This commentary questions why progress toward more rigorous standards has been so slow 25 years after the creation of the EAS. It argues the problem is structural rather than cognitive: critical and expressive sociology dominate hiring, publishing, and editorial gatekeeping, and their success criteria are largely orthogonal to methodological rigor. It contends that more rapid progress will require not just moral suasion but a more aggressive capture of evaluation infrastructure — journals, funding panels, and editorial boards — alongside greater public visibility for cognitive sociology, since legitimacy in public debate is itself a resource in the competition for academic power.
We examine the existence of altruism budgets (AB), which imply fixed monetary allocations to prosocial behaviours (PSB), and benevolence constraints (BC), which refer to wider limits to benevolent behaviour, giving rise to a substitution between PSB's across domains and causes, including volunteering and biological donations. Using longitudinal data from the Netherlands from 2003 to 2019, we exploit two exogenous shocks to charitable behaviour: the introduction of a tax incentive that increased donations to culture and the arts, and a large-scale emergency fundraising campaign targeting Syrian refugees and victims of Typhoon Haiyan. Our results provide no evidence of AB but robust evidence of BC. We find a robust and precisely estimated decline in volunteering of approximately 4.5 hours per month after the emergency aid campaign among donors. This pattern suggests that individuals substitute across different forms of prosocial behaviour, reallocating effort from non-monetary activities such as volunteering toward monetary contributions during periods of heightened charitable demand.
Pandemics create social dilemmas. Everyone benefits from health behaviors that reduce the transmission of damaging infectious diseases. But people may not want to bear the costs of engaging in health behaviors themselves. Research suggests that if an action (like failing to engage in a health behavior) has consequences for others (i.e., produces externalities), those others will disapprove of the behavior and expect others to also disapprove. In the pandemic context, this argument suggests that norms will support health behaviors. But in situations in which some subgroups are affected by the virus and others are not, norms supporting health behaviors should be weaker. This is because people at risk from a virus are likely to be more supportive of health behaviors than those who are not. And people are likely to expect individuals in groups affected by a virus to support health behaviors more than those who are not affected. We use two online vignette experiments to test this externalities argument in the context of a novel virus. Results partially support the hypotheses. Theoretically, the study contributes to understanding of how patterns of externalities affect normative beliefs and expectations. Substantively, it has implications for messaging about the effects of viruses and the promotion of health behaviors aimed at reducing disease transmission.
In this note we outline a vision on standards for sociology. The occasion is given us by the 25th anniversary of the European Academy of Sociology (EAS), an institution that aims to promote those standards. We first revisit the founding aims of EAS and evaluate the extent to which they have been realized. We then consider the challenges and opportunities currently facing sociology and the social sciences more broadly and propose three key principles to advance disciplinary standards in sociology. These key principles concern the integration of theory and empirics, open science practices, and engagement with wider societal debates. We conclude by calling for unity in basic disciplinary standards agreed upon by the sociological community, alongside diversity in research questions and methods to foster creative sociological explanations and descriptions.
Aksoy et al. (2026) propose three standards for sociology, the integration of theory and empirics, open science, and a careful relation between scholarship and political action. In this comment, we endorse these standards and argue that two developments, the uneven geography of sociological knowledge and the disciplinary reach of artificial intelligence, call for a wider frame. We propose reciprocal collaboration with researchers in the Global South as a single move that absorbs the disruption from AI, corrects an empirical deficit, and narrows the methodological gap, while extending rather than diluting the standards the statement defends.
This comment argues that the position statement by Aksoy et al. (2026) articulates necessary but insufficient conditions for disciplinary standards in sociology. Integrating theory and empirics, open science practices, and engagement with pressing social issues are essential requirements; yet they leave unaddressed the capacity of sociological knowledge to produce operationally testable effects. Drawing on Prasad's distinction between the causes of problems and the causes of solutions, the paper contends that analytical robustness must also be assessed through what happens when knowledge performs, when it must orient decisions, reveal resistances, and enable collective learning. The pragmatist tradition offers a complementary reframing: a sociological claim is not fully robust until it survives the test of application and generates effects that can be learned from. The comment then develops an analogy with medical research to articulate what might be called a standard of "clinical causality". Just as preclinical findings may be causally well-identified yet therapeutically irrelevant, sociological mechanisms may pass all internal tests while remaining fragile, non-transferable, or operationally vacuous. Unlike clinical trials, however, social interventions cannot rely on increasing control to achieve transferability; they require instead an adaptive mix of control and learning, in which failure is treated as data about the limits of the theory rather than a shortcoming of implementation. An expanded standard of this kind look would preserve everything Aksoy et al. advocate while adding a fourth evaluative dimension: the capacity to translate knowledge into solutions that are testable, transferable, and capable of generating cumulative learning from their effects.
