American Journal of Sociology 118(5)

American Journal of Sociology, March 2013: Volume 118, Issue 5

Relative Deprivation and Internal Migration in the United States: A Comparison of Black and White Men
Chenoa Flippen

While the link between geographic and social mobility has long been a cornerstone of sociological approaches to migration, recent research has cast doubt on the economic returns to internal U.S. migration. Moreover, important racial disparities in migration patterns remain poorly understood. Drawing on data from the 2000 census, the author reappraises the link between migration and social mobility by taking relative deprivation into consideration. She examines the association between migration, disaggregated by region of origin and destination, and absolute and relative earnings and occupational prestige, separately by race. Findings lend new insight into the theoretical and stratification implications of growing racial disparities in migration patterns; while both blacks and whites who move north-south generally average lower absolute incomes than their stationary northern peers, they enjoy significantly higher relative social positions. Moreover, the relative “gains” to migration are substantially larger for blacks than for whites. The opposite patterns obtain for south-north migration.

Terrorist Events and Attitudes toward Immigrants: A Natural Experiment
Joscha Legewie

Using a quasi-experimental research design, this study examines the effect of terrorist events on the perception of immigrants across 65 regions in nine European countries. It first elaborates a theoretical argument that explains the effect of events and points to economic conditions, the size of the immigrant population, and personal contact as mediating factors. This argument is evaluated using the fact that the terror attack in Bali on October 12, 2002, occurred during the fieldwork period of the European Social Survey. The findings from this natural experiment reveal considerable cross-national and regional variation in the effect of the event and its temporal duration. The analysis on the regional level supports the argument about contextual variations in the response to the event and a second analysis based on the 2004 Madrid bombing confirms the study’s conclusions. Implications of the findings for societal responses to terror attacks, the literature on attitudes toward immigrants, and survey research are discussed.

The Sacralization of the Individual: Human Rights and the Abolition of the Death Penalty
Matthew D. Mathias

In the latter half of the 20th century, countries abolished the death penalty en masse. What factors help to explain this global trend? Conventional analyses explain abolition by focusing primarily on state level political processes. This article contributes to these studies by analyzing world cultural factors that lend to the abolition trend. The main finding in three separate models on full, ordinary, and de facto cumulative measures of abolition show that the global sacralization of the individual, measured as the institutionalization of the human rights regime, represents a significant driver of states’ abolition. Countries’ predominant religion is also found to significantly affect the probability of abolition: predominantly Catholic nation-states are most likely to abolish the death penalty, and predominantly Muslim nation-states are least likely to abolish. These findings provide evidence for world cultural factors that structure the abolition trend globally.

Financialization and U.S. Income Inequality, 1970–2008
Ken-Hou Lin and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey

Focusing on U.S. nonfinance industries, we examine the connection between financialization and rising income inequality. We argue that the increasing reliance on earnings realized through financial channels decoupled the generation of surplus from production, strengthening owners’ and elite workers’ negotiating power relative to other workers. The result was an incremental exclusion of the general workforce from revenue-generating and compensation-setting processes. Using time-series cross-section data at the industry level, we find that increasing dependence on financial income, in the long run, is associated with reducing labor’s share of income, increasing top executives’ share of compensation, and increasing earnings dispersion among workers. Net of conventional explanations such as deunionization, globalization, technological change, and capital investment, the effects of financialization on all three dimensions of income inequality are substantial. Our counterfactual analysis suggests that financialization could account for more than half of the decline in labor’s share of income, 9.6% of the growth in officers’ share of compensation, and 10.2% of the growth in earnings dispersion between 1970 and 2008.

The Payoff to Skill in the Third Industrial Revolution
Yujia Liu and David B. Grusky

Is the third industrial revolution indeed driven by rising payoffs to skill? This simple but important question has gone unanswered because conventional models of earnings inequality are based on exceedingly weak measurements of skill. By attaching occupational skill measurements to the 1979–2010 Current Population Surveys, it becomes possible to adjudicate competing accounts of the changing returns to cognitive, creative, technical, and social skill. The well-known increase in between-occupation inequality is fully explained when such skills are taken into account, while returns to schooling prove to be quite stable once correlated changes in workplace skills are parsed out. The most important trend, however, is a precipitous increase in the wage payoff to synthesis, critical thinking, and related “analytic skills.” The payoff to technical and creative skills, often touted in discussions of the third industrial revolution, is shown to be less substantial.

The Transformation of America’s Penal Order: A Historicized Political Sociology of Punishment
Michael C. Campbell and Heather Schoenfeld

Comparative historical methods are used to explain the transformation of the U.S. penal order in the second half of the 20th century. The analysis of multiple state-level case studies and national-level narratives suggests that this transformation has three distinct, but interconnected, historical periods and reveals that the complex interaction between national and state-level politics and policy helps explain the growth in imprisonment between 1970 and 2001. Specifically, over time, national political competition, federal crime control policy, and federal court decisions helped create new state-level political innovation and special interest groups that compelled lawmakers to increasingly define the crime problem as a lack of punishment and to respond by putting more people in prison for longer periods of time. In turn, state-level developments facilitated increasingly radical crime control politics and policies at the national level that reflected historical traditions found in Sun Belt states.