At this week’s Republican National Convention, Donald Trump will accept the party’s nomination for president. Social scientists explain Trump’s primary success by looking at his supporters, especially at their racial biases and class grievances. The nomination is still surprising, though, because Trump has managed to win reluctant support from party leaders, influence the GOP platform, and gain traction among Evangelical Christians (despite not seeming all that pious himself). Sociological research on political parties and organizing show how an unlikely leader can win institutional favor even when they seem to clash with the individuals who run the show.

How is Trump winning over party elites? We often think about political parties as groups of savvy leaders who design the system to keep themselves in office (and challengers out). A longstanding sociological take, however, shows how parties represent deep divisions in the public along race, class, and ideology. This means that emerging public interest groups can and do swing party politics, such as the Democrats’ shift toward a civil rights agenda or the rise of the Tea Party coalition among Republicans.

• Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan. 1967. Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives. New York/London: Free Press/Collier-MacMillan
• Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks. 1999. Social Cleavages and Political Change: Voter Alignments and US Party Coalitions. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
• Stephanie L. Mudge and Anthony S. Chen. 2014. “Political Parties and the Sociological Imagination: Past, Present, and Future Directions,” Annual Review of Sociology 40(1):305–30

And how did a man quoting “Two Corinthians” win over leaders in the Religious Right? This group’s political influence doesn’t just come from the pulpit. Instead, shared beliefs allow lay leaders to build networks among influential people in government, business, and entertainment. Much of their success comes from “unobtrusive organizing”—the way the networks, in turn, work within existing power structures to acquire political influence. Thus, the Religious Right can fall in line with a candidate who does not seem to fit their public agenda if it means even more power and access behind the scenes.

• Michael Lindsay. 2008. Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Jaime Kucinskas. 2014. “,The Unobtrusive Tactics of Religious Movements,” Sociology of Religion 75(4):537–50.
• Lydia Bean. 2014. The Politics of Evangelical Identity: Local Churches and Partisan Divides in the United States and Canada. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

From last year’s attacks in Paris to recent bombings in Ankara, Brussels, and Lahore, transnational terrorism is at the forefront of public concern. The media often gravitates toward focusing on who the perpetrators are and what drove them to commit these heinous acts. There is a wealth of research on the individual and psychological factors that may be at play, but sociological studies highlight the strong influence of social context and institutions in turning people toward terror, challenging easy explanations that focus on individual ideology alone.

Quantitative analysis shows how radical Islamic groups are motivated by many of the same social and political factors as older radical groups. Social and political change, especially international development, urbanization, and western military dependency, is associated with more frequent attacks. Higher foreign investment associates with a lower frequency of attacks, however, and research on terror in Israel shows this kind of conciliatory action may do more to limit terror than repressive strategies alone.

• Laura Dugan and Erica Chenoweth. 2012. “Moving Beyond Deterrence: The Effectiveness of Raising the Expected Utility of Abstaining from Terrorism in Israel,” American Sociological Review 77(4):597-624.
• Kristopher K. Robison, Edward M. Crenshaw and J. Craig Jenkins. 2006. “Ideologies of Violence: The Social Origins of Islamist and Leftist Transnational Terrorism,” Social Forces 84(4):2009-2026.

Research also shows that individual attackers are actually fairly “normal.” They are not more likely to be poor or poorly educated, and, often, they are not psychologically pathological. Instead, scholars look to the social arrangements of the institutions and networks that recruit and empower individuals. These terror groups are rarely centralized, hierarchical organizations that train bombers from on high; attacks stem from struggles for power among fractured organizations, local splinter groups, and state forces. As these conflicts escalate, local groups mobilize network relationships to recruit attackers and build the autonomy to develop their own motivational strategies to spur attacks. These local relationships and networks matter much more than individuals’ beliefs alone.

• Scott Atran. 2003. “Genesis of suicide terrorism,” Science (299):1534-1539.
• Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger. 2006. “The Changing Nature of Suicide Attacks—A Social Network Perspective,” Social Forces 84(4):1983-2004.
• Eitan Y. Alimi. 2011. “Relational dynamics in factional adoption of terrorist tactics: a comparative perspective,” Theory and Society 40(1):95-118.

