The intergenerational transmission of educational attainment remains a key mechanism through which social inequalities are reproduced. While sociological research has long emphasized environmental influences, recent research shows that genetic differences are also relevant to educational attainment, as well as socially contingent in their influences. Using the effects of a polygenic score for educational attainment, this study integrated sociological and genetic perspectives to describe how equality of opportunity is distributed within Germany’s highly stratified educational system. The analysis is based on data from the genotyped Socio-Economic Panel innovation sample (SOEP‑G; N = 1783). The results show that the observed social inequalities in educational attainment cannot be justified by genetic differences, as there is almost no social stratification of education-linked genetics. Although education-linked genetics exhibits strong effects on educational attainment, this is also moderated by social background. Genetic associations are stronger among individuals from advantaged families, supporting theories of social enhancement: Favorable environments amplify opportunities to realize individual differences, whereas disadvantaged environments suppress them. These findings strengthen the sociological argument that inequality in Germany arises not from genetic differences but from unequal social environments. This study therefore removes some of the uncertainty and demonstrates the value of genetically informed sociological stratification research.
Ronald Inglehart's theory of the Silent Revolution, first published in 1971, claims that there has been an intergenerational shift in values toward postmaterialism. The theory of the Silent Revolution, along with the measurement tool developed by Inglehart and the analytical strategy he employed, has faced massive criticism in recent decades. Inglehart, however, has largely ignored this criticism. As recently as 2019, in the book Cultural Backlash, published jointly with Pippa Norris, Inglehart used the theory of the Silent Revolution as the starting point for an explanation of the rise of right-wing populist parties and politicians. Regarding the age of right-wing populists' supporters, Norris and Inglehart arrived at empirically inaccurate conclusions. The reason for this lies in the fact that an intergenerational shift in values toward postmaterialism, as posited by the theory of the Silent Revolution, simply does not exist. This is demonstrated using Germany as an example, based on cumulative survey data spanning a period of 54 years. These data are analyzed using hierarchical age-period-cohort models.
Player market values generated on the online platform transfermarkt.de are based on a 'wisdom of the crowd' logic and are used as an established point of reference in media reports, by football clubs, and in academic research. This article examines how football fans on this platform discuss player market values and justify proposals for upward or downward adjustments. Drawing on a qualitative content analysis of 1030 forum posts from the market value analysis thread, the study analyses the argumentative patterns through which fans substantiate and legitimise their notions of appropriate market values. The findings reveal six key justifications that structure the valuation discourse: performance, comparison, market, speculation, reputation, and club benefit. These argumentative patterns range from assessments of athletic performance and statistical indicators to comparisons with other players, transfer market activity, and assumptions about future developments. They also include an emphasis on a player's specific value to the club and evaluations of public recognition. Ultimately, the market values are determined as the outcome of ongoing, collectively negotiated debates. The results underscore that the dissent arising from the reference to different valuation conventions supports the wisdom of laypeople, as this continuously creates new opportunities for valuations.
Die auf Basis der „Wisdom-of-the-crowd“-Logik bestimmten Marktwerte von Fußballern der Online-Plattform „Transfermarkt.de“ werden in Medienberichten, in der Klubpraxis sowie in der wissenschaftlichen Forschung als anerkannter Referenzwert verwendet. In diesem Beitrag wird untersucht, wie Fußballfans auf dieser Plattform Marktwerte diskutieren und Auf- und Abwertungsvorschläge rechtfertigen. Mittels einer qualitativen Inhaltsanalyse von 1030 Beiträgen aus dem Forum „Marktwert-Analyse“ werden die Argumentationsmuster untersucht, mit denen die Fans ihre Vorstellungen von angemessenen Marktwerten begründen und legitimieren. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass sechs zentrale Rechtfertigungsordnungen den Bewertungsdiskurs strukturieren: Leistungskonvention, Vergleichskonvention, Marktkonvention, Spekulationskonvention, Reputationskonvention und Ertragskonvention. Die vertretenen Argumentationsmuster reichen von der Bewertung sportlicher Leistungen und statistischer Kennzahlen über Vergleiche mit anderen Spielern und Transfermarktangeboten bis hin zu Annahmen über zukünftige Entwicklungen, der Akzentuierung des spezifischen Werts für den Verein sowie der Bewertung der öffentlichen Anerkennung von Spielern. Die letztlich von der Online-Plattform festgelegten Marktwerte der Spieler entstehen als Ergebnis fortlaufender, kollektiv ausgehandelter Debatten. Die Ergebnisse unterstreichen, dass der aus dem Bezug auf unterschiedliche Bewertungskonventionen entstehende Dissens die Weisheit der Laien stützt, da so fortlaufend neue Anlässe für Bewertungen geschaffen werden.
This study investigates regional differences in pay fairness perceptions among employees in eastern and western Germany from 2009 to 2023. Using longitudinal data from the Socio-Economic Panel study, the analysis reveals substantial initial disparities: Employees in eastern Germany perceive their gross earnings as more unfair than employees in western Germany do. Over time, however, these regional differences diminish. Analyses stratified by wage deciles show that this convergence in pay fairness is primarily driven by a decrease in unfairness perceptions among low-wage employees in eastern Germany. This development, in turn, is driven by a narrowing East–West gap in actual earnings among low-wage employees. The finding of converging pay fairness perceptions in eastern and western Germany remains robust after adjusting for individual differences (gender, age, education, labor market experience, immigration background) and structural factors (economic area, public sector, organizational size), underscoring that there has been a true convergence of perceptions over time. While this development is cause for optimism, the overall convergence is driven not solely by employees in eastern Germany improving in terms of pay fairness but also by employees in western Germany showing an overall increase in perceived unfairness.
This brief report investigates the association between family structure and the cognitive effort of fifth-grade students in Madrid and Berlin. Although existing studies often link single parenthood to poorer academic outcomes, scant research has investigated its impact on children’s effort. This study utilizes a novel behavioral measure of cognitive effort—rather than survey-based proxies—to fill this knowledge gap. We collected data from 1359 students across 62 classes. Effort was measured via performance on three incentivized real-effort tasks (AX continuous performance, Simon, and slider tasks). Using two-level random-intercept linear regression models and multiple imputation, we analyzed children’s effortful behavior while adjusting for cognitive ability. Our findings consistently show that children from single-parent households exhibit lower cognitive effort. This negative association remained significant across all incentive conditions and even after controlling for socioeconomic factors and environmental variables. Moreover, the effort gap between single and dual-parent households was qualitatively similar in both cities. However, the estimated magnitude of this effect is rather small. In conclusion, children growing up with a single parent exhibit lower cognitive effort than children in dual-parent families. This finding may provide a pathway to better understanding of the educational disadvantage typically observed among single-parent children.
Die 1971 erstmals veröffentliche Theorie der Stillen Revolution von Ronald Inglehart behauptet die Existenz eines intergenerationalen Wertewandels hin zum Postmaterialismus. Die Theorie der Stillen Revolution ist ebenso wie das von Inglehart entwickelte Messinstrument und die von ihm verwendete Auswertungsstrategie in den letzten Jahrzehnten massiv kritisiert worden. Inglehart hat diese Kritik allerdings weitgehend ignoriert. Noch 2019 machte Inglehart in dem gemeinsam mit Pippa Norris veröffentlichten Buch „Cultural Backlash“ die Theorie der Stillen Revolution zum Ausgangspunkt einer Erklärung für das Erstarken rechtspopulistischer Parteien und Politiker. Im Hinblick auf das Alter der Anhängerschaft der Rechtspopulisten gelangten Norris und Inglehart dabei zu empirisch unzutreffenden Aussagen. Der Grund hierfür ist in der Tatsache zu sehen, dass ein intergenerationaler Wertewandel hin zum Postmaterialismus im Sinne der Theorie der Stillen Revolution schlicht nicht existiert. Dies wird am Beispiel Deutschlands anhand von kumulierten Umfragedaten gezeigt, die einen Zeitraum von 54 Jahren umspannen. Die Auswertung dieser Daten erfolgt mittels hierarchischer Alters-Perioden-Kohorten-Modelle.
This study describes differences in partnership forms and parter characteristics between young male refugees from Syria and Afghanistan in Germany and demographically comparable men from the resident population, both with and without migration backgrounds. We contribute by focusing not only on current partnerships but also on retrospective partnership reports since arrival in Germany or—for those born in Germany—since adolescence, distinguishing between casual, committed, and marital unions. We further observe patterns of ethnic endogamy across these types. We draw on data from wave 1 of the Partnership Formation in the Context of Recent Refugee Migration study (PARFORM), fielded throughout 2022 and 2023 among male refugee migrants in Germany, and wave 9 of the German part of the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey in Four European Countries study (CILS4EU-DE), fielded in 2022 among the German resident population, two datasets that collected retrospective information on the prevalence of specific partnership forms. Findings from a series of logistic regressions indicate that Syrian and Afghan refugees are more likely to be married, except when compared to resident minorities originating from the Middle East and North Africa, but are also more likely than any other group in the resident population not to report any partnerships since arrival. In nonmarital partnerships, refugees are more likely to be involved in less committed relationships compared to men from the German resident population. Finally, patterns of ethnic endogamy vary by partnership type: Refugees have a high probability of co-national marital partners, while the likelihood of having a German partner (compared to co-national) is greater in nonmarital unions.
Experimental methods increasingly inform sociological inequality research; however, a blind spot often remains when experimental findings are translated into group-level disparities. This article addresses treatment prevalence—the proportion of individuals within different groups who receive a given treatment outside the experimental setting—as a largely overlooked parameter linking experimental treatment effects to macro-level inequality patterns. We demonstrate how incorporating treatment prevalence enhances the interpretation of experimental results by drawing on three recent sociological studies concerning ethnic inequality in social interactions, gender inequality in academic hiring, and social inequality in higher-education enrolment. Our analysis reveals that substantial group-level disparities can emerge even when treatment effects are equal across groups. Conversely, treatments producing stronger positive effects for disadvantaged groups may nevertheless exacerbate inequality when treatment receipt differs across groups. We introduce a heuristic framework and sensitivity tool to help researchers systematically explore how treatment effects and treatment prevalences jointly shape macro-level disparities. Beyond advancing the study of existing inequalities, our framework has immediate practical implications for evaluating inequality-reducing interventions, which must consider not only treatment effects but also which groups receive treatments. More broadly, our approach offers a pathway for integrating experimental and observational methods in future social stratification and inequality research.
The method of decreasing abstraction (MDA) has been proposed as a strategy for developing sociological models that balance parsimony and descriptive adequacy. This paper reconstructs Lindenberg’s version of MDA and situates it within broader debates on unrealistic assumptions and the tension between instrumentalism and realism. Lindenberg’s MDA can be viewed as a special case of a more general class of theory-development strategies. It combines explicit heuristic rules for the context of discovery with substantive auxiliary theories that guide the construction of more specialized models. Empirically, however, MDA has been taken up only selectively and rarely in the demanding form envisaged by Lindenberg. Drawing on structuralist reconstructions in the philosophy of science, we analyze hierarchically nested model variants as a general structural feature of research programs, arising from theory-building strategies akin to implicit forms of MDA. We further argue, first, that Lindenberg’s own version of MDA, with its strong commitments to specific auxiliary theories, is too narrow to serve as a general method, and second, that it may often be more promising to use MDA as a strategy that begins with careful reconstructions of existing research programs. We conclude with reflections on the implications for theoretical progress and on the role and balance of theoretical quality criteria such as parsimony and coherence with background knowledge when choosing between competing models.
This article examines whether and to what extent the lifestyles of social groups are linked to their attitudes regarding key areas of political conflicts. Scholarly debates on new societal cleavages posit that conflicts over migration, climate policy, or sexual diversity pit social groups with fundamentally different identities, values, and ways of life against one another. Despite the theoretical salience of such concepts, they have received little empirical attention in polarization research to date. Drawing on recent German survey data and an established lifestyle typology, our analyses demonstrate that substantial attitudinal differences do indeed exist across lifestyle types, though these differences do not amount to a fundamental opposition between them. Modernized groups, whose lifestyles are characterized by greater biographical openness, tend to hold more progressive attitudes on migration, sexual diversity, and climate protection than traditionally oriented groups. For migration and climate issues, the resource level of one's lifestyle also matters: Progressive attitudes are more pronounced among those whose lifestyles reflect elevated levels of economic and cultural capital. In contrast, lifestyle differences prove largely irrelevant for attitudes about economic redistribution. Lifestyle thus appears consequential for those issues commonly labeled as "culture wars" in public discourse. Multivariate analyses suggest that lifestyle differences represent an independent factor shaping sociopolitical attitudes, comparable in magnitude to class and educational differences.
This article discusses and showcases approaches to causal inference with text as data, focusing on the challenges and opportunities that arise when sociological constructs are embedded in language. We highlight that text embeds latent constructs and comes with a number of measurement challenges: Variables of interest must be interpreted through coding, feature extraction, and modelling choices. We distinguish between three central designs: when text is the outcome to be explained (text as outcome), when text functions as the treatment whose effects are to be estimated (text as treatment), and when information extracted from text is used as control variable (text as control). Drawing on examples from our own research, we illustrate how recent methodological advances allow researchers to learn latent outcomes or latent treatments from textual data while preserving the logic of causal identification. We use state-of-the-art techniques for drawing causal inferences with text as data and show how text can serve as a window into sociologically relevant constructs, while also underscoring the interpretive leeway inherent in computational modelling. Our analysis demonstrates that causal inference with text requires careful attention to theory, transparency about researchers’ choices, and sensitivity to the data-generating process. We conclude that text-as-data approaches hold promise for causal analysis and can contribute to sociological explanation.
This article provides an overview and critical discussion of major approaches to causality in contemporary analytic philosophy, with a focus on their relevance to the social sciences. After a discussion of regularity accounts of causality in the spirit of logical empiricism (Sections 2–3), four important groups of more recent postpositivist approaches are examined: counterfactual accounts of causality within the metaphysical framework of similarity-ordered possible worlds (Section 4), temporal accounts and causal process accounts that operate at the level of physics (Sections 5–6), interventionist accounts of causality (Section 7), and, finally, the theory of causal nets, which does not attempt to provide a definition of causality but characterizes causality by theoretical axioms (Sections 8–9). The last account is most general and transdisciplinary, being applicable across all scientific fields. Section 10 addresses issues concerning causal relations between values of variables—as opposed to relations between variables themselves—such as causal preemption and overdetermination. The last section is devoted to causal–mechanistic models of explanation.
Analytical sociology strives to explain sociological phenomena at the macro level through assumptions at the micro level about individual actions and interactions, their contextual dependence, and social dynamics. The focus is on the crucial but ambiguous concept of the “mechanism explanation,” which is contrasted with the “covering-law model.” These concepts are examined using the example of the trust problem in online markets. At the micro level, analytical sociology extends beyond rational choice theory by also taking up alternative theories of action or decision-making. Analytical sociology overlaps strongly with “explanatory sociology” and builds on this tradition. The article focuses on key aspects of the methodology of explanations. In addition, the “desire-belief-opportunity” (DBO) heuristic, the relationship between evolutionary dynamics and goal-oriented behavior, and the problem of alternative explanations for a macro-level relationship are discussed, using an example from criminological research. The article argues for a broader, integrative version of analytical sociology that does not restrict itself to specific models and methods.
The notion that jobs should be awarded on applicants’ qualifications and not on the basis of gender, ethnicity, religion, or family background is a key component of modern liberal societies. Drawing on a novel public opinion survey covering 26 countries from all regions of the world, we analyze the degree to which citizens support the idea that job recruitment should be based on applicants’ qualifications. To understand the variation in citizens’ attitudes toward nondiscrimination, we derive our hypotheses from two broader sociological theories: world society theory and modernization theory. We find strong support for the idea of nondiscrimination in almost all countries surveyed, and at the same time significant variation across the 26 countries, with support being highest in Chile, Latvia, and Sweden and lowest in India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Türkiye. Modernization theory as well as world society theory contribute to better understanding of citizens’ attitudes, albeit to different degrees and mediated through different channels. Citizens living in countries more deeply embedded in world society are more likely to support the principle of nondiscrimination. On the individual level, it turns out that people’s level of education and their general commitment to the norms of a global culture are associated with support for nondiscrimination. With regard to modernization theory, we find that a country’s level of modernization does not directly impact nondiscrimination attitudes, but many of the individual features derived from modernization theory do because individuals who are better educated and more secularized and those holding postmaterial values are more likely to support the nondiscrimination norm.
Der Beitrag untersucht, ob und wie stark die Lebensführung sozialer Gruppen mit ihren Einstellungen zu zentralen politischen Konfliktthemen zusammenhängt. In den sozialwissenschaftlichen Diskussionen zu neuen gesellschaftlichen Spaltungslinien wird postuliert, dass in Konflikten um Migration, Klimaschutz oder sexuelle Diversität gesellschaftliche Gruppen mit grundverschiedenen Identitäten, Werten und Lebensweisen aufeinanderprallen. Obwohl derlei Konzepte theoretisch bedeutsam sind, wurden sie in der Polarisierungsforschung bisher kaum empirisch berücksichtigt. Auf Basis aktueller deutscher Umfragedaten und einer etablierten Lebensführungstypologie zeigen unsere Analysen, dass zwischen Lebensführungstypen in der Tat substanzielle Einstellungsunterschiede bestehen, ohne dass diese Unterschiede das Ausmaß einer fundamentalen Opposition erreichen. Modernisierte Gruppen, deren Lebensführung sich durch hohe biografische Offenheit auszeichnet, zeigen tendenziell progressivere Einstellungen zu Themen der Migration, sexuellen Diversität und des Klimaschutzes als traditionalistisch orientierte Gruppen. Bei Migrations- und Klimafragen spielt zudem das Ausstattungsniveau der Lebensführung eine Rolle: Progressive Haltungen treten hier verstärkt bei jenen auf, deren Lebensführung von einem gehobenen Niveau an ökonomischem und kulturellem Kapital geprägt ist. Bei Einstellungen zu materieller Umverteilung erweisen sich Unterschiede in der Lebensführung hingegen als kaum relevant. Die Lebensführung ist damit für jene Themen bedeutsam, die in der öffentlichen Diskussion als „Kulturkämpfe“ rubriziert werden. Multivariate Analysen weisen darauf hin, dass Lebensführungsunterschiede einen eigenständigen Bedingungsfaktor der gesellschaftspolitischen Einstellungen darstellen, der von ähnlicher Relevanz ist wie Klassen- und Bildungsunterschiede.
