politics

Mother Jones ran a story yesterday that was meant to serve as a ‘field guide’ to vote-blocking tactics titled, “Beyond Diebold: Ten Ways to Steal This Election.” The piece outlined a number of different state and federal measures taken to exclude certain voting populations… and sociologist Chandler Davidson helped Mother Jones sort this out.

Tactics to deny Americans the right to vote are as old as, well, the right to vote. Democrats have been at fault in the past—take the literacy tests Southern states used to deprive blacks of their suffrage from the Civil War up through 1965. Today’s shenanigans—which still target minorities and vulnerable first-time voters—are more often designed to stifle Democratic turnout, perhaps never more than in 2008. “This is obviously an important election, and the turnout may break records,” says Rice University sociologist Chandler Davidson, who has studied vote suppression, “so there is every reason to expect these tactics will be employed.”

Read more.

This Sunday’s New York Times ran a piece titled ‘Overfeeding on Information’ about our obsession with the news, especially during such a closely contested presidential election and in the midst of an economic crisis.

The Times describes this compulsion for constant updates:

This explosion of information technology, when combined with an unusual confluence of dramatic — and ongoing — news events, has led many people to conclude that they have given their lives over to a news obsession. They find themselves taking breaks at work every 15 minutes to check the latest updates, and at the end of the day, taking laptops to bed. Then they pad through darkened homes in the predawn to check on the Asian markets.

Sociologist Eric Klinenberg is asked to weigh in on this trend…

ERIC KLINENBERG, a sociology professor at New York University, said people are unusually transfixed by news of the day because the economic crisis in particular seems to reach into every corner of their lives. Usually, he added, people can compartmentalize their lives into different spheres of activity, such as work, family and leisure. But now, “those spheres are collapsing into each other.”

And the news is not just consequential, but whipsaw-volatile. Financial markets swing hundreds of points within an hour; poll numbers shift. This means that news these days has an unbelievably short shelf life, news addicts said. If you haven’t checked the headlines in the last half-hour, the world may already have changed.

And commentary from a psychologist…

For others, information serves as social currency. Crises, like soap operas or sports teams, can provide a serial drama for people to talk about and bond over, said Kenneth J. Gergen, a senior research psychologist at Swarthmore College who studies technology and culture. “It gives us the stuff that keeps the community together,” he said. And for those whose social circles think of knowledge as power, having the latest information can also enhance status, Dr. Gergen said. “If you can just say what somebody said yesterday, that doesn’t do the trick,” he said.

Read the full story.

The Christian Science Monitor reported this morning on the enduring signs of US power despite the economic crisis. Many people seem panicked about America’s status as a superpower, so the Monitor investigated scholarly opinions as to whether ‘the American century’ is over. 

Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein brings his take to this coverage…

Still, what seems clear is that the experience of the Bush years, now drawing to a close amid the worst economic calamity in eight decades, have bolstered those who long predicted a clipped American eagle. “What George Bush did was turn a slow decline into a precipitous one,” says the noted Yale University sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, who has been predicting the end of the American empire since the 1980s.

“We’ve had two standout factors: the Iraq war, which not only demonstrated but actually accelerated this decline in power, and then the way this president put the American government in such deep debt,” Mr. Wallerstein says. “What we see playing out before us is the culmination of these actions.”

The Monitor concludes….

But for the moment, it’s the financial crisis that is providing a gauge of America’s enduring leadership capacity. With many economists citing international coordination as key to righting the global economic ship, one test will come Friday when finance ministers of the world’s seven major economies meet in Washington.

Read more.

Eleanor Clift of Newsweek, has recently written about how vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin is reigniting the culture war as her ‘everywoman’ act plays well with audiences. She suggests that this might indicate that the GOP will try to once again paint Barack Obama as an elitist.

In her article Clift included commentary from sociologist Todd Gitlin, who spoke at a Pew Forum discussion in Washington as to whether the cultural war will have an impact come November…

Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, speaking from the progressive side, said the culture war always matters, but that it may not be decisive, with economic issues making it harder for Republicans to get traction on lampooning Obama as an elitist, in the way they turned John Kerry into a windsurfing Frenchman. Gitlin described the presidential election as a “quadrennial plebiscite of who we are,” with Americans casting their vote for the candidate that best embodies who we are as a nation.