Chicago Public Media’s This American Life recently aired “The Problem We All Live With”—an extended episode with New York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones on how racial segregation lives on into 21st century classrooms.

School segregation has been on the rise since the 1980s, leading, in part, to a wide achievement gap between Black and White students. Policymakers often focus on the moral achievement of Brown v. Board of Education, but racial separation persists.

• Gary Orfield, Susan E. Eaton, and The Harvard Project on School Desegregation. 1996. Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education. New York: New Press.

Minority students are much more likely to drop out of school, to be tracked into “low-ability” groups or vocational programs, and to face other barriers to achieving higher education. Ability matters for achievement, but so does the social structure of schools.

• Grace Kao and Jennifer S. Thompson. 2003. “Racial and Ethnic Stratification in Education Achievement and Attainment.” Annual Review of Sociology. 29:417-442

We usually think school segregation really happens at the neighborhood level, but neighborhood segregation has declined since 1990. Instead, we see increasing macro-segregation—patterns where minority groups are concentrated in certain urban and suburban areas. Therefore, entire schools or districts are more likely to see homogenous groups of students.

• Daniel T. Lichter, Domenico Parisi, and Michael C. Taquino. 2015. “Toward a New Macro-Segregation? Decomposing Segregation within and between Metropolitan Cities and Suburbs.” American Sociological Review 80(4):843–73.

For more on inequality in schools, check out the TSP White Paper “Students Squeezed by an Hourglass Economy” by Robert Crosnoe.

With Apple Music’s launch and services like Spotify and Pandora going strong, music streaming is here to stay. Spotify recently released data on music preferences, giving us a new look into listeners’ lives. Metal rules over pop worldwide with the highest listener loyalty, especially with a tight-knit fan community. On the other hand, rigid genre boundaries may fade away as streaming listeners feel more comfortable trying just about anything. Demographics also matter; listeners “age out” of following popular music, and they do so much faster if they have children. Genres are more than labels on the shelf, though, and have more staying power when they represent social groups. Research shows these changes aren’t just about personal taste—social structure as a stronger effect.

We still use genre preferences to mark out a range of social boundaries. Education and political tolerance relate to “musical tolerance,” but people with these broad tastes are also more likely to say they don’t like music associated with uneducated fans (gospel, country, rap and metal).

• Bethany Bryson. 1996. “‘Anything But Heavy Metal’: Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes.” American Sociological Review. 61(5): 884-899

Streaming allows more listeners to quietly cross these boundaries, but fan subcultures remain powerful social groups that encourage devotion—and sometimes deviance. Genre preferences associate with different kinds of substance use, and loyalty to a community of fans can create a strong culture of sharing and collection that sustains music file-sharing.

• Mike Vuolo, Christopher Uggen, and Sarah Lageson. 2014. “Taste clusters of music and drugs: evidence from three analytic levels.” The British Journal of Sociology 65(3): 529-554.
• Kevin F. Steinmetz and Kenneth D. Tunnell. 2013. “Under the Pixelated Jolly Roger: A Study of On-Line Pirates.” Deviant Behavior 34(1):53–67.

Most importantly, genre hopping is not new. The way music marks class and status has changed since the 1980s. While high status listeners used to prefer particular genres, younger generations mark status by “omnivorous” music habits—consuming a wide range of popular and obscure tunes.

• Richard A. Peterson and Roger M. Kern. 1996. “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore.” American Sociological Review 61: 900-907.

With the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, states must legally recognize same-sex marriage nationwide. The fight for equality isn’t over, however, as many states do not have explicit protections for same-sex couples against practices like hiring discrimination. The Texas Attorney General also ruled that individual county clerks can refuse to offer marriage licenses to same sex couples on the grounds of their religious beliefs, even if the clerks’ office must ultimately grant the license. This is the challenge with nationwide legislation: laws on the books often differs from the law in action. History shows inequality can thrive in low level bureaucracy, sometimes in spite of national policy.

Policy changes take time to wind through organizations, especially those with large bureaucratic structures like the U.S. government. Autonomous managers in the middle construct their own reasons for adopting policies, often distancing themselves from big changes at the top of the chain. An institutional culture affects the implementation of a policy as much as the policy itself.

