This study complements existing scholarship in family sociology and digital demography by investigating the role of digital technologies in shaping partnership ideals among unmarried women in India. We build on the premise that, by means of faster communication, effective information dissemination, and reciprocal exchange of norms and ideals, recurrent exposure to globalized cultural scripts through the Internet may shape family-related outcomes such as views and opinions regarding different aspects of family life. Leveraging new data from a primary survey of unmarried, partnered women living in cities across twenty states, we find that daily Internet use is positively and significantly associated with modern partnership ideals, measured as secularized views on the choice of a partner, the importance of marriage, partner preferences, and views about love marriage. Moreover, we show that accessing the Internet independently—vis-à-vis through a shared device—is what matters the most, and that results are stronger among high-educated individuals. We assess the selectivity of the sample by conducting subgroup analyses and replicating our findings on the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 2019–2021. Lastly, we offer evidence that these findings can be deemed causal, complementing our results with an instrumental-variable approach leveraging digital geographical information. Our findings reveal that digital technologies may be gradually contributing to shifting views about marriage and family formation, even in a context such as India, which has traditionally exhibited strong resistance to modernization forces, at least in the realm of the family.
{"title":"Shifting partnership ideals with online technologies among unmarried women in India","authors":"Luca Maria Pesando, Koyel Sarkar, Sabino Kornrich","doi":"10.1093/sf/soaf100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf100","url":null,"abstract":"This study complements existing scholarship in family sociology and digital demography by investigating the role of digital technologies in shaping partnership ideals among unmarried women in India. We build on the premise that, by means of faster communication, effective information dissemination, and reciprocal exchange of norms and ideals, recurrent exposure to globalized cultural scripts through the Internet may shape family-related outcomes such as views and opinions regarding different aspects of family life. Leveraging new data from a primary survey of unmarried, partnered women living in cities across twenty states, we find that daily Internet use is positively and significantly associated with modern partnership ideals, measured as secularized views on the choice of a partner, the importance of marriage, partner preferences, and views about love marriage. Moreover, we show that accessing the Internet independently—vis-à-vis through a shared device—is what matters the most, and that results are stronger among high-educated individuals. We assess the selectivity of the sample by conducting subgroup analyses and replicating our findings on the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 2019–2021. Lastly, we offer evidence that these findings can be deemed causal, complementing our results with an instrumental-variable approach leveraging digital geographical information. Our findings reveal that digital technologies may be gradually contributing to shifting views about marriage and family formation, even in a context such as India, which has traditionally exhibited strong resistance to modernization forces, at least in the realm of the family.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"48 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144568353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
How do protests affect Americans’ gun ownership decisions? Using a novel dataset of gun-related web searches in combination with geocoded protest data, we examine the effects of the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests on Americans’ interest in firearm purchase. We find a clear relationship between geographic proximity to BLM protests and firearm purchase web searches, but a null relationship between these searches and proximity to re-opening protests. We then examine racial attitudes of would-be gun buyers using users’ web search histories and find that users exposed to racially conservative narratives had significantly larger spikes in gun purchase interest during the 2020 BLM protests than did other comparable searchers. These results suggest that Black civil rights protests can serve as a catalyst for gun purchase interest.
