American Journal of Sociology 118(6)

American Journal of Sociology, May 2013: Volume 118, Issue 6

The Power of Instability: Unraveling the Microfoundations of Bargained Authoritarianism in China
Ching Kwan Lee and Yonghong Zhang

This article develops an interactive and relational conception of infrastructural state power for studying the capacity of authoritarian regimes to absorb popular protests. Based on an ethnography of the grassroots state in moments of unrest in China, the authors identify three microfoundations of Chinese authoritarianism: protest bargaining, legal-bureaucratic absorption, and patron-clientelism. Adopting, respectively, the logics of market exchange, rule-bound games, and interpersonal bonds, these mechanisms have the effect of depoliticizing social unrest and constitute a lived experience of authoritarian domination as a non-zero-sum situation, totalizing and transparent yet permissive of room for maneuvering and bargaining. This heuristic framework calls for bringing the subjective experience of subordination back into the theorizing of state domination.

The Demography of Social Mobility: Black-White Differences in the Process of Educational Reproduction
Vida Maralani

Increases in women’s education represent one of the most wide-reaching socioeconomic changes of recent decades. But how much will future