This comment on the position statement by Aksoy et al. argues that the statement should go further by articulating how their definition of theory as linking micro-components of social behavior to macro-level outcomes can more clearly define what sociological advice to policymakers and activists can and should accomplish.
The collective action problem associated with CO2 reduction presents a global challenge that requires cooperation among actors. Two factors are often argued to hinder successful cooperation in this context: endowment heterogeneity and the time delay between environmentally harmful actions and their consequences. This study examines the effects of endowment heterogeneity and delayed feedback on cooperation in common-pool resource management at the individual and group levels. Using a Common-Pool Resource (CPR) game in a laboratory experiment, we simulated CO2 emission dynamics under various conditions of heterogeneity and time-varying feedback. The results highlight that cooperation in common-pool resource dilemmas is shaped through complex micro-macro interdependence. Endowment heterogeneity primarily affects the internal distribution of behavior within groups rather than aggregate outcomes. Low-endowment participants tend to emit less, while high-endowment participants tend to emit more, indicating that endowment heterogeneity affects emissions in opposite directions across group members, largely offsetting each other at the group level. This suggests that heterogeneity may redistribute contributions to mitigation efforts within groups. In contrast, delayed feedback primarily operates by influencing how individuals process and respond to social information. Feedback timing affects how participants react to prior group behavior and the informational conditions under which conditional cooperation is expressed. At the group level, this translates into a modest but detectable effect, suggesting that feedback structure can influence collective outcomes even when individual-level effects are limited. This implies that the determinants of cooperation in CPR settings cannot be fully understood by looking only at either the micro or the macro level.
Old autocratic elites can have incentives to democratize voluntarily and, indeed, they have frequently done so. We develop a theoretical model that carves out path-dependent politico-institutional traits under which an old autocratic elite both wants and dares to democratize voluntarily. It wants to do so if this improves or preserves the old elite’s wealth position; and it dares to do so only if it expects the future democratic rules to be self-enforcing, since otherwise its members may lose their wealth and possibly their freedom or their life. Due to historical path dependency, some politico-institutional traits carry over to a new democratic constitution. Against this background, we demonstrate that the two conditions for voluntary democratization to hold requires that the gap between the inherited politico-institutional structure and that of a self-enforcing democracy are sufficiently narrow to be bridged via non-violent constitutional reforms.
It has been argued that vaccinated patients should be prioritized over unvaccinated patients in life and death triage decisions. To ensure public support, policies need to take views from the general public into account. Empirical evidence on the preferences of the general public is overall in line with prioritizing vaccinated patients. In this study, it is argued that effects of pro-social punishment and in-group bias can explain unequal treatment of vaccinated and unvaccinated patients in triage decisions made by lay persons. Moreover, it is argued that correctly identifying punishment effects requires control for in-group biases. Data from a conjoint experiment with English speaking adults from North America and Europe ( N = 1 , 987 ) were used to test this theoretical argument. Participants were asked to choose one of two patients to receive a life-saving respiratory ventilator. The patients differed randomly in terms of their vaccination status along with other medical and social characteristics. The results indicate that unequal treatment of vaccinated and unvaccinated patients can be attributed to in-group biases for unvaccinated participants, while vaccinated participants show evidence for in-group biases as well as punishment effects. These findings highlight the importance of a nuanced, theory-based understanding of public preferences in triage decisions.
This comment on the position statement by the European Academy of Sociology (EAS) on standards for sociology opens with some preliminaries – concerning theory and empirics, their types, and ways to link them – proceeds to offer eight Sentences summarizing some basics for accelerating the growth of knowledge in sociology, and concludes with two Sentences suggesting next steps for the EAS and individual scholars.