{"title":"Gun purchase interest as backlash to Black Lives Matter protests","authors":"Masha Krupenkin, Elad Yom-Tov, David Rothschild","doi":"10.1093/sf/soaf096","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf096","url":null,"abstract":"How do protests affect Americans’ gun ownership decisions? Using a novel dataset of gun-related web searches in combination with geocoded protest data, we examine the effects of the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests on Americans’ interest in firearm purchase. We find a clear relationship between geographic proximity to BLM protests and firearm purchase web searches, but a null relationship between these searches and proximity to re-opening protests. We then examine racial attitudes of would-be gun buyers using users’ web search histories and find that users exposed to racially conservative narratives had significantly larger spikes in gun purchase interest during the 2020 BLM protests than did other comparable searchers. These results suggest that Black civil rights protests can serve as a catalyst for gun purchase interest.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"39 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144568415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sascha Becker, Yuan Hsiao, Steven Pfaff, Jared Rubin
The spread of radical institutional change does not often result from one-sided pro-innovation influence; countervailing influence networks in support of the status quo can suppress adoption. We develop a model of multiplex and competing network diffusion to describe how competing actors compete through multiple types of networks. Specifically, we hypothesize three types of contested diffusion: market competition, inoculation, and firefighting. To apply the contested-diffusion model to real data, we look at the contest between Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus, the two most influential intellectuals of early 16th-century Europe. In the early phase of the Reformation, these two figures utilized influence networks, affecting which cities in the Holy Roman Empire adopted reform. Using newly digitalized data on both leaders’ correspondence networks, their travels, the dispersion of their followers, and parallel processes of exchange among places through trade routes, we employ empirical tests of our theoretical model. We find that although Luther’s network is strongly associated with the spread of the Reformation, Erasmus’s network is associated with the stifling of the Reformation. This is consistent with a “firefighting” mechanism of contested diffusion, whereby the countervailing force suppresses innovations only after they have begun to spread.
{"title":"Competing social influence in contested diffusion: contention and the spread of the early reformation","authors":"Sascha Becker, Yuan Hsiao, Steven Pfaff, Jared Rubin","doi":"10.1093/sf/soaf079","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf079","url":null,"abstract":"The spread of radical institutional change does not often result from one-sided pro-innovation influence; countervailing influence networks in support of the status quo can suppress adoption. We develop a model of multiplex and competing network diffusion to describe how competing actors compete through multiple types of networks. Specifically, we hypothesize three types of contested diffusion: market competition, inoculation, and firefighting. To apply the contested-diffusion model to real data, we look at the contest between Martin Luther and Desiderius Erasmus, the two most influential intellectuals of early 16th-century Europe. In the early phase of the Reformation, these two figures utilized influence networks, affecting which cities in the Holy Roman Empire adopted reform. Using newly digitalized data on both leaders’ correspondence networks, their travels, the dispersion of their followers, and parallel processes of exchange among places through trade routes, we employ empirical tests of our theoretical model. We find that although Luther’s network is strongly associated with the spread of the Reformation, Erasmus’s network is associated with the stifling of the Reformation. This is consistent with a “firefighting” mechanism of contested diffusion, whereby the countervailing force suppresses innovations only after they have begun to spread.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"44 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144513190","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
How does protests’ size shape their electoral impact? Recent years have seen frequent, loosely coordinated public days of protest with historically unprecedented participation. Yet scholars and activists debate whether even massive protest size translates into electoral outcomes. Resolving this debate is difficult because protest participation is influenced by underlying political conditions, and thus any correlation between protest size and electoral results may be due to unobservable omitted variables. In this article, I conduct a rigorous test of the electoral impact of protest participation in a case that also allows for further insight into the mechanisms for protest’s impact: the 2017 Women’s March. I test the impact of the Women’s March on 2018 county-level election results using detailed geo-coded data on local marches’ location and participation. To address omitted variable bias, I employ an instrumental variables analysis, instrumenting march size with precipitation and temperature data. I find that the number of Women’s March participants had a significant positive effect on the 2018 Democratic party vote share. To understand why, I further test the impact of instrumented march participation on two other variables: the creation of “Indivisible” groups and donations to Democratic politicians. This analysis shows that larger Women’s Marches led to higher levels of sustained organizing and political donations. Rapidly organized, social media–based days of protest can impact elections through activating participants for future political action.
