Abstract: The U.S. public’s confidence in elections is intensively studied in the last decade but little is known about election confidence among locally elected officials, whose roles and community status may influence public opinion. Using a nationally representative survey of local election officials, we compare election confidence among local elected officials with that of the general public. Local elected officials are more likely to trust both local and national elections. We theorize factors that affect local officials’ trust in elections, including partisan context, state leadership election denial levels, and political ambition. We show how social trust, partisan identity, and ambition significantly influence local officials’ confidence that local and national results reflect the intention of voters. We conclude by showing how the relative lack of intensive partisan polarization among local elected officials is especially important at keeping election distrust low among local officials.
Abstract: This essay reviews Laura Ford’s The Intellectual Property of Nations, with particular attention to its implications for the study of religion and politics. I argue that Ford’s book offers helpful insights for scholars working in these fields, with especially productive extensions for the study of the state and for sociological analyses of law and religion.
Abstract: This visualization explores changes in the scope and dynamics of consecration within American sociology by examining awards granted to members of the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) constituent sections. Consecration is important because it signals quality to nonspecialists, boosts intellectual careers, and can be a crucial vector introducing various forms of inequality. We show that with ASA sections, the number of awards, multiple award winners, and honorable mentions has grown dramatically, especially since 2010, and that this has occurred even as the number of ASA sections has remained constant and overall ASA membership has declined.
Abstract: Rogers Brubaker’s work has been a touchstone for the study of ethnicity, nationalism, and politics for more than a quarter-century. His recent book, Grounds for Difference, offers an important new theoretical statement on the politics and organization of cultural diversity. In this symposium, four prominent historical sociologists provide commentary on the possibilities and complexities of the book, with particular attention to their normative, political, and methodological implications.
Abstract: This essay argues that field analyses of social movements can be improved by incorporating the insights of Pierre Bourdieu. In particular, Bourdieu's concepts of logic, symbolic capital, illusio, and doxa can enrich social movement scholarship by enabling scholars to identify new objects of study, connect organizational- and individual-level effects, and shed new light on a variety of familiar features of social movements. I demonstrate this claim by delineating the contours of one such field, the "social justice field." I argue that the social justice field is a delimited, trans-movement arena of contentious politics united by the logic of the pursuit of radical social justice. Drawing upon existing scholarship, as well as my own research on the prison abolition movement, I argue that the competitive demands of the field produce characteristic effects on organizations and individual activists within the field. I conclude by considering how a Bourdieuian analysis of fields provides fresh insights into familiar problematics within the social movements literature.
Abstract: While debates rage about what public sociology is or should be, how to actually do public sociology is often left unstated. This chapter presents a series of proposals about the practice of writing public sociology. While many sociologists have argued that public sociology writing must be “accessible,” this is often interpreted to mean little more than not using jargon. We argue that for public sociology to be truly accessible, it must also be accountable to the author’s chosen public. To accomplish this, authors must rethink both how they engage with “the literature” as well as how they present findings from research. We present a series of proposals for how to write public sociology. These include emphasizing how new research is relevant, integrating the literature review into the body of the text, and incorporating voices from broader public debates.