Categorical Inequalities Research Articles

Lasso Regularization for Selection of Log-linear Models: An Application to Educational Assortative Mating

Log-linear models for contingency tables are a key tool for the study of categorical inequalities in sociology. However, the conventional approach to model selection and specification suffers from at least two limitations: reliance on oftentimes equivocal diagnostics yielded by fit statistics, and the inability to identify patterns of association not covered by model candidates. In this article, we propose an application of Lasso regularization that addresses the aforementioned limitations. We evaluate our method through a Monte Carlo experiment and an empirical study of educational assortative mating in Chile, 1990–2015. Results demonstrate that our approach has the virtue, relative to ad hoc specification searches, of offering a principled statistical criterion to inductively select a model. Importantly, we show that in situations where conventional fit statistics provide conflicting diagnostics, our Lasso-based approach is consistent in its model choice, yielding solutions that are both predictive and parsimonious.

Building Democracy from Below: Lessons from Western Uganda

How to achieve democratisation in the neo-patrimonial and agrarian environments that predominate in sub-Saharan Africa continues to present a challenge for both development theory and practice. Drawing on intensive fieldwork in Western Uganda, this paper argues that Charles Tilly’s ‘democratisation as process’ provides us with the framework required to explain the ways in which particular kinds of association can advance democratisation from below. Moving beyond the current focus on how elite-bargaining and certain associational forms may contribute to liberal forms of democracy, this approach helps identify the intermediate mechanisms involved in building democracy from below, including the significance of challenging categorical inequalities, notably through the role of producer groups, and of building trust networks, cross-class alliances and synergistic relations between civil and political society. The evidence and mode of analysis deployed here help suggest alternative routes for supporting local efforts to build democracy from below in sub-Saharan Africa.

The social structure of european inequality: a multidimensional perspective

<span>The aim of this article is to present some contributions to the understanding of social inequality in Europe today. We analyse the distributional inequalities of economic and educational resources as well as the categorical inequalities between nation states and between social classes. The source of the empirical data was the European Social Survey 2012. We were able to calculate European income deciles, build a matrix of class-country segments, and analyse the intersections of this structural matrix with the distributions of income and schooling. The results reveal high degrees of distributional inequality in Europe. They also show the structural configurations assumed in Europe by the intersection of distributive and categorical inequalities.</span>

`Membership Has Its Privileges': Status Incentives and Categorical Inequality in Education.

Prizes - formal systems that publicly allocate rewards for exemplary behavior - play an increasingly important role in a wide array of social settings, including education. In this paper, we evaluate a prize system designed to boost achievement at two high schools by assigning students color-coded ID cards based on a previously low stakes test. Average student achievement on this test increased in the ID card schools beyond what one would expect from contemporaneous changes in neighboring schools. However, regression discontinuity analyses indicate that the program created new inequalities between students who received low-status and high-status ID cards. These findings indicate that status-based incentives create categorical inequalities between prize winners and others even as they reorient behavior toward the goals they reward.

The Relational Generation of Workplace Inequalities

In this article, I outline a dynamic, relational theory of workplace inequalities. I begin with the basic model offered by Charles Tilly in Durable Inequality that categorical distinctions, such as gender or education, are mapped, exaggerated, and naturalized within organizational divisions of labor. This argument is attractive in the generality and simplicity of its causal account, yet fairly weak in specifying (1) core organizational processes, (2) the micro-foundations and interactions that generate inequalities, and (3) the potential of intersectional dynamics to disrupt the durability of categorical inequalities. I offer an integrated interactional-organizational-institutional perspective on the relational processes that generate inequalities.

On Equity in India's Water Supply Public-Private Partnerships

This article studies the implementation of a public-private partnership (PPP) in the water supply sector in Nagpur (Maharashtra, India). Drawing upon the capability approach and the concept of disadvantage, we define equity as the need to focus on the worse-off. Based on extensive field-research, we explain how the access to water is currently characterized by patronage relations and institutional discriminatory practices that perpetuate categorical inequalities. Addressing equity concerns in a PPP therefore requires questioning the existing power relations to clearly prioritize the worse-off. Our research argues that international law might be used to promote equitable processes in urban infrastructure, beyond today's focus on technical accounts and efficiency debates.