This statement engages with the position paper by focusing on a growing asymmetry in the production of social knowledge between public research institutions and large technology companies. While universities remain committed to open science, transparency, and public accountability, digital platforms increasingly control the infrastructures through which social life is organized, observed, and analyzed. The statement argues that this asymmetry threatens the capacity of independent sociology to produce autonomous and publicly accountable knowledge about digitally mediated societies. It calls for strengthening independent research infrastructures and participatory forms of digital governance to preserve the institutional conditions for rigorous and independent sociological inquiry.
This study examines how social capital moderates the associations between regional economic and cultural externalities and support for populist radical right parties (PRRPs). While demand-side research has documented the role of economic and cultural grievances, the social mechanisms that condition the response to these shocks remain less understood. This study addresses this gap by distinguishing between bonding, bridging, and linking social capital and by applying a multilevel analysis to capture the cross-level interplay between social structures and macro-level changes. Drawing on the UK Household Longitudinal Study and UK Census data, the findings demonstrate that bonding social capital amplifies the positive association between grievances and PRRP support, whereas both bridging and linking social capital tend to attenuate these relationships. These interactive patterns remain consistent even when party choices, including Conservative, Labour, and UKIP, are explicitly differentiated. By shifting the focus to these contingent associations, this study refines conventional demand-side explanations and highlights how the social fabric of communities determines the political consequences of economic and cultural shocks.
Dictators are notoriously untrustworthy allies, often seeking to consolidate power at the expense of their own supporters. While some ruling coalitions are too weak to resist this, others possess the capacity to push back. Why, then, do these powerful elites often fail to prevent personalization? This study argues that strong elites face a collective action problem when resisting the dictator. Given their strength, as long as one of them resists, the autocrat's power remains constrained, benefiting all members of the ruling coalition. This creates an incentive to free ride. Elites let other regime members do the work of resisting, hoping to capture the benefits of power sharing without having to pay the costs of confrontation. As more elites fall for this calculus, inaction becomes inevitable, enabling dictators to consolidate power. Contrary to the prevailing view, power sharing does not always constrain autocrats. Depending on how dictators share power, they may create strategic incentives that facilitate personalization.
King Ethelred's repeated payments to Viking armies are often portrayed as evidence of political weakness and strategic failure. This paper reinterprets these actions within a rational choice framework, asking whether Ethelred the Unready acted optimally when paying King Svein Forkbeard to withdraw from England between 991 and 1012. Drawing on historical evidence from five documented Danegeld payments, we develop a formal model in which tribute and restraint emerge from repeated strategic interaction sustained by credible threats. The model identifies the conditions under which it is optimal for Ethelred to pay and for Forkbeard to refrain from raiding, and determines the equilibrium interval between successive encounters. Interpreting the English economy as a renewable resource, we apply the logic of Faustmann's Rule and Olson's stationary bandit theory to explain how coercion and cooperation can coexist in a self-enforcing equilibrium. Ethelred pays when tribute and its collection costs are lower than expected wartime losses; Forkbeard restrains himself when the discounted value of future payments exceeds the one-time gain from plunder. The analysis shows that Ethelred's policy was not inoptimal appeasement but a calculated equilibrium strategy that temporarily stabilized Anglo-Danish relations. More broadly, the paper provides a framework for understanding how repeated interaction, discounting, and resource dynamics can sustain cooperation under coercive conditions.
While social norms and metanorms supporting sanctions are essential for norm compliance, their emergence in temporary settings, where long-term repeated interactions and reputational incentives are absent, remains poorly understood. This study analyzes survey, social network (N = 421), and interview (N = 65) data collected from volunteers at three Hungarian music festivals to explore the relationship between sanctioning support and social networks in these transient organizations. The findings show that a clear sanctioning hierarchy can emerge even in such temporary settings. Support for sanctions was strongest for violations that caused immediate operational disruption or direct harm, but far weaker for violations consistent with the festival's informal, permissive atmosphere. Informal peer regulation mitigated the need for formal sanctions, particularly for lateness, a frequent violation. Different measures of network centrality were associated with distinct sanctioning attitudes: individuals in bridging positions showed stronger support for sanctions, especially for violations that posed a threat to group cohesion, whereas well-connected volunteers showed no consistent support for sanctions. This suggests that in temporary settings, some socially active and central individuals may favor short-term social harmony over the group's cooperative interests. These findings demonstrate that social control mechanisms are not confined to stable environments but can also emerge in transient settings.
Applying insights from the theory of collective action in self-governance, this paper addresses how a city-sanctioned homeless camp has successfully self-governed for over two decades. Based on a club goods model and democratic practices, this tent city attains social order and provides numerous collective benefits to its residents, who initially bring very little capital to the camp. Our case study, which includes in-depth interviews with residents of a tent city at four time points between 2012-2025, as well as observations from their weekly organizational meeting, illustrates how the possibility of exclusion for rule violation, norms emphasizing voice and service, and democratic governance combine to make the community viable. In addition, the evidence shows, rather than merely enabling collective action, that collective identity, social capital and personal agency are emergent features of self-governance that enhance and reinforce its benefits for residents. Finally, we discuss the limitations of self-governance as a solution to homelessness.