{"title":"Turning protest into power: how the Women’s March worked","authors":"Jonathan Pinckney","doi":"10.1093/sf/soaf083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf083","url":null,"abstract":"How does protests’ size shape their electoral impact? Recent years have seen frequent, loosely coordinated public days of protest with historically unprecedented participation. Yet scholars and activists debate whether even massive protest size translates into electoral outcomes. Resolving this debate is difficult because protest participation is influenced by underlying political conditions, and thus any correlation between protest size and electoral results may be due to unobservable omitted variables. In this article, I conduct a rigorous test of the electoral impact of protest participation in a case that also allows for further insight into the mechanisms for protest’s impact: the 2017 Women’s March. I test the impact of the Women’s March on 2018 county-level election results using detailed geo-coded data on local marches’ location and participation. To address omitted variable bias, I employ an instrumental variables analysis, instrumenting march size with precipitation and temperature data. I find that the number of Women’s March participants had a significant positive effect on the 2018 Democratic party vote share. To understand why, I further test the impact of instrumented march participation on two other variables: the creation of “Indivisible” groups and donations to Democratic politicians. This analysis shows that larger Women’s Marches led to higher levels of sustained organizing and political donations. Rapidly organized, social media–based days of protest can impact elections through activating participants for future political action.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"644 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144513187","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Experiences with public benefits can shape recipients’ feelings (belonging) and enactment of citizenship (e.g., political, civic, or economic behaviors). However, we know less about how undocumented and lawful permanent resident (LPR) immigrants fit within this paradigm. This study, based on in-depth interviews with forty working-poor undocumented and LPR Latina immigrant mothers, reveals striking ways in which mothers described the meanings they attached to the benefits received and the social processes their experiences with benefit programs informed. Many mothers described an increased sense of self-efficacy as mothers and as immigrants, expanded notions of government responsiveness, and shifts in how they understood the citizenship (broadly conceived) of their children based on their experiences with benefits. This was even reported among mothers who used programs often seen as stigmatizing or who had challenges arise in petitioning for benefits. Moreover, mothers conveyed these meanings spurring legal, economic, and civic behavioral adaptations in their lives, deepening their engagement as citizens. They also described how the meanings derived from benefits use produced changes in their parenting practices, describing structuring their children’s time and engagement with institutions, as well as fostering reasoning skills and attitudes meant to benefit their children’s long-term integration. I term such practices concerted citizenship cultivation. For children with legal citizenship, concerted citizenship cultivation focused on developing comfort and entitlement within US institutions, socializing interactions with authority figures, and promoting expanded engagement in society. For children who lacked legal citizenship, concerted citizenship cultivation focused on developing positive identity and deepening engagement within protective institutions.
{"title":"How public benefits make citizens in Latino mixed-status families: self-efficacy, institutional engagement, and concerted citizenship cultivation","authors":"Luis Edward Tenorio","doi":"10.1093/sf/soaf081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf081","url":null,"abstract":"Experiences with public benefits can shape recipients’ feelings (belonging) and enactment of citizenship (e.g., political, civic, or economic behaviors). However, we know less about how undocumented and lawful permanent resident (LPR) immigrants fit within this paradigm. This study, based on in-depth interviews with forty working-poor undocumented and LPR Latina immigrant mothers, reveals striking ways in which mothers described the meanings they attached to the benefits received and the social processes their experiences with benefit programs informed. Many mothers described an increased sense of self-efficacy as mothers and as immigrants, expanded notions of government responsiveness, and shifts in how they understood the citizenship (broadly conceived) of their children based on their experiences with benefits. This was even reported among mothers who used programs often seen as stigmatizing or who had challenges arise in petitioning for benefits. Moreover, mothers conveyed these meanings spurring legal, economic, and civic behavioral adaptations in their lives, deepening their engagement as citizens. They also described how the meanings derived from benefits use produced changes in their parenting practices, describing structuring their children’s time and engagement with institutions, as well as fostering reasoning skills and attitudes meant to benefit their children’s long-term integration. I term such practices concerted citizenship cultivation. For children with legal citizenship, concerted citizenship cultivation focused on developing comfort and entitlement within US institutions, socializing interactions with authority figures, and promoting expanded engagement in society. For children who lacked legal citizenship, concerted citizenship cultivation focused on developing positive identity and deepening engagement within protective institutions.