The collapse of intermediate structures?

How can we explain the rise of President Trump and the attraction of his campaign behavior before and since he took office? We argue here that the collapse of ‘intermediate structures’ has been a key factor; that the associations and groups which are building blocks of pluralistic politics have been eroded to such an extent that Trump’s personality politics have been able to take over the political stage

Concepts and Measurement in Multimethod Research

This article argues that concept misformation and conceptual stretching undermine efforts to combine qualitative and quantitative methods in multimethod research (MMR). Two related problems result from the mismatch of qualitatively and quantitatively construed concepts. Mechanism muddling occurs when differences in the connotation of qualitatively and quantitatively construed concepts embed different causal properties into conceptual definitions. Conceptual slippage occurs when qualitatively and quantitatively construed concepts use incompatible nominal, ordinal, or radial scales. Instead of gaining leverage from the synthesis of large- and small-N analysis, these problems can push MMR in two diametrically opposed directions, emphasizing one methodological facet at the cost of the other.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Democracy at Work: Moving Beyond Elections to Improve Well-Being

How does democracy work to improve well-being? In this paper, we disentangle the component parts of democratic practice—elections, civic participation, expansion of social provisioning, local administrative capacity—to identify their relationship with well-being. Our analysis of an original dataset covering over 5,550 Brazilian municipalities demonstrates that competitive elections alone do not explain variation in infant mortality rates, one outcome associated with well-being. We move beyond elections to show how participatory institutions, social programs, and local state capacity can interact to buttress one another and reduce infant mortality rates. The result is a new understanding of how different aspects of democracy work together to improve a key feature of human development

How facts travel: The model systems of sociology

The discussion in the sociology of science about the role of model systems in biology provides an invitation to reflect on whether and how similar devices operate in sociology. This paper shows that sociology relies on objects of study that receive a disproportionate amount of attention and implicitly come to stand in for a specific class of objects. But, unlike other disciplines, sociology has no agreed language or theory to classify the discipline-specific objects that it studies, which hinders explicit reflection on the use of model systems across sociological subfields. In contrast to other disciplines, which use model systems, physical copies of sociological model systems usually do not travel. Because of this, the relationship between specimen and epistemic object is less standardised in sociology than in other disciplines, which creates problems for the accumulation of knowledge. Sociology also encounters unique problems of access to model systems