politics

Vexed by Vaccination Refusals

Caty Taborda on February 9, 2015

As the outbreak of measles in Southern California continues its spread, public health officials have turned their attention toward the rising number of parents forgoing vaccinations for their children. Once based on the now discredited study linking vaccines to autism, the choice not to vaccinate is now considered an issue of individual choice, albeit one made at the expense of public health.

Vaccinating has become highly politicized. With conflicting information about potential side effects and the increase in mandated vaccines, some parents have grown anxious and distrustful—they are now known as “anti-vaxxers.”
Social networks and institutions help distrust spread. For instance, you can’t “catch” autism from other people, but as parents near each other share information and experiences, the chances that a child will be diagnosed with autism increases.
When parents who distrust medical advice about vaccines consider other parenting practices, such as breastfeeding and nutrition, they also seek out institutions like private schools, which are more friendly to alternative choices. The parents’ networks are thus made smaller.
Although anti-vaxxers are not necessarily motivated by religious values, sociologists study how multiple sources of authority, such as religious and political affiliations, impact scientific distrust and result in deeply held personal beliefs that may place facts and values at odds.

Curbing Police Profiteering

Ryan Larson on February 5, 2015

Attorney General Eric Holder has reduced the ability of law enforcement agencies to seize assets without a criminal conviction, an “informal measure” of policing known as civil forfeiture. The program had been expanded by the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act in an effort to curtail the sale and distribution of illegal drugs, and it has since allowed law enforcement agencies to divide and keep the majority of proceeds seized from forfeitures.

Proponents argue that civil forfeiture makes certain crimes less profitable and redistributes resources for socially beneficial programs. Critics say it might be part of a “hidden economic agenda” behind “tough on crime” initiatives and can lead to due process infringements
Institutional contexts are important: 40% of law enforcement agencies report dependence on the revenue produced from civil forfeitures. Agencies in states with strict forfeiture policies tend to use federal “equitable sharing” policies more often, even after accounting for factors such as official crime rates and drug arrests. This suggests agencies try to maximize their returns on civil forfeiture seizures.
Law enforcement agencies operating in high inequality areas and more conservative voting districts seize more value per drug arrest. This ratio also increases with agency complexity but drops in districts with higher black populations. Agencies may use more formal measures, such as arrests, in majority minority areas.

Taking Stock of Torture

Evan Stewart on January 23, 2015

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.
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.
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.

Veterans Day and the Challenges of Civilian Life

Evan Stewart on November 11, 2014

With more troops coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, this Veterans Day sees a unique push for public awareness about the challenges that accompany a return to civilian life. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has a new book and A&E a new reality show, and the social science shows why we want to pay attention to veterans after they return from service. We have a few previous TROT posts on issues within the military, but unique problems arise in a civilian world which can often be less hospitable than the regiment.

Military service provides a number of social benefits upon returning home. The positive image of having served can even overcome negative stereotypes in civilian life and help advance veterans who have a history of delinquency.
After service, however, institutional problems in civilian life mean veterans don’t all face the same challenges when they return home. For example, the G.I. Bill offered a wide range of education and housing benefits, but historic racial inequality in civilian institutions often made it harder for vets of color to collect those benefits. Today, female vets are more likely to face unemployment than males. However, those with only a high school degree often do earn more than non-vets with only a high school degree, and they are more likely to be enrolled in college.
We can still do a lot of work to improve the military, particularly in leadership and adjudication, but it also has a history of positive institutional changes to address issues like racial inequality and reduce the risks of service for certain minority groups.

 

Foraging in the Urban Jungle: Food Security and Homelessness

Matt Gunther on October 28, 2014

According to a new report making headlines this week, 21 American cities have passed laws designed to stop residents from sharing food with homeless people since 2013. The finding, which comes from the National Coalition for the Homeless, highlights an increasingly popular belief that hunger motivates troubled individuals to make lifestyle changes. Food aid, in this view, keeps the homeless complacent. In an interview with NPR, one consultant argued that “Street feeding is one of the worst things to do… it’s very unproductive, very enabling, and it keeps people out of recovery programs.” Many city officials quoted in the report have extended this line of thinking to community soup kitchens and food pantries as well. They see those offerings as well-intentioned, but ultimately misguided attempts to help. One, a police captain from Cincinnati, remarked “If you want the bears to go away, don’t feed the bears.” Research shows this isn’t the case, and these attitudes may actually harm people experiencing homelessness.