• Frank Dobbin and John R. Sutton. 1998. “The Strength of a Weak State: The Rights Revolution and the Rise of Human Resources Management Divisions.” American Journal of Sociology 104(2): 441-476
• Bruce G. Carruthers. 1994. “When is the State Autonomous? Culture, Organization Theory, and the Political Sociology of the State.” Sociological Theory 12(1): 19-44

We can see these institutional boundaries in broader patterns of hiring discrimination against LGBT citizens that appear in experimental studies, even when employers don’t intend to discriminate. The history of federal regulation in immigration, the military, and welfare policies shows that the U.S. slowly built a bureaucratic system interested in measuring and controlling sexuality long before public battles over LGBT rights came on the scene.

• Margot Canaday. 2009. The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton University Press
• András Tilcsik. 2011. “Pride and Prejudice: Employment Discrimination against Openly Gay Men in the United States.”American Journal of Sociology 117(2):586–626.

Similar bureaucratic patterns happen around race. When the Supreme Court repealed laws against interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia, for example, mixed-race couples still faced clerks who were often unwilling to grant them licenses. While the GI Bill was a sweeping national effort in which many U.S. citizens got better housing and education, veterans of color often had trouble registering for those benefits in uncooperative local offices.

• Peggy Pascoe. 2009. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. Oxford University Press
• Ira Katznelson. 2006. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. W.W. Norton & Co.

A recently released ACLU investigation a found that black residents of Minneapolis were 8.7 times more likely to be arrested for low-level offenses than white residents between January 2012 and September 2014. The report is the latest in eight city case studies, all of which “describe police departments that reserve their most aggressive enforcement for people of color.” The Minneapolis City Council also recently repealed spitting and lurking ordinances, two examples of the low level offenses cited by the report. Recent sociological research strikes a similar chord; it demonstrates how modern law enforcement isn’t just about crime, but controlling groups of people with minor rules and regulations.

Public discussion about crime tends to focus on felonies, but the majority of law enforcement activity today is geared toward misdemeanors. Even without conviction and sentencing, these minor offenses bring more people into the criminal justice system. The procedural hassle of dealing with a minor criminal record means more people are under this systematic control at any given time, regardless of their guilt or innocence.

• Issa Kohler-Hausmann. 2013. “Misdemeanor Justice: Control without Conviction.” American Journal of Sociology 119(2):351-393.

The ACLU report finds people experiencing homelessness are the most vulnerable to this system, and many are charged for minor offenses that directly result from being homeless (like panhandling or sleeping outside). Many cities criminalize these behaviors as a way to control space, even to the point that those with criminal records are barred from entering certain neighborhoods.

• Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert. 2009. Banished: The New Social Control in Urban America. Oxford University Press.

This law enforcement isn’t just about crime, but also about power in communities of color. Neighborhood-level analysis shows that the stereotypical relationship between race and violent crime rates disappears for communities with more African Americans politically organizing and serving, either in office or on civilian review boards for the police. One of the ACLU’s recommendations to improve the situation in Minneapolis is to establish such review boards.

• María B. Vélez, Christopher J. Lyons, and Wayne A. Santoro. 2015. “The Political Context of the Percent Black-Neighborhood Violence Link: A Multilevel Analysis.” Social Problems 62(1):93–119.

California is facing record drought, water restrictions, and threats of wildfires. The solution seems simple—just find more water through increased pumping or desalination—but these quick fixes ignore deeper questions about how we turn public necessities into commodities and determine who can lay claim to natural resources. These issues can lead to cultural conflict, but struggles for water can also renew solidarity across different social groups.

Sociological case studies remind us that professional environmental responsibilities to the land, its residents, owners, and governments change over time and through particular institutional cultures. Power and inequality shape who is exposed to environmental problems and how we address solutions.

• Wendy N. Espeland. 1998. The Struggle for Water: Politics, Rationality, and Identity in the American Southwest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• David N. Pellow and Hollie Nyseth Brehm. 2013. “An Environmental Sociology for the Twenty-First Century.” Annual Review of Sociology 39:229-250.

Water conflicts also bring up commodification—the way we turn public necessities like water and health into market goods. Research on commodification examines everything from how the water industry actively competes with the tap to how insurance markets change the culture of life and death in the United States.

• Viviana A. Zelizer. 1978. “Human Values and the Market: The Case of Life Insurance and Death in 19th-Century America.” American Journal of Sociology 84(3):591-610
• Daniel Jaffee and Soren Newman. 2012. “A Bottle Half Empty: Bottled Water, Commodification, and Contestation.” Organization and Environment. 26(3): 318-335.

Water resources—even when scarce—do not inevitably lead to conflict. Environmental concern is not only high in affluent nations; even in places as tense as the Middle East, local activists regularly use the environment to bridge cultural, political, and religious tensions.

• Riley E. Dunlap and Richard York. 2008. “The Globalization of Environmental Concern and the Limits of the Postmaterialist Values Explanation: Evidence from Four Multinational Surveys.” The Sociological Quarterly 49(3):529-563.
• Nicole Harari and Jesse Roseman. 2008. “Environmental Peacebuilding Theory and Practice.” Eco Peace Middle East.

Rebecca Farnum is a 2012 EPA Marshall Scholar researching for a PhD in Geography at King’s College London, where she explores environmental conflict and cooperation around food and water resources in the Middle East and North Africa. She has an LLM in International Law on environmental and human rights law, an MSc in Water Security and International Development, and undergraduate degrees in anthropology, interdisciplinary humanities, international development, and international relations.

ISIS recently announced they “will conquer Rome, by Allah’s permission” in a video that showed the murder of 21 Christians in Libya.  Not long after the video’s release, Italians offered cheeky travel advice to the militant group via Twitter, using the hashtag “#We_Are_Coming_O_Rome.”  Tweets warned of traffic jams and tourist traps at landmarks like the Trevi Fountain, while others humorously applauded ISIS’s “vacation” choice.  But is laughter the best medicine for international threats? 

Jokes are a way for societies to cope with threats.  People use irony to lessen their anxieties about an unsettling situation without seeming paranoid.  Humor also give status by discrediting those with strong anxieties and giving the joker an air of nonchalance. 

• K.A. Parkhill, K.N. Henwood, N.F. Pidgeon, and P. Simmons. 2011. “Laughing it Off? Humour, affect and emotion work in communities living with nuclear risk.” The British Journal of Sociology 62(2): 324-346.

Ethnic jokes also draw symbolic boundaries between who does and doesn’t belong.  These jokes reinforce the moral values of the in-group by characterizing outsiders’ unacceptable behavior. Framing is key in being playful with something political—those involved in the interaction need to have shared beliefs and the joke needs the right context.

• Christie Davies. 1982. “Ethnic Jokes, Moral Values and Symbolic Boundaries.” The British Journal of Sociology 33(3): 383-203.
• Elise Kramer. 2011. “The playful is political:  The metapragmatics of internet rape-joke arguments.” Language in Society 40: 137-168.

However, humor is a double-edged sword as evidenced by the events that followed the Charlie Hebdo cartoons earlier this year and the Jyllands Posten depictions of Mohammad in 2006. Targeting a minority group reinforces stereotypes and masks the diversity of individuals within the group. When a member of the dominant culture “punches down,” with an ethnic or racist joke, the audience is more likely to be judgmental of individual members of a minority group.

• Otto Santa Ana. 2009. “Did You Call In Mexican? The Racial Politics of Jay Leno Immigrant Jokes.” Language in Society 83(1): 23-45.
• Marion G. Müller and Esra Özcan. 2007. “The Political Iconography of Muhammad Cartoons: Understanding Cultural Conflict and Political Action.” PS: Political Science and Politics 40(2):287-291.
• Christian F. Rostbøll. 2009. “Autonomy, Respect, and Arrogance in the Danish Cartoon Controversy.” Political Theory 37(5): 623-648.

By Evan Stewart, Jack Delehanty, Ryan Larson, and Stephen Suh

The shooting of three young adults in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, raises a number of questions about hate crimes in the United States. All three victims were Muslim, and interviews with their family members about previous conflicts indicate the killings may have been motivated by anti-Islamic sentiment. On the other hand, police released a statement that the killings were motivated by a parking dispute, and the regional U.S. attorney called them “an isolated incident.” Research shows the social context of a crime matters, even when it isn’t officially labeled a “hate crime.”

