Unequal polities

Most nations are at least nominally based on the idea of the legal equality of all citizens. This commitment provides a salient pathway through which even the most disadvantaged groups can pursue their goal of achieving greater equality for themselves and their communities, consistent with the defining values of the nation. Some countries, however, have embodied legal differences among groups of their citizens based on the religion or ethnicity of the person. And in these circumstances, pariah groups have no pathway -- legal or moral -- through which to attempt to create a non-violent pathway towards greater social justice for themselves.Malaysia is a striking example of the latter circumstance. Its constitution and legal system give fundamental...

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Posted in: CAT_collective action,collective action,power,social movements,Southeast Asia

Is there such a thing as human nature?

People often make claims about "human nature." For example -- "It is a part of human nature to be egoistic." "Human beings are naturally acquisitive." "Cooperation is a natural human instinct." "Human nature defines the way we learn language." "Violence is natural." What would human nature look like? To start with a preliminary definition, we might say that human nature is a relatively fixed set of characteristics of psychology, motivation, and cognition that are not the product of learning. Or, at a slightly greater remove from behavior, we might include innate capacities that can be triggered by appropriate experiences, but may also remain latent if those experiences are not encountered. (This is roughly the way that Noam Chomsky...

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Posted in: CAT_agency

Polling and social knowledge

Here's a pretty interesting graphic from Pollster.com:As you can see, the graph summarizes a large number of individual polls measuring support for the two major party candidates from January 1 to October 26. The site indicates that it includes all publicly available polls during the time period. Each poll result is represented with two markers -- blue for Obama and red for McCain. The red and blue trend lines are "trend estimates" based on local regressions for the values of the corresponding measurements for a relatively short interval of time (the site doesn't explicitly say what the time interval is). So, for example, the trend estimate for August 1 appears to be approximately 47%:42% for the two candidates. As the site explains, 47%...

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Posted in: CAT_methodology,epistemology,prediction,quantitative methods

Causal mechanisms

The central tenet of causal realism is a thesis about causal mechanisms or causal powers. We can only assert that there is a causal relationship between X and Y if we can offer a credible hypothesis of the sort of underlying mechanism that might connect X to the occurrence of Y. The sociologist Mats Ekström puts the view this way: “the essence of causal analysis is ... the elucidation of the processes that generate the objects, events, and actions we seek to explain” (Ekstrom 1992, p. 115). Authors who have urged the centrality of causal mechanisms for both explanatory and purposes include Nancy Cartwright (Nature's Capacities and Their Measurements), Jon Elster (Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences), Rom...

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Posted in: CAT_mechanisms,causal mechanism,realism

"Influence" concepts

Power is an elusive social concept, because it is fundamentally relational and composite. The power that a person or group possesses can only be defined in relation to the domain of persons over whom this power can be wielded and the set of social resources that constitute the levers of this power. Power must be characterized in terms of domain and mechanisms. The question here is whether there are other social concepts that have a similar conceptual geography. If so, this may give us a better basis for explaining the concept of power.Consider these possible sibling concepts: status, affluence, charisma, eloquence, funny ... Each of these is what we might call an "influence" concept. It stipulates a capacity to bring about a particular kind...

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Posted in: CAT_power,power

Labor mobilization

Workers are a group who ought to be readily prone to mobilization. They are brought together into proximity with each other in large numbers in factories, rail stations, ports, and other workplaces. The circumstances of production usually give them causes around which to gather -- health and safety issues in the workplace, bullying or disrespectful treatment by supervisors, petty or demeaning work rules. And the business incentives created for owners and managers assure an environment in which workers are likely to have economic grievances, ranging from low pay to withheld wages to pension fund corruption and default. So the conditions for mobilization of workers in protest and advocacy seem propitious almost everywhere. And yet passive acceptance...

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Posted in: CAT_collective action,collective action,contingency,Marx,peasant

What do polls tell us?

We're all interested in the opinions of vast numbers of strangers -- potential voters, investors, consumers, college students, or home owners. Our interest is often a practical one -- we would like to know how the election is likely to go, whether the stock market will rebound, whether an influenza season will develop into a pandemic, or whether the shops in our cities and malls will have higher or lower demand in the holiday season. And so we turn to polls and surveys of attitudes and preferences -- consumer confidence surveys, voter preference polls, surveys of public health behaviors, surveys of investor confidence. And tools such as pollster.com aggregate and disaggregate the data to allow us to make more refined judgments about what the...