Social scientists have amassed a great deal of knowledge about the connection between homelessness and hunger. Over and over, they’ve shown that people with stable food access tend to fare better in other aspects of life.
More importantly, these people aren’t animals and homelessness is no mere matter of individual laziness or poor choice. A number of well known structural factors cause and sustain homelessness, including social stigma, poor access to affordable housing, limited employment opportunities, mental health factors, and physical disabilities.

For more on homelessness, check out TROT posts on last year’s polar vortex and this year’s VMAs.

Tax Haven Mavens

Erik Kojola on October 20, 2014

American companies have a new trick for an old trend of saving money by going overseas – moving their headquarters to countries with lower taxes.  These recent corporate inversions in which U.S. based companies, such as Medtronic and Burger King, reincorporate abroad in order to avoid taxes is part of an ongoing process in which corporations go global to offshore work and shuffle money through “tax havens” to boost profits. Commentators such as Allen Sloan condemn these tactics as unpatriotic and bad corporate citizenship. This highlights the tension between national interests and the pressures of globalization. We know that firms are not tied to particular national borders—a fundamental aspect of capitalism that classic theorists like Max Weber and Karl Marx observed in the 19th and early 20th century— but why are these publicly unpopular actions so prevalent today?

While nation-states have lost some power in the past 30 years, they created the very policies that contributed to economic globalization. U.S. policy since the 1970s has led to an increased financialization of the economy and the opening of global capital flows. Corporations aren’t just moving overseas due to greedy and unpatriotic CEOs, but the result of decades of change in policy and the global economy. 
Firms also have immediate financial interests in increasing shareholder value and avoiding taxes, even if that means harming national interests or engaging in immoral behaviors. Organizational dynamics, leadership and culture shape business strategies as well as the broader policy and economic context. 

Tactical Textbooks: The Politics of Teaching History

Jack Delehanty on October 17, 2014

The past few weeks have seen furious debate about the College Board’s new framework for AP U.S. History. At issue is the framework’s emphasis on topics like racial conflict and social inequality. To the Board and its advocates, like James R. Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, these topics encourage “learning how to ask historical questions, interpret documents and reflect both appreciatively and critically on history.” To the new framework’s detractors, however, this curriculum neglects core American values and demonizes the U.S. from a global perspective. This debate about education and curriculum became a political flashpoint in August, when the Republican National Committee passed a resolution condemning the new framework as “radically revisionist.” What kind of history does the College Board want students to learn, and what kind of history are Republicans accusing the Board of revising? The debate over AP U.S. History is more than a skirmish over education policy—it reflects an ongoing struggle over cultural authority.

Sociologist James Loewen, in a now classic book published in 1995, argued that most standard U.S. history textbooks supplied “irrelevant and even erroneous details, while omitting pivotal questions … textbooks rarely present the various sides of historical controversies and almost never reveal to students the evidence on which each side bases its position.”
What conservatives are calling revisionist, then, is a way of thinking and learning that challenges common assumptions about how, why, and for whom social change has taken place throughout American history. Banks shows that education, far from a neutral dissemination of facts, reflects the political and social interests of those doing the teaching. History is written by the conquerors.
The debate over education also plays out in a context where conservatives’ trust in science and academic knowledge is declining. Sociologist Gordon Gauchat shows that in the period from 1974-2010, conservatives’ trust in science as a source of cultural authority declined precipitously, and suggests that academic and scientific forms of knowledge have become strongly politicized as a result.

Fast Food Strikes Bring Everyone to the Table

Erik Kojola on September 23, 2014
Image via Annette Burnhardt via Flickr Creative Commons
Image via Annette Burnhardt via Flickr Creative Commons

Flipping burgers at McDonald’s is the iconic dead-end job of the U.S. service economy with low-wages, few benefits and certainly no labor unions. But now a national movement of fast-food and other low-paid workers is growing and organizing to improve working conditions. In the past two years there have been seven national fast-food strikes, which reflect a broader resurgence in the U.S. labor movement and new forms of social mobilization from Occupy Wall Street to the Walmart Black Friday strikes. These recent protests have mobilized often marginalized communities in ways that question the service economy model based on cheap non-unionized labor.