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"142 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144304679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the United States, widespread support for gender egalitarianism in the household contrasts with the pattern that women continue to do more household labor than men in different-sex relationships. Existing scholarship has revealed the ways in which different-sex couples justify these unequal arrangements. However, we know little about why women do more labor even when they have egalitarian goals and few structural constraints. I address this question by examining whether and how couples attempt to achieve equality and why they so often fail. Data from 40 in-depth interviews with members of 20 cisgender, different-sex, college-educated couples show that, because unequal household labor patterns are so entrenched, having an egalitarian division of labor itself requires work. I theorize and provide evidence for a process I call “equality work,” the work of creating an egalitarian division of labor, which often falls on women. Equality work includes anticipating inequality, strategizing to avoid it, monitoring equality, speaking up about inequality, fixing unequal outcomes, and withholding work. When men don’t strive for equality, women preserve the relationship by doing the labor their partners do not and revising their ideals. Equality work helps us better understand why women do most of the household labor; paradoxically, doing less requires that women work as well. These findings suggest that women are not passively accepting unequal household arrangements but striving to change them.
{"title":"Equality takes work: a process to understand why women still do most of the household labor","authors":"Inés Martínez Echagüe","doi":"10.1093/sf/soaf068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf068","url":null,"abstract":"In the United States, widespread support for gender egalitarianism in the household contrasts with the pattern that women continue to do more household labor than men in different-sex relationships. Existing scholarship has revealed the ways in which different-sex couples justify these unequal arrangements. However, we know little about why women do more labor even when they have egalitarian goals and few structural constraints. I address this question by examining whether and how couples attempt to achieve equality and why they so often fail. Data from 40 in-depth interviews with members of 20 cisgender, different-sex, college-educated couples show that, because unequal household labor patterns are so entrenched, having an egalitarian division of labor itself requires work. I theorize and provide evidence for a process I call “equality work,” the work of creating an egalitarian division of labor, which often falls on women. Equality work includes anticipating inequality, strategizing to avoid it, monitoring equality, speaking up about inequality, fixing unequal outcomes, and withholding work. When men don’t strive for equality, women preserve the relationship by doing the labor their partners do not and revising their ideals. Equality work helps us better understand why women do most of the household labor; paradoxically, doing less requires that women work as well. These findings suggest that women are not passively accepting unequal household arrangements but striving to change them.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144296110","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
How do individuals and groups frame their appeals to change official racial/ethnic categories and explain their perceptions of the underlying boundaries that such categories reflect? This article draws from the case of revisions to the 2030 U.S. census categories using the universe of the over 20,000 public comments submitted to the federal government in response to proposed changes. Using an integrated computational text analysis and qualitative approach, I find that three sets of strategies characterize the general deployment of racial frames across comments. The first describes the broader characteristics that are perceived to define a given category; the second grapples with the historical and contemporary nature of racial/ethnic boundaries; and the third situates the placement of a given group in the existing racial order. I then examine the use of these strategies in reference to the proposed Middle Eastern and North African category and to the existing Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino categories. Finally, I examine the resonance of particular frames and strategies by illustrating the extent to which they were submitted on behalf of organizations or duplicated widely by individual actors. Together, this study advances our broader understanding of the dynamic nature of racial/ethnic categories and the boundaries that they are perceived to represent.