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Posted in: CAT_methodology,heterogeneity,quantitative methods

Mapping social data

Fig. 1. Household income inequality (US Census 2000 link)Fig. 2. Poverty rates (US Census Data 2000 link)Fig. 3. 60 day bank card delinquency -- Q1 2008 (Federal Reserve Bank link)Fig. 4. 90 day mortgage delinquency -- Q1 2008 (Federal Reserve Bank link)It's interesting to look at each of these data maps in detail. The comparisons of patterns are very revealing. Figure 4 is the most familiar to us -- it shows the geographical distribution of the mortgage crisis across the country. California and Florida aren't a surprise; but there are other hot spots across the country. For example, the "rust belt" of Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana shows a pretty dense set of high mortgage delinquency counties. But then consider the next crisis that may...

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Posted in: CAT_methodology,spatial pattern

Mental life

We are all persons with thoughts, desires, emotions, memories, and awareness. In some sense we have first-hand knowledge of all this -- we are the ones who experience the situation of going through a difficult job interview, of feeling angry at an aggressive driver, of trying to decide what to do in a moment of important choice, of remembering an incident that occurred months or years earlier. We're not in the position that Thomas Nagel assumed when he tried to reason about what it feels like to be a bat ("What is it Like to Be a Bat?" in Ned Block, ed. Readings in Philosophy of Psychology v.1). And yet we have a surprisingly thin set of theories of what is involved in this active experiencing of the world as a thinking, acting person -- and...

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Posted in: CAT_agency,literature,microfoundations

Greenblatt in the world

I recently read Stephen Greenblatt's brilliant biographical book on Shakespeare, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, and I was once again struck by what a large contribution Greenblatt might make to the social sciences. His innovations in literary theory are well known, particularly in his pioneering work on forging "the new historicism" (for example, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare). (Here is a link to a nice website on the new historicism.) Greenblatt's interpretive imagination, his ability to think clearly and innovatively about identities and meanings, and his remarkable ability to link a series of observations into a startling inference and insight -- these abilities would be most beneficial to...

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Posted in: CAT_history,history,literature

Marx's historical thinking

Marx's theories are deeply historical, in that he wants to explain the dynamics of change of large historical formations such as capitalism or feudalism, and he insists on putting social events into historical context. And, of course, Marx is most celebrated for developing a general approach to historical explanation, the theory of historical materialism. But how does Marx do when he treats concrete historical events? How is Marx as an historian?There are surprisingly few extended examples of detailed historical analysis in Marx's writings. There is Marx's account of "primitive accumulation" in English agrarian history in the 17th and 18th centuries in Capital. There are occasional references to the Roman Empire and classical slavery throughout his work. And there are his important writings...

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Posted in: CAT_foundations,Marx,materialism,narrative

What holds a country together?

When you consider the enormous differences that exist across regions and traditions in the United States, it raises an interesting question: what factors serve to knit this population together into a single polity? We don't share a single set of cultural values, a single religion, or a single political tradition. So what helps this population of some 300 million achieve some degree of civic or national identity?One possible answer is a skeptical one: there is no such common strand of civic identity in the United States. Instead, we are a nation of overlapping identities and traditions, with the remarkable good fortune that these differences have only rarely developed into serious inter-group conflict. On this approach, the general history of...

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Posted in: CAT_identity

Policy, treatment, and mechanism

Policies are selected in order to bring about some desired social outcome or to prevent an undesired one. Medical treatments are applied in order to cure a disease or to ameliorate its effects. In each case an intervention is performed in the belief that this intervention will causally interact with a larger system in such a way as to bring about the desired state. On the basis of a body of beliefs and theories, we judge that T in circumstances C will bring about O with some degree of likelihood. If we did not have such a belief, then there would be no rational basis for choosing to apply the treatment. "Try something, try anything" isn't exactly a rational basis for policy choice.In other words, policies and treatments depend on the availability of bodies of knowledge about the causal structure...

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Posted in: CAT_mechanisms,causal reasoning,complexity,mechanism,prediction

What to do?

Decision makers at every level are perplexed by the turbulence created by the current financial crisis. Everyone is acting under great uncertainty -- business owners, state governors, the Department of the Treasury, the presidential candidates, and university officials. And yet today's actions may have enormous effects on the business, the non-profit organization, the family, or the state tomorrow. Liquidity drought, variations in cash flow, the availability of credit for major capital projects, the possibility of bankruptcy of major and essential business partners such as contractors, the possibility of further major job losses in various regions, abrupt decline in demand for houses and cars, and a plummeting stock market make for an environment...

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Posted in: CAT_agency,rational choice theory