Service work, and fast-food in particular, is a growing sector of employment that is indicative of larger trends in the U.S. economy towards contingent, temporary employment and low wages. Violations of workplace laws like mandatory overtime and minimum wage are part of corporate cost-cutting and common in low-wage industries, and unionization could help give workers power to resist these practices.
This revitalized labor movement is also mobilizing women, people of color and immigrants who were largely left out of the traditional craft and industrial unions.
Broader decline of unionization and decrease in the minimum wage has contributed to rising income inequality, and so attempts to organize low-wage workers could help all U.S. workers and reduce this inequality. Union membership provides a wage boost for workers, especially women, people of color and those with less education.

For more on the inclusive power of unions, check out this Girl w/Pen! post.

Good Kids Gone Guerrilla: Why Flee to Fight?

Jack Delehanty on September 19, 2014

Fears of a “terror pipeline” running from Western countries to ISIL and other militant groups are on the rise. The New York Times reports that at least a dozen men have left Minnesota to join radical Islamist groups. Community leaders and FBI officials suggest that cultural isolation, social discontent, and economic challenges drive recent immigrants abroad to fight, and expert accounts in the media argue solving these local problems is the best means of curbing the trend.

Social science has two things to say about this: first,  sincere religious belief, political ideology, and rationalistic behavior may play a stronger role than the media recognize. Second, Western media and governments may have an interest in portraying the motivations for militancy in particular ways.

Ethnographic research shows that the incentive structures of fundamentalist Islam make militancy an appealing choice. Young men who spend hundreds of hours per year in prayer groups and become leaders in their local mosque communities come to view radicalism as the only sure path to Heaven. They don’t join militant organizations because they are confused, isolated, or have no other choices, but because they sincerely believe that doing so is the right path.
This type of radical religious behavior becomes more appealing in times of political uncertainty. Given the instability of Iraq’s fledgling democracy following the U.S. occupation, conservative Muslims may see ISIL’s rise as an opportunity to reclaim the region after a more secular approach to governing failed.
Western media organizations have strong incentives to blame militancy on local social and cultural problems. In times of moral or cultural panic, audiences look to pundits to see who to blame. “Disaffected Muslim youth” may be one such constructed class.
And, once blame has been placed, media accounts perpetuate that particular frame of the situation through a “fringe effect” where angry arguments from the margins become mainstream.

For more on why people may flee micro-agressions at home, check out this Reading List.

Scotland’s Independence Referendum

Evan Stewart on September 17, 2014

This week Scotland goes to the polls for a fundamental decision: should it declare independence from the United Kingdom? Discover Society has an excellent summary of the issue, and everyone from The Economist, to Jacobin (on both sides), to The Simpsons’ Groundskeeper Willie has weighed in on the debate. The “Yes” side argues for “embedded independence”—separate nationhood but with strong financial and regulatory ties to the rest of the UK—claiming an independent Scotland can provide better social services to the people. The “No” side thinks the status quo with the UK and the rest of Europe is a good deal, but is willing to compromise with the devolution of some welfare and tax policies back to national control. With a black and white vote, though, social scientists often have to look at the bigger forces behind nuanced policy issues. 

While the meat of the debate is about public policy, accusations of “nationalism” fly in the background. Sociologists can be critical of nationalism; Puri’s work shows how it shapes the desires of society in both progressive and troubling ways. However, authors like Calhoun remind us that national identity also helps create a necessary sense of belonging and social solidarity. Either way, national sentiment is neither unimportant nor just irrationally passionate.
Scottish public opinion on the yes/no referendum has converged over time and is now closer than ever. With much of the debate centered around social welfare policies, it is important to understand that Great Britain is a strange case; it is much more like the U.S. in terms of market-based social policy, but its public opinion shows a wide range of support for government intervention. This contradiction shows the debate about what the Scottish nation should be is rooted in disagreement about what a nation should do.