Spontaneous order is the keystone idea in Hayek's thought and it is at the basis of his reflections on the market, the State, and the law. Among the scholars that have been influenced by Hayek, Sugden is one of the most concerned with such an idea. Indeed, he has recently reaffirmed that the Austrian scholar influenced his understanding of the market as a spontaneous order. For this reason, the paper aims to provide a reading of Hayek's spontaneous order theory through Sugden's contribution on the matter. In addition to outlining the origins of the concept, the paper highlights similarities and differences in the thinking of the two scholars in order to explore some hidden features of Hayek's spontaneous order through Sugden's conceptualisation, which helps to 'de-ideologise' Hayek's alleged ideological justification for capitalism.
In this note we outline a vision on standards for sociology. The occasion is given us by the 25th anniversary of the European Academy of Sociology (EAS), an institution that aims to promote those standards. We first revisit the founding aims of EAS and evaluate the extent to which they have been realized. We then consider the challenges and opportunities currently facing sociology and the social sciences more broadly and propose three key principles to advance disciplinary standards in sociology. These key principles concern the integration of theory and empirics, open science practices, and engagement with wider societal debates. We conclude by calling for unity in basic disciplinary standards agreed upon by the sociological community, alongside diversity in research questions and methods to foster creative sociological explanations and descriptions.
To understand how social media shapes online discourse or contributes to polarization, we need models of collective online choice that link users' behavioral adaptation to the emergence of complex and dynamic digital environments. This study develops a dynamic model of platform selection based on Social Feedback Theory, using multi-agent reinforcement learning to capture how user decisions are shaped by past rewards across platforms. A key parameter (mu) governs whether users seek approval from like-minded peers or exposure to opposing views. Agent-based simulations combined with dynamical-systems analysis reveal a social dilemma: even when users value diversity, collective dynamics can trap online environments in polarized echo chambers that reduce overall user satisfaction. Above a critical diversity threshold, a different equilibrium appears in which one large, integrated platform dominates while smaller platforms persist as extremist niches. In an intermediate regime, the two outcomes coexist, generating path dependence and hysteresis. We further demonstrate how modest, strategically targeted interventions-such as rewarding minority participation-can destabilize polarization and promote integrated discourse. The model shifts attention from belief change to participatory choice. It links micro-level learning dynamics to macro-level online fragmentation and informs mechanism-based interventions in the digital public sphere.
This paper develops a Calculus of Consent-inspired model that focuses on how strongly citizens believe there are moral truths in politics. This truth-commitment is treated as an environmental parameter that shifts external-cost and decision-cost schedules while maintaining the contractarian objective of minimizing their sum. Two results follow. First, the optimal threshold tightens when truth-commitment steepens external costs relative to decision costs and loosens in the reverse case; under a plausible configuration, higher truth-commitment implies stricter rules. Second, even at the optimal rule, the minimized sum of external and decision costs weakly increases whenever truth-commitment raises either component at a fixed rule. The analysis is agnostic about the existence of political moral truth. An interpretive section situates these results in Buchanan's procedural liberalism under moral anti-realism and explains why popular belief in moral truth tends to elevate the costs of collective organization, providing a contractarian rationale for his skepticism. Extensions sketch how consensus and conviction operate as orthogonal channels, how rights can substitute for higher thresholds, how heterogeneous truth-commitments aggregate, and how perception shifts tied to truth-commitment can distort observed rules. The paper brings metaethical beliefs into the positive theory of constitutional choice, providing a tractable formal account of how truth-commitment shapes optimal rules and the costs of collective organization.
This paper seeks to clarify the concept of opportunity hoarding as it applies to Black-White educational inequalities. Two prevailing interpretations stand out: a group-disparity interpretation, which treats opportunity hoarding as any process generating group differences, and an exclusionary-behaviors interpretation, which emphasizes how White actors secure advantages through exclusionary practices. I argue that the former is too broad - remaining vague about the underlying mechanisms - and the latter too narrow, overlooking what I term hoarding without hoarders, i.e., opportunity hoarding that arises even in the absence of exclusionary behaviors. I define opportunity hoarding as the relational processes that generate racial penalties in access to resources, i.e., disparities unexplained by previously formed individual differences. Using an agent-based model of racial disparities in advanced course-taking, this paper shows how network diffusion - under segregation, consolidation of race and socioeconomic status, and temporal constraints - can produce racial penalties even when behaviors are race-neutral. The framework highlights the need for scholars and policymakers to look beyond exclusionary acts in the hoarding of valuable resources.
