Pro-integration policies and the occupational expectations of immigrant youth

Europe is experiencing heightened public attention toward anti-immigration policy reforms and restrictions. Despite the potential importance of these policy changes, we do not know whether these policies influence how immigrant children perceive their futures in their host countries. Employing secondary data analysis of the Program for International Student Assessment and the Migrant Integration Policy Index data, I show that a decrease in policy support for immigrant integration is associated with a decrease in how good of a job immigrant children expect to have when they are adults. Since students’ occupational expectations influence their eventual status attainment, this article shows that a decrease in pro-integration policies has important implications for the integration of immigrants into their host countries and for their life trajectories

The Campus Human Rights Index: Measuring University Commitment to Human Rights

To what extent do universities respect human rights? Despite the prevailing view that universities are bastions of progressive ideas with a bias for rights protection, anecdotal evidence suggests that they diverge significantly in their commitment to promote and protect human rights, even within the U.S. To this point, though, there exists no systematic measure of university human rights commitments. In this manuscript, we introduce the first such indicator - the Campus Human Rights Index (CHRI). We describe the measure and introduce our initial ranking of universities. We then formally assess the construct validity of our measure by comparing it to other plausibly related university characteristics. We conclude by describing our future data collection efforts. This paper constitutes our first step in a larger research project that seeks to understand the determinants and consequences of university human rights practices

Do Education System Characteristics Moderate the Socioeconomic, Gender and Immigrant Gaps in Math and Science Achievement?

Using data from the 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study for 45 countries, we examined the size of socioeconomic, gender, and immigrant status related gaps, and their relationships with education system characteristics, such as differentiation, standardization, and proportion of governmental spending on education. We find that higher socioeconomic status is positively and significantly associated with higher math and science achievement; immigrant students lag behind their native peers in both math and science, with first generation students faring worse than second generation; and girls show lower math performance than boys. A higher degree of differentiation makes socioeconomic gaps larger in both math and science achievement, whereas higher governmental spending reduces socioeconomic achievement gaps.  

Last Name Selection in Audit Studies

In this article, we build on Gaddis (2017a) by illuminating a key variable plausibly related to racial perceptions of last names—geography. We show that the probability that any individual belongs to a race is conditional not only on their last name but also on surrounding racial demographics. Specifically, we demonstrate that the probability of a name denoting a race varies considerably across contexts, and this is more of a problem for some names than others. This result has two important implications for audit study research: it suggests important limitations for (1) the generalizability of audit study findings and (2) for the interpretation of geography-based conditional effects. This means that researchers should be careful to select names that consistently signal racial groups regardless of local demographics. We provide a slim R package that can help researchers do this

An attitude network analysis of post-national citizenship identities.

How are evaluative reactions pertaining post-national citizenship identities interrelated and what are the potential mechanisms how post-national identities evolve? Previous efforts to operationalize and measure post-national citizenship identities leave it open how people's stances on different issues are related and suffer from a variety of theoretical and methodological shortcomings regarding the nature of political attitudes and ideologies. A recently proposed approach conceptualizes ideologies as networks of causally connected evaluative reactions to individual issues. Individual evaluative reactions form the nodes in a network model, and these nodes can influence each other via linked edges, thereby giving rise to a dynamic thoughts system of networked political and identity-related views. To examine this system at large, we apply network analysis to data from the European Values Study. Specifically, we investigate 33 evaluative reactions regarding national and supra-national identity, diversity, global empathy, global environmentalism, immigration, and supra-national politics. The results reveal a strongly connected network of citizenship identity-related attitudes. A community analysis reveals larger clusters of strongly related evaluative reactions, which are connected via bridges and hub nodes. Centrality analysis identifies evaluative reactions that are strategically positioned in the network, and network simulations indicate that persuasion attempts targeted at such nodes have greater potential to influence the larger citizenship identity than changes of more peripheral attitude nodes. We lastly show that socio-demographic characteristics are not only associated with the overall level of post-national citizenship, but also with the network structure, suggesting that these structural differences can affect the network function as people develop national or post-national citizenship identities, or respond to external events. These results provide new insights into the structure of post-national identities and the mechanism how post-national identities might evolve. We end with a discussion of future opportunities to study networked attitudes in the context of civic and citizenship education

Science at risk? Considering the importance of academic freedom for STEM research production across 17 OECD countries.

Since 2011, a declining trend in academic freedom globally has paralleled a rising tide of neo-nationalism. We use fixed effects models to examine data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-DEM) academic freedom index and bibliometric data for 17 OECD countries across nearly three decades (1981-2007) that precede the recent decline in academic freedom. We find substantial, statistically significant, positive relationships between cross-nationally comparable and longitudinal measures of academic freedom and volume of STEM publications. Additionally, academic freedom positively influenced the quality of STEM publications as measured by journal rankings. Our findings were relatively consistent across various measures of academic freedom and model specifications. We discuss implications for safeguarding academic freedom, applying neo-institutional theory, and identifying directions for future research

SRD760414_ONLINE_APPENDICES – Supplemental material for Using Google Trends to Measure Issue Salience for Hard-to-Survey Populations

<p>Supplemental material, SRD760414_ONLINE_APPENDICES for Using Google Trends to Measure Issue Salience for Hard-to-Survey Populations by Volha Chykina and Charles Crabtree in Socius</p

Descriptive statistics, 1981.

Since 2011, a declining trend in academic freedom globally has paralleled a rising tide of neo-nationalism. We use fixed effects models to examine data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-DEM) academic freedom index and bibliometric data for 17 OECD countries across nearly three decades (1981–2007) that precede the recent decline in academic freedom. We find substantial, statistically significant, positive relationships between cross-nationally comparable and longitudinal measures of academic freedom and volume of STEM publications. Additionally, academic freedom positively influenced the quality of STEM publications as measured by journal rankings. Our findings were relatively consistent across various measures of academic freedom and model specifications. We discuss implications for safeguarding academic freedom, applying neo-institutional theory, and identifying directions for future research.</div