Newsweek’s commentary on the vice-presidential candidates in this culture war…

Nobody wants to be an elitist. In politics, it’s a deadly label. What we saw in Thursday night’s debate were two competing strains of populism. Biden, the Irish-Catholic kid from Scranton, represents Main Street populism, the people against the powerful, anti-corporatism, little guy kitchen-table values. Palin is wooing the same working-class constituency that could decide the election in battleground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania with her pro-gun, family and religious down-to-earth values.

Read more here.

Yesterday sociologist Dwight Lang wrote an opinion piece published in the Detroit Free Press. The University of Michigan professor offered commentary on the close presidential race this fall.

He writes:

Neither Democrat Obama nor Republican McCain will actually say “white working class,” but they do talk about “working” Americans or “blue-collar” workers as the backbone of America.

The critical importance of these voters is evidenced by the vice-presidential selections. We’ve heard how Joe Biden hails from an East Coast city where families struggle from paycheck to paycheck. He has worked his way up from humble roots and achieved the American Dream. His special appeal is to Catholics, who haven’t always voted Democratic in recent years. Sarah Palin’s modest background and straightforward style clearly speak to rural voters who identify with her version of the American Dream. Working women especially understand her efforts to balance career and family. 

He concludes:

Who wins this competition for millions of blue-collar votes may very well depend on who’s seen as capable of solving economic problems: bringing jobs back to America, reducing home foreclosures, and securing certain and bright futures for hardworking families.

Read the full piece.

New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks recently wrote about individualism and decision-making in a piece entitled ‘The Social Animal.’ In his analysis, Brooks discusses scholarly work that reveals the interconnectedness which informs our decision-making processes, even broadly highlighting the work of sociologists. Brooks’ piece is centered around political decision-making and the potential for both parties to learn from this knowledge about the influences on our individual behavior.

Brooks writes:

Geneticists have shown that our behavior is influenced by our ancestors and the exigencies of the past. Behavioral economists have shown the limits of the classical economic model, which assumes that individuals are efficient, rational, utility-maximizing creatures.

Psychologists have shown that we are organized by our attachments. Sociologists have shown the power of social networks to affect individual behavior.

What emerges is not a picture of self-creating individuals gloriously free from one another, but of autonomous creatures deeply interconnected with one another. Recent Republican Party doctrine has emphasized the power of the individual, but underestimates the importance of connections, relationships, institutions and social filaments that organize personal choices and make individuals what they are.

This may seem like an airy-fairy thing. But it is the main impediment to Republican modernization. Over the past few weeks, Republicans have talked a lot about change, modernization and reform. Despite the talk, many of the old policy pillars are the same. We’re living in an age of fast-changing economic, information and social networks, but Republicans are still impeded by Goldwater’s mental guard-rails.

Read more.

National Public Radio (NPR) commentator Dick Meyer reported on the work of sociologist Wayne Baker in his recent piece titled ‘September 11th and The Non-Crisis of Values’ as part of the series ‘Against the Grain.’

Meyer writes:

Baker is a sociologist at the University of Michigan and the author of America’s Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception(2005). I won’t bury the lead for you: The answer is perception, not crisis. It’s a useful big-picture view of American values at a time when it’s easy to be lost in the worm’s-eye view.

Baker is a wise social thinker who studies our values from the perspective of public opinion research, specifically data garnered from large polls conducted regularly all over the world called the World Values Surveys. He rightly notes that the idea that America faces a crisis of values, or “moral values,” is pervasive and is essentially assumed to be true.

But what exactly would a “crisis” of values entail? Would it be that Americans lost their traditional values? Or American values eroding in comparison with other countries? Are Americans deeply divided on fundamental beliefs? He answers no to each question; he found no crisis in America.

From a broad, global perspective, Baker examines human values on two planes. The first is a range of values from traditional to secular-rationalist. Societies with traditional values emphasize the importance of God and religion; of family and parenting; of national identity and pride; of absolute standards of morality, not relative ones. Secular-rationalist values are pretty much the opposite: nonreligious; open to abortion and euthanasia; skeptical of national pride or patriotism; tilted toward individualism over family, duty and authority.