Categorical inequality, institutional ambivalence, and permanently failing institutions: the case of immigrants and barriers to health care in America

I draw on the theories of Charles Tilly, Robert K. Merton, Eleanor Barber, Marshall Meyer, and Lynne Zucker to develop a three-part framework for understanding the organizational and institutional interface between social services like health care and disadvantaged minorities like immigrants. Tilly's theory of durable inequality is transposed to categorical inequalities in organizations and law. His vocabulary of motives is expanded to include categorical entrenchment, restitution, and compensation. These embedded inequalities lead to institutional ambivalence in the provision of services and to permanently failing institutions that work poorly, waste resources, or provide uneven quality, yet do not collapse but endure while resisting reform. One rationale for resistance is ‘moral hazard’ by individuals; but the theory of moral hazard is biased and partial, because provider moral hazard and insurer moral hazard are more prevalent. The specific manifestations of these concepts and dynamics between them warrant further research in different contexts.

リベラルの夢から醒めて

According to Michael Walzer, “[i]nvoluntary associations is a permanent feature of social existence” and we cannot envision the more equal society without taking this social reality seriously. The paper starts with analyzing Walzer's claim that the gender hierarchy is the most ancient, enduring and “hardest” constrains of any other categorical inequalities and concludes with the suggestion of “social” possibility for the ethics of care to go beyond the current political boundaries. Firstly, I examine why feminist politics and theory seem to be unlocked within women's world and therefore they are often criticized by its emotional, sometimes intensively passionate way of arguments. However, as Walzer pointed out, involuntary lives such as female beings offer also the space of opposition and resistance. Then, I try to argue that the ethics of care, which mainly focus on how our society should maintain the relation of care without dominance and violence, provides the collective empowerment model for feminist politics, instead of the emancipation model. In the third section, I examine Eva Kittay's argument, which criticizes radically Rawlsian idea of liberal society constituting of autonomous, free, and equal citizens. Here, I distinguish the ethics of care from altruism, self-sacrifice, even so-called maternal love. The ethics of care prohibits anyone from being enforced on care responsibilities to needy dependents as well as deteriorating the relation of care into dominant relationship. In other words, the ethics of care tries to show us how we should begin to create our connectedness, which right-based ethics, such as ethics of justice takes for granted. I conclude the paper with remarking that the ethics of care is a certain kind of revolutionary program of feminist politics because it is committed to overthrow the most entrenched hierarchy, that is, the hierarchy of gender by empowering activities and relationship which are used to suppose that they belong to the women's world. The relation of care can provide us another kind of dream of creating a new kind of human relationship beyond the current political borders in global society.

Gender, Ideational Analysis, and Social Policy

An increasing number of social scientists have argued that ideational processes can have major consequences on politics and policy. Focusing on social policy, the present article explains how students of gender have contributed to the contemporary literature on ideational processes. As suggested, all researchers interested in these processes would benefit from engaging with the gender literature because it draws our attention to at least three broad issues neglected by many non-feminist scholars: (i) the intersection between categorical inequalities and policy ideas; (ii) the role of identities and gendered cultural assumptions; and (iii) the relationship between welfare regimes and ideational processes. Overall, the main objective of this article is to favor a more fruitful dialogue between students of gender, on one hand, and other policy scholars who also explore the role of ideational processes, on the other.

Trust and Rule

Trust and Rule. By Charles Tilly. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 214p. 19.99 paper.From his earliest publications, Charles Tilly has focused on the relationships between varying sets of agents in civil society, forms of rule, and state formation. Democracy, and the circumstances under which it arises or disintegrates, has been an important aspect of these inquiries. Tilly's fullest, recent examination of these issues is his (2003) Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000. There, he argued that what was crucial for democratization over the long period was the insulation of public politics from “categorical inequalities” of class, race, gender and the like; the transformation of public politics in ways that broadened and equalized participation, enhanced collective control of government, and inhibited arbitrary conduct by political actors; and the integration of “trust networks” into public politics. Trust and Rule elaborates the conceptual and historical arguments for this last “necessary” condition for democratization. In doing so the author jousts briefly (but persuasively) with the recent debate over “trust,” social capital, and democracy. He then recasts that debate in the light of older literatures in social history, sociology, and institutional economics on networks as a means of collective action in the presence of various forms of rule, not only democracy.