Social Problems 57(4)

Reporting Conventions: Journalists, Activists, and the Thorny Struggle for Political Visibility
Sarah Sobieraj

This article draws upon 134 in-depth interviews with activists and journalists in an effort to reconcile the extensive activism taking place in the shadows of presidential campaigns with its near invisibility in the news. In his classic work, Todd Gitlin (1980) demonstrated that activists become newsworthy only by submitting to the "implicit rules of news making" (p. 3). This research supports his finding, but demonstrates that unbeknownst to activists, coverage of political outsiders is governed by a set of rules quite different from (and often diametrically opposed to) those employed in routine news-gathering. Taking cues from news creation practices that go on daily between journalists, parajournalists, and subjects, activist groups work assiduously to prepare members to fit the needs of political reporters. They bend over backwards to be media-friendly, which they perceive as professional, quotable, and credible, but ironically these studied attempts to conform to the norms of routine political reporting make them less appealing to journalists. While journalists may attend eagerly to elected officials' press conferences and official statements, they demand authenticity, particularly in the form of emotion and spontaneity, from outsiders—the very attributes activists work to erase in their media trainings. In the end, the activist groups fail to obtain coverage, not because they can't conform to the rules of news making, but because they are following the wrong rules. This article maps the contradictory sets of norms at play in the negotiation over news, and shows how they work together to create nearly insurmountable cultural boundaries for political outsiders.

Beyond the Ballot: Immigrant Collective Action in Gateways and New Destinations in the United States
Dina Okamoto and Kim Ebert

Most studies that attempt to understand immigrant political incorporation focus on patterns of electoral participation and citizenship acquisition. Given that nearly 60 percent of the foreign-born population in the United States is comprised of noncitizens, we argue that past studies miss an important dimension of the immigrant political incorporation process. In this article, we move beyond the ballot by documenting patterns of immigrant protest and conducting an analysis of the conditions under which immigrant organizing occurs in traditional gateways and new destinations. In addition to political opportunities and resources, we argue that conditions heightening group boundaries between immigrants and natives—what we call boundary markers—should play an important role in encouraging immigrants to develop a shared minority status and make collective claims on behalf of the larger group. Using hurdle models, we test our theoretical ideas with a new data set comprised of over 200 immigrant protest events in 52 metropolitan areas across the United States. Our results challenge past studies of immigrant mobilization because we find that inclusionary contexts characterized by greater access to formal political and economic incorporation both hinder and facilitate immigrant organizing, while boundary markers—measured here as threats and segregation—tend to encourage immigrant protest.

More Than Just Nickels and Dimes: A Cross-National Analysis of Working Poverty in Affluent Democracies
David Brady, Andrew S. Fullerton, and Jennifer Moren Cross

Despite its centrality to contemporary inequality, working poverty is often popularly discussed but rarely studied by sociologists. Using the Luxembourg Income Study (2009), we analyze whether an individual is working poor across 18 affluent democracies circa 2000. We demonstrate that working poverty does not simply mirror overall poverty and that there is greater cross-national variation in working than overall poverty. We then examine four explanations for working poverty: demographic characteristics, economic performance, unified theory, and welfare generosity. We utilize Heckman probit models to jointly model the likelihood of employment and poverty among the employed. Our analyses provide the least support for the economic performance explanation. There is modest support for unified theory as unionization reduces working poverty in some models. However, most of these effects appear to be mediated by welfare generosity. More substantial evidence exists for the demographic characteristics and welfare generosity explanations. An individual's likelihood of being working poor can be explained by (a) a lack of multiple earners or other adults in one's household, low education, single motherhood, having children and youth; and (b) the generosity of the welfare state in which he or she resides. Also, welfare generosity does not undermine employment and reduces working poverty even among demographically vulnerable groups. Ultimately, we encourage a greater role for the welfare state in debates about working poverty.

Social Problem Construction and National Context: News Reporting on "Overweight" and "Obesity" in the United States and France
Abigail C. Saguy, Kjerstin Gruys, and Shanna Gong

Drawing on analyses of American and French news reports on "overweight" and "obesity," this article examines how national context—including position in a global field of nation states, as well as different national politics and culture—shapes the framing of social problems. As has been shown in previous research, news reports from France—the economically dominated but culturally dominant nation of the two—discuss the United States more often than vice versa, typically in a negative way. Our contribution is to highlight the flexibility of anti-American rhetoric, which provides powerful ammunition for a variety of social problem frames. Specifically, depending on elite interests, French news reports may invoke anti-American rhetoric to reject a given phenomenon as a veritable public problem, or they may use such rhetoric to drum up concern over an issue. We further show how diverse cultural factors shape news reporting. Despite earlier work showing that a group-based discrimination frame is more common in the United States than in France, we find that the U.S. news sample is no more likely to discuss weight-based discrimination than the French news sample. We attribute this to specific barriers to this particular framing, namely the widespread view that body size is a behavior, akin to smoking, rather than an ascribed characteristic, like race. This discussion points, more generally, to some of the mechanisms limiting the diffusion of frames across social problems.

The state of the Economy and the Relationship Between prisoner Reentry and Crime
Lance Hannon and Robert DeFina

Previous research has identified a positive relationship between prisoner reentry and crime rates. The relationship potentially reflects both the recidivism of reentering offenders and the broader impact of the releases on the social organization of the areas to which they return. This article explores how economic conditions moderate the association between the size of the reentering population and crime rates. Using a state-level panel spanning the years 1978 through 2003, and two alternative measures of economic strength, the results demonstrate that the amount of increase in property and violent crime associated with prisoner societal reentry is substantially lessened by strong economic conditions. The findings suggest that economic conditions and criminal justice policies should not be pitted against each other as simply competing explanations for variation in crime rates. Instead, they should be recognized as irreducibly interdependent.

Who Lives and Dies on Death Row? Race, Ethnicity, and Post-Sentence Outcomes in Texas
Michelle A. Petrie and James E. Coverdill

A substantial body of research has explored the extent to which the race of offenders and victims influences who receives a death sentence for capital crimes. Little is known about how race and ethnicity might pattern death-row outcomes. Drawing upon evidence from male offenders sentenced to death in Texas during the years 1974 through 2009, we extend recent research by examining whether the race and ethnicity of offenders and victims and a number of offender, victim, and crime attributes influence the likelihood of executions and sentence relief (whereby prisoners leave death row). Cox regression analyses are used in conjunction with a multiple-imputation method for handling a modest amount of missing data. The results show that cases involving minorities—with black or Latino offenders or victims—have lower hazards of execution than cases in which both offenders and victims are white. Victim and offender race and ethnicity have little to no independent effect upon the hazard of sentence relief.

A Paradox of Participation: Nonwhites in White Sororities and Fraternities
Matthew W. Hughey

Although law prohibits race-based exclusion in college sororities and fraternities in the United States, racial segregation prevails. As a result, nonwhite membership in white Greek-letter organizations (WGLOs) is often hailed as a transformative step toward equality and unity. The bulk of work on such cross-racial membership centers on comparative-historical and survey data and treats integrated membership as the successful end, rather than a problematic beginning, of analysis. Drawing upon in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in three university campuses on the East Coast, I shift the focus from resource factors that either prevent or enable membership to the strategies of action that nonwhite members employ in their everyday lives in order to be perceived as full, belonging members. By drawing upon the insights of the sociology of culture, I argue that robust racialized schemas simultaneously enable and constrain inclusion. Rather than hide explicit racial-ethnic difference or accede to traditional expectations of Anglo conformity, I find that nonwhite members are enmeshed in a paradox of participation: their ability to frame themselves as equal and belonging Greek "brothers and sisters" remains tied to a patterned reproduction of their racial and ethnic identities as essentially different and inferior. Such a paradox emerges as an important theoretical and pragmatic dilemma with implications for an array of institutional contexts.

Social Problems, November 2010: Volume 57, Issue 4