The second axis of value runs from survival values to self-expression ones. In less developed and stable societies, survival values reign: Physical security and meeting basic material needs are paramount; cultural change, foreigners and ethnic diversity are seen as threatening; intolerance is exaggerated and authoritarian regimes tend to flourish. When material needs are well met, self-expression, self-realization, environmentalism, gender equality and creativity become more important.

Read on…

The Washington Post recently posted comments from sociologist Andrew Cherlin on the state of the American family. The online forum was developed to address vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s remarks about her own family.

The Post reports: 

“If the candidates wished to convince viewers that their families were just like ours, they were undone by a 21st-century reality: There is no typical family anymore — at least not in terms of who lives in the household and how they are related. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin noted as much on Wednesday when, while introducing her clan to a cheering crowd of the Republican faithful, the GOP vice presidential nominee said: ‘From the inside, no family ever seems typical. That’s how it is with us.'”

View the transcript of the online forum here.

The exchange features topics like homosexual family formation, and Cherlin’s own work, but centers mostly around families currently in the political spotlight. The exchange was in part a response to a piece by Cherlin in the Post in the ‘Outlook’ section this past Sunday. 

Cherlin writes: 

That traditional family unit has been replaced by a wide variety of living arrangements. Today, only 58 percent of children live with two married, biological parents. Many others live with stepparents or with single parents. Even having a pregnant teen in the home is not that unusual: About one out of six 15-year-old girls will give birth before reaching age 20, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

The candidates seemed to realize that none of their families is typical in the old sense. None of them tried to look like the ’50s family. Instead, they focused on being “typical” in a different, 21st-century sense: They worked hard to show us how emotionally close they are.

Read more.

Recently the headlines have been filled with commentary on Republican VP pick Sarah Palin. Two articles that caught the Crawler’s attention brought in the sociologists to answer current questions about Palin’s future.

Reuters generated an article on Palin’s ability to galvanize the political ‘left.’ For this article they drew upon the expertise of Michael Lindsay.

“Everybody pays attention to the mobilizing affect on the right but equally important is the mobilizing affect that Palin’s nomination makes for the left,” said Michael Lindsay, a political sociologist at Rice University in Houston who has written extensively on the U.S. evangelical movement.

“In many ways she is a much more mobilizing figure for both sides than John McCain because he is seen as much more of a moderate middle of the road political figure,” he said.  [Full article]

But will a ‘middle of the road’ image win the Republican ticket the election?

The second article supplemented by sociologist expertise ran in the LA Times and purported to explain the ‘new feminism’ offered by Palin’s candidacy. 

Debbie Walsh, director for the Rutgers Center for the American Woman and Politics, said Palin had already been caught in a bind between her political obligations and her family. That happened when she and her husband, Todd, issued a news release announcing that their daughter Bristol was pregnant.

“It’s terrible, like a Sophie’s choice situation, where you are in this horrible position as a mother,” said Walsh, “to feel that you have to reveal this piece of information about your daughter and not just to a few people in your family but to the national press corps?”

Pepper Schwartz, a University of Washington sociologist, agreed that the parenting questions came up more readily for Palin because she is a woman.

“I’m all for being a working mom,” Schwartz said. “But I do have a sense from having two children how totally unsuited and uncapable I would be with five.” [Full Article]

Can Palin convince the American voters that she can successfully balance work and family?

In my readings for the Crawler I often come across articles that use the term ‘sociological’ to express an ambiguous set of influences or circumstances related to a given news item. This week I was struck by an especially poignant example as the pundits and journalists swarmed around the Bristol Palin controversy, a teen pregnancy in the political spotlight. 

New York Times columnist Adam Nagourney writes: 

In many ways, how the country will react to the pregnancy of Ms. Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is more a sociological question than a political one. Yes, many officials in both parties — including Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, Mr. McCain’s Democratic opponent — were quick on Monday to say that the private lives of candidates should be strictly off limits.

But this clearly stands as a challenge to the traditional image of a potential first family, and could well provide fodder for provocative conversations around kitchen tables or sly references in the late-night television comic-sphere. It will test again what voters deem private, at a time when the Web has pulled down so many curtains, and what in these times is considered a normal family life.

Full story.

What should we as sociologists make of these vague references to the forces at play in our social world? Does the use of the term sociological become diluted when it remains unexplained?

What do you think?