{"title":"“Paper, practice, ancestry, culture”: Racial frames and contested racial/ethnic census categories","authors":"Marissa E Thompson","doi":"10.1093/sf/soaf075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf075","url":null,"abstract":"How do individuals and groups frame their appeals to change official racial/ethnic categories and explain their perceptions of the underlying boundaries that such categories reflect? This article draws from the case of revisions to the 2030 U.S. census categories using the universe of the over 20,000 public comments submitted to the federal government in response to proposed changes. Using an integrated computational text analysis and qualitative approach, I find that three sets of strategies characterize the general deployment of racial frames across comments. The first describes the broader characteristics that are perceived to define a given category; the second grapples with the historical and contemporary nature of racial/ethnic boundaries; and the third situates the placement of a given group in the existing racial order. I then examine the use of these strategies in reference to the proposed Middle Eastern and North African category and to the existing Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino categories. Finally, I examine the resonance of particular frames and strategies by illustrating the extent to which they were submitted on behalf of organizations or duplicated widely by individual actors. Together, this study advances our broader understanding of the dynamic nature of racial/ethnic categories and the boundaries that they are perceived to represent.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144269392","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This research investigates the ways in which authoritarianism constrains the transnational political engagement of recent Russian emigrants, a group known as relokanti. The study centers on three interconnected social roles of relokanti: as citizens of Russia, as family members of those who remain in Russia, and as migrants navigating life in Georgia. Drawing upon twenty in-depth interviews alongside secondary data, the research reveals that despite residing in a host country with greater democratic freedoms and possessing biographical characteristics often associated with political activism, relokanti deliberately refrain from engaging in political expression, even within the private sphere of family interactions. I conceptualize this strategic withdrawal from all transnational political action as silence after exit—a form of political non-engagement shaped by the indirect yet pervasive effects of the extraterritorial spillover of authoritarianism. Findings of this work contribute to the literature on diaspora and transnational political action by centering cases of political disengagement and underscoring the importance of incorporating constraint into our understanding of political life of migrants under authoritarian reach.
{"title":"Strategic non-engagement: new Russian political migrants and the effects of extraterritorial spillover of authoritarianism","authors":"Liudmila Listrovaya","doi":"10.1093/sf/soaf076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf076","url":null,"abstract":"This research investigates the ways in which authoritarianism constrains the transnational political engagement of recent Russian emigrants, a group known as relokanti. The study centers on three interconnected social roles of relokanti: as citizens of Russia, as family members of those who remain in Russia, and as migrants navigating life in Georgia. Drawing upon twenty in-depth interviews alongside secondary data, the research reveals that despite residing in a host country with greater democratic freedoms and possessing biographical characteristics often associated with political activism, relokanti deliberately refrain from engaging in political expression, even within the private sphere of family interactions. I conceptualize this strategic withdrawal from all transnational political action as silence after exit—a form of political non-engagement shaped by the indirect yet pervasive effects of the extraterritorial spillover of authoritarianism. Findings of this work contribute to the literature on diaspora and transnational political action by centering cases of political disengagement and underscoring the importance of incorporating constraint into our understanding of political life of migrants under authoritarian reach.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"137 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144269391","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
When Americans protest the police, how should the police treat the protesters? Police exert social control on behalf of the state and have been implicated in the maintenance of inequalities, yet are also tasked with managing protests, even protests of the police. So, how do citizens feel about possible restrictions to their right to protest, a critical feature of a functional democracy? While the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 were largely peaceful, some Americans supported the use of repressive “law and order” responses. Amid simultaneous movements for racial equality (Black Lives Matter) and gendered equality (#MeToo), an intersectional threat perspective encourages us to consider the potentially unique reactions of people who perceive simultaneous threats to multiple privileged identities. We theorize that support for aggressive policing approaches to racial justice protests acts as a synchronized performance of race and gender, enforcing the symbolic boundaries that undergird structural inequalities. Specifically, we suspect that perceived threats to male privilege will also be relevant to these views, at least among those who also perceived threats to white privilege. Using data from the 2020 American National Election Study survey—shortly after the mass protests of the spring and summer of that year—we find a conditional relationship for perceived gender threat, which appears relevant to views of policing the Black Lives Matter protests only among those who also perceive threats to white privilege. We discuss implications for understanding public comprehension of other social phenomena, particularly during multiple overlapping civil rights movements.
