themes of “competitiveness” and the protection of “sacred” aspects of the institution from internal and external threats.