When does violent conflict intensify rather than suppress investment in children’s education? We argue that under conflicts characterized by selective violence and partial preservation of civilian infrastructure, families respond to uncertainty by reallocating resources toward portable forms of capital—most notably, education. Using retrospective data from Spain and a regression discontinuity design, we compare cohorts who reached school age during the Civil War (1936–1939) with adjacent birth cohorts. The baseline regression discontinuity design provides little robust evidence of an overall total effect of war exposure. Exploratory conditional specifications that adjust for educational supply show a +14 percentage point discontinuity in primary school completion and a +6 percentage point discontinuity in lower secondary completion. Because educational supply may itself have been affected by the war, these conditional estimates are consistent with a positive demand-side response that may have been offset in the total effect by supply-side constraints. At the primary level, gains were largest among children from less educated households, suggesting partial equalization of educational opportunity. These findings propose a conditional theory of how violent disruption reshapes family investment strategies and, through them, patterns of educational inequality.
Research consistently documents the wide-ranging strains of family member incarceration, but less is known about the different ways family members work together to manage these strains or the additional strains stemming from this coordination. We use in-depth interview data from the Jail and Family Life Study, drawing on longitudinal interviews with 69 mothers and 85 romantic partners of incarcerated men, to understand the symbiotic harms of jail incarceration for families. We find that the strains of family member incarceration engender reactionary brokering, a concept we define as the collaborative work family members engage in (with each other and occasionally with institutional actors) to manage strains generated by the sudden absence of a loved one. We uncover three primary types of reactionary brokers—exhaustive, concentrated, and bounded—alongside a group of monitors who oversee but are largely excluded or exempt from the brokering role. We also trace the socially patterned processes that shape these roles. Although reactionary brokering can provide critical support for families, it also generates substantial new strains, particularly for families with harmonious relationships that facilitate brokering. The concept of reactionary brokering illuminates how family members experiencing the same strain—in this case, incarceration—arrive at divergent brokering roles that can create new inequalities.
It has been argued that reputation systems in anonymous online markets supersede informal information exchange in their capacity to promote cooperation among traders. We challenge this view and propose that informal communication plays a crucial role in online market governance. Drawing on a comprehensive theoretical framework of learning and control through social embeddedness, we combine rich data on market transactions, trader reputation scores, and textual data in community forum discussions of two large online markets for illegal goods. Our analyses reveal two key insights. First, despite the availability of standardized scores in reputation systems, both traders and market administrators also rely on informal community discussions when exerting social control in online markets. Second, when reputable sellers are suspected of fraudulent behavior, community discussions involving traders and administrators prove swifter at resolving these issues than reputation systems. Our work shows that informal means of information exchange complement and, at times, supplement reputation systems in supporting the governance of large, anonymous marketplaces.
That happiness tracks income is an abiding finding in the social science literature. First-born children tend to have higher socioeconomic attainment than later-borns, and therefore are expected to be relatively happier. Using data from representative U.S. surveys (approximately 15,000 individuals and 7,000 siblings), I find that although first-borns have substantially higher income levels, birth order effects on indicators of psychological well-being—life satisfaction, positive affect, and mental health—are statistically non-significant. Nevertheless, observed first-born effects on life satisfaction, albeit small, align with differences implied by birth order income gaps and the income–well-being gradient. By contrast, first-borns have significantly lower levels of positive affect and mental health than implied by their income advantage, revealing a happiness paradox. Possible explanations for the paradox are explored. These findings highlight the relevance of social context in shaping the income–happiness link, and invite investigation into relational determinants of well-being that may be independent of material success.
Although many argue that American society has become overly politicized, social scientists have yet to systematically measure “politicization”—the process by which issues are framed as political through their association with recognizable political divisions in public discourse. This article develops a new measure of politicization using à la carte word embedding models trained on 1.35 million articles from three national newspapers. I trace the historical politicization of 25 issue domains in the United States from 1980 to 2024 by examining the extent to which specific issues are discursively associated with ideological labels (liberal and conservative) and partisan markers (Democrat and Republican). The analysis yields three main findings. First, politicization in the American public sphere has increased substantially over the past four decades, and this increase has extended beyond traditionally political issues into previously less politicized aspects of social life. Second, the discursive locus of political conflict has shifted over time: race and immigration, gender and family, and legal institutions have become more politicized than economic issues, which had been among the most politicized domains in the 1980s. Third, the boundary between the political and the less-political remains consequential, as some important areas of social life such as the home, financial markets, and outer space remain relatively unpoliticized in public discourse today. By studying politicization as a phenomenon in its own right, this research contributes to cultural and political sociology by treating “politics” as a dynamic category whose boundaries are continuously renegotiated, while also reorienting scholars of political division to shift their focus from public opinion and formal institutions toward the “public culture” through which social conflict and cohesion are represented and experienced.