{"title":"Who watches the watchmen? intersectional threat and public opinion about policing the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests","authors":"Kevin Drakulich, Christian Law","doi":"10.1093/sf/soaf078","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf078","url":null,"abstract":"When Americans protest the police, how should the police treat the protesters? Police exert social control on behalf of the state and have been implicated in the maintenance of inequalities, yet are also tasked with managing protests, even protests of the police. So, how do citizens feel about possible restrictions to their right to protest, a critical feature of a functional democracy? While the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 were largely peaceful, some Americans supported the use of repressive “law and order” responses. Amid simultaneous movements for racial equality (Black Lives Matter) and gendered equality (#MeToo), an intersectional threat perspective encourages us to consider the potentially unique reactions of people who perceive simultaneous threats to multiple privileged identities. We theorize that support for aggressive policing approaches to racial justice protests acts as a synchronized performance of race and gender, enforcing the symbolic boundaries that undergird structural inequalities. Specifically, we suspect that perceived threats to male privilege will also be relevant to these views, at least among those who also perceived threats to white privilege. Using data from the 2020 American National Election Study survey—shortly after the mass protests of the spring and summer of that year—we find a conditional relationship for perceived gender threat, which appears relevant to views of policing the Black Lives Matter protests only among those who also perceive threats to white privilege. We discuss implications for understanding public comprehension of other social phenomena, particularly during multiple overlapping civil rights movements.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144260666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Climate change represents a major threat to the world, yet policy responses to it have been tepid and ineffective. Recent dire warnings and more frequent climate-related extreme weather events have stirred greater interest in more assertive responses, mostly around two beloved “solutions or policy areas”—transitioning to renewable energy and energy efficiency improvement. This study investigates whether these solutions lessen carbon emissions. More crucially, it scrutinizes whether they are resilient against consumptive lifestyles, an elephant in the room often ignored by governmental decision-makers. Dynamic fixed effects modeling of cross-national longitudinal data shows renewable energies offer opportunities for reducing carbon emissions, but energy intensity prevents us from realizing their full environmental benefits. We find evidence in our analysis that energy intensity as well as other socioeconomic factors are suppressing the influence of renewable energies on carbon emissions. The analysis also shows that the relationship between national energy-intensity, which taps inefficiency, and carbon emissions is moderated by energy-intensive lifestyles (energy use per capita). This finding suggests reducing energy intensity may offer some reductions in carbon emissions, but such efforts must be paired with reductions in energy consumption per capita.
{"title":"Another elephant in the room? how energy-intensive lifestyles may undermine the fight against climate change","authors":"Lazarus Adua, Brett Clark","doi":"10.1093/sf/soaf074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf074","url":null,"abstract":"Climate change represents a major threat to the world, yet policy responses to it have been tepid and ineffective. Recent dire warnings and more frequent climate-related extreme weather events have stirred greater interest in more assertive responses, mostly around two beloved “solutions or policy areas”—transitioning to renewable energy and energy efficiency improvement. This study investigates whether these solutions lessen carbon emissions. More crucially, it scrutinizes whether they are resilient against consumptive lifestyles, an elephant in the room often ignored by governmental decision-makers. Dynamic fixed effects modeling of cross-national longitudinal data shows renewable energies offer opportunities for reducing carbon emissions, but energy intensity prevents us from realizing their full environmental benefits. We find evidence in our analysis that energy intensity as well as other socioeconomic factors are suppressing the influence of renewable energies on carbon emissions. The analysis also shows that the relationship between national energy-intensity, which taps inefficiency, and carbon emissions is moderated by energy-intensive lifestyles (energy use per capita). This finding suggests reducing energy intensity may offer some reductions in carbon emissions, but such efforts must be paired with reductions in energy consumption per capita.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"41 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2025-06-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144238065","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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