American Sociological Review 77(5)

American Sociological Review, October 2012: Volume 77, Issue 5

The Rise of the Super-Rich: Power Resources, Taxes, Financial Markets, and the Dynamics of the Top 1 Percent, 1949 to 2008
Thomas W. Volscho and Nathan J. Kelly

The income share of the super-rich in the United States has grown rapidly since the early 1980s after a period of postwar stability. What factors drove this change? In this study, we investigate the institutional, policy, and economic shifts that may explain rising income concentration. We use single-equation error correction models to estimate the long- and short-run effects of politics, policy, and economic factors on pretax top income shares between 1949 and 2008. We find that the rise of the super-rich is the result of rightward-shifts in Congress, the decline of labor unions, lower tax rates on high incomes, increased trade openness, and asset bubbles in stock and real estate markets.

Political Holes in the Economy: The Business Network of Partisan Firms in Hungary
David Stark and Balazs Vedres

This article redirects attention from the question of how business ties have an impact on politics to the question of how political ties have an impact on business. Specifically, do divisions within the field of politics become divisions in the field of business networks? To study co-evolution of political and economic fields, we conducted a historical network analysis of the relationship between firm-to-party ties and firm-to-firm ties in the Hungarian economy. We constructed a dataset of all senior managers and boards of directors of 1,696 corporations and the complete set of all political officeholders from 1987 to 2001. Findings from our field interviews and dyadic logistic regression models demonstrate that director interlocks depend, to a significant extent, on political affiliations. Although the political and economic fields have been institutionally separated, firms and parties have become organizationally entangled. Firms of either left or right political affiliation exhibit a preference for partnerships with firms in the same political camp and increasingly avoid ties with firms in the opposite camp. Our analysis reveals that political camps in the Hungarian economy occurred not as a direct legacy of state socialism but as the product of electoral party competition.

Religion and Sexual Behaviors: Understanding the Influence of Islamic Cultures and Religious Affiliation for Explaining Sex Outside of Marriage
Amy Adamczyk and Brittany E. Hayes

Social scientists have long been interested in how cultural and structural characteristics shape individuals’ actions. We investigate this relationship by examining how macro- and micro-level religious effects shape individuals’ reports of premarital and extramarital sex. We look at how identifying with one of the major world religions—Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, or Judaism—and living in a nation with a Muslim culture shape the likelihood of sex outside of marriage. Using hierarchical modeling techniques and cross-national data from the Demographic and Health Surveys, we find that ever married Hindus and Muslims are less likely to report having had premarital sex than are ever married Jews and Christians, and an earlier age at marriage does not appear to explain the relationship. Married Muslims are also less likely than affiliates of all other religions, except Buddhists, to report extramarital sex. The percentage Muslim within a nation decreases the odds of reports of premarital sex and this relationship is not explained by restrictions on women’s mobility. These findings contribute to research on religion, culture, policy, and health, as well as our understanding of the macro-micro relationship.

Religion and Volunteering in Context: Disentangling the Contextual Effects of Religion on Voluntary Behavior
Chaeyoon Lim and Carol Ann MacGregor

This study examines whether religion’s effect on volunteering spills over to nonreligious individuals through personal ties between religious and nonreligious individuals. We use three different analytic strategies that focus on national, local, and personal network level contexts to identify the network spillover effect of religion on volunteering. We find that if nonreligious people have close friends with religious affiliations, they are more likely to volunteer for religious and nonreligious causes. However, this network spillover effect cannot be inferred from the relationship between volunteering and national or local level religious context—a common approach in the literature. In fact, we find that the average level of local religious participation is negatively associated with volunteering among the nonreligious in the United States. This novel finding suggests that to fully understand religion’s civic role in the wider community, we need to consider how religion might influence the civic life of people outside religious communities, not just those within them. Our findings also suggest that in spite of methodological advances, studies that purport to test mechanisms at one level of analysis by using data at a larger level of aggregation run a high risk of committing an ecological fallacy.

Disease Politics and Medical Research Funding: Three Ways Advocacy Shapes Policy
Rachel Kahn Best

In the 1980s and 1990s, single-disease interest groups emerged as an influential force in U.S. politics. This article explores their effects on federal medical research priority-setting. Previous studies of advocacy organizations’ political effects focused narrowly on direct benefits for constituents. Using data on 53 diseases over 19 years, I find that in addition to securing direct benefits, advocacy organizations have aggregate effects and can systemically change the culture of policy arenas. Disease advocacy reshaped funding distributions, changed the perceived beneficiaries of policies, promoted metrics for commensuration, and made cultural categories of worth increasingly relevant to policymaking.

Academic Entrepreneurship and Exchange of Scientific Resources: Material Transfer in Life and Materials Sciences in Japanese Universities
Sotaro Shibayama, John P. Walsh, and Yasunori Baba

This study uses a sample of Japanese university scientists in life and materials sciences to examine how academic entrepreneurship has affected the norms and behaviors of academic scientists regarding sharing scientific resources. Results indicate that high levels of academic entrepreneurship in a scientific field are associated with less reliance on the gift-giving form of sharing (i.e., generalized exchange) traditionally recommended by scientific communities, and with a greater emphasis on direct benefits for givers (i.e., direct exchange), as well as a lower overall frequency of sharing. We observe these shifts in sharing behavior even among individual scientists who are not themselves entrepreneurially active; this suggests a general shift in scientific norms contingent on institutional contexts. These findings reflect contradictions inherent in current science policies that simultaneously encourage open science as well as commercial application of research results, and they suggest that the increasing emphasis on commercial activity may fundamentally change the normative structure of science.

Changing Global Norms through Reactive Diffusion: The Case of Intellectual Property Protection of AIDS Drugs
Nitsan Chorev

This article explores conditions under which global norms change. I use a case study in which the original interpretation of an international agreement on intellectual property rights was modified to address demands for improved access to affordable AIDS drugs. Conventional theories that focus on international negotiations cannot fully account for the events in this case. Drawing on the theory of recursivity and insights from the literature on diffusion, I suggest that shifts in global norms occur through reactive diffusion of policies across states. Experiences accumulated in this ongoing process of reinvention eventually lead to a new, globally accepted reinterpretation of the original obligation.