Shadow education has become a prominent feature of educational systems worldwide, yet its consequences for educational inequality remain contested. While some perspectives view shadow education as a universal mechanism for enhancing academic achievement and educational opportunities, others emphasize its role in reproducing social inequalities. This study examines how the relationship between shadow education, university admission, and educational stratification varies across institutional contexts. Drawing on nationally representative panel data from Germany, Japan, and the United States, we analyze patterns of participation in shadow education and its associations with academic achievement and transitions to higher education. The findings reveal substantial cross-national variation. In Germany, shadow education is used primarily as a compensatory resource and shows little association with academic achievement or university admission. In contrast, shadow education is positively associated with university entry in both Japan and the United States, where admissions systems rely more heavily on competitive selection and standardized testing. Although participation in shadow education is socially stratified—particularly in Japan and the United States—additional analyses provide little evidence that its returns differ systematically across socioeconomic groups. Instead, educational inequalities arise mainly through unequal access to shadow education rather than unequal benefits from participation. These results highlight the importance of institutional contexts in shaping the role of shadow education and demonstrate that its implications for educational inequality are contingent rather than universal.
This study develops a context-bargaining account of how macro conditions shape the relational significance of spouses’ education for gender-role attitudes. Using World Values Survey data from 56 countries (N = 49,238), we combine multilevel dominance analysis and cross-level interaction models to examine gendered asymmetries in own- and spouse-education associations. Spouse education is the dominant educational correlate of men’s attitudes, whereas own education dominates among women. These asymmetries become more pronounced in contexts where women have greater economic opportunities, while secular values show little evidence of comparable moderation. The findings demonstrate that the relational significance of education is context dependent: women’s education carries greater weight within marriage where broader opportunity structures allow educational resources to be translated into economic leverage and bargaining capacity.
The article examines the link between national identity and an under-researched side of migration attitudes—attitudes toward emigration. We investigate the role of the strength of national identification and conceptions of nationhood in public opinion on emigration, adopting a comparative multi-country perspective. Based on structural equation models on nationwide samples from six European countries ( N = 7810), we found little evidence for the hypothesized positive link between national identification and anti-emigration sentiment, as well as for the moderating role of conceptions of nationhood, highlighting the need to further study the drivers of emigration attitudes.
This article examines how public authorities, political parties, and civil society have opposed two French populist radical right parties, Rassemblement national (RN) and Reconquête (R!). Recent research has highlighted the normalization of this political family in Europe, suggesting that it is not only due to the success of populist radical right parties but also due to the accommodating strategies employed by their adversaries. In this article, I adopt a different approach to analyzing reactions to populist radical right parties. I ask why, despite the growing popularity of these parties and the normalization of their ideas, they are still marginalized in France. After more than 50 years of existence, one would have expected the full integration of RN into the French political arena. To explain this puzzle, I use a dataset of 378 initiatives opposing RN and R! (2020–2024). First, I show how political parties marginalize populist radical right parties, a strategy actively supported by civil society actors. Then I highlight the reasons for this persistent practice and discuss the role of historical and institutional factors. Initiatives opposing RN and R! draw on the salient memory of authoritarianism. In addition, underfunded and weakly structured opponents from civil society benefit from the resources provided by the two-round first-past-the-post voting system. This system enables them to deploy their resources during election campaigns, saturating the media with anti-RN/R! messages. By doing so, they legitimize the practice of marginalization, campaign after campaign. In sum, the article emphasizes the path-dependent dimension of responses to populist radical right parties.