Hate crimes are retaliatory and respond to particular social events and contexts. Racialized talk of hate crime, especially when discussed over the Internet, is provoked by anxieties over close social ties to minorities—such as interracial marriage or integrated neighborhoods—more than economic competition. Time, neighborhood, and labeling factors all point to social context as a necessary tool to understand hate crimes.

• Ryan D. King and Gretchen M. Sutton. 2013. “High Times for Hate Crimes: Explaining the Temporal Clustering of Hate-Motivated Offending.” Criminology 51(4):871-894
• Jack Glaser, Jay Dixit, and Donald P. Green. 2002. “Studying Hate Crime with the Internet: What Makes Racists Advocate Racial Violence?” Journal of Social Issues 58(1):177-193

Social context is often ignored in hate crime data. Government offices and watchdog organizations often define hate crimes differently than others, and their data focus on the number of attacks rather than contextual risk factors. This makes it difficult to study hate crimes, especially when witness reports or police records show a parking dispute.

• Donald P. Green, Laurence H. McFalls and Jennifer K. Smith. 2001. “Hate Crime: An Emergent Research Agenda”Annual Review of Sociology 27:479-504
• Christopher J. Lyons. 2008. “Individual perceptions and the social construction of hate crimes: A factorial survey.” The Social Science Journal 45(1):107-131
• Christopher J. Lyons and Aki Roberts. 2014. “The Difference “Hate” Makes in Clearing Crime: An Event History Analysis of Incident Factors.” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice. 30(3):268-289.

Anti-Islamic attitudes are also central to the UNC case. Emerging research indicates these attitudes are unique in the U.S. context as well, where racial bias interacts with cultural bias against public religious practice in a particular political climate.

• Louise Cainkar. 2009. Homeland insecurity: the Arab American and Muslim American experience after 9/11. Russell Sage Foundation.
• Steve Garner and Saher Selod. “The Racialization of Muslims: Empirical Studies of Islamophobia.” Critical Sociology, July 7, 2014.
• Kerem Ozan Kalkan, Geoffrey C. Layman, and Eric M. Uslaner. 2009. “‘Bands of Others’? Attitudes toward Muslims in Contemporary American Society.” The Journal of Politics 71(3):847–62.

Last month the Senate Intelligence Committee released its report on the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” News outlets have raised a number of disturbing takeaways from the report’s 500+ page summary, including the gritty details of torture, the failure of many of these practices to get results, and the $81 million paid out to the advisors who helped design them. We typically think of torture as either a barbaric practice or a necessary, if extreme, evil in some limited cases. But while the public wonders whether it actually works, research shows this question doesn’t really decide whether an organization will turn to torture in the first place.

Torture only works because of a highly developed social relationship where the perpetrator can perceive the victim’s pain, but continue with the practice. Randall Collins argues this makes it an extreme way to symbolize human social boundaries—who is in with the powerful community and who is not. This relationship maintains dominance, regardless of whether it gets information.

• Randall Collins. 1974. “Three Faces of Cruelty: Towards a Comparative Sociology of Violence.” Theory and Society 1(4): 415-440.

When torture hits the news, leaders care more about managing the public response than ending this social relationship. Analysis of the Senate Armed Services Committee meetings after Abu Ghraib came to light in 2004 shows how leaders interpreted widespread torture as “isolated incidents.” Experimental surveys of Iraqi judges found they were more likely to give lenient sentences in hypothetical cases of Coalition torture if they felt secure from future crime and protected by police.

• Jared Del Rosso. 2011. “The Textual Mediation of Denial: Congress, Abu Ghraib, and the Construction of an Isolated Incident.” Social Problems. 58(2): 165-188
• John Hagan, Gabrielle Ferrales, and Guillermina Jasso. 2008. “How Law Rules: Torture, Terror, and the Normative Judgments of Iraqi Judges” Law & Society Review 42(3): 605-644

All this points to a broader claim about the “dark side of organizations:” their misbehavior is often routine. When the public finds out, organizations are often more concerned with making sure the routine isn’t destroyed by being labeled as a widespread mistake, misconduct, or disaster. Instead, they admit to individual wrongdoing—like isolated incidents of torture that didn’t work—to avoid bigger questions about why torture happens in the first place.

• Diane Vaughan. 1999. “The Dark Side of Organizations: Mistake, Misconduct, and Disaster”Annual Review of Sociology 25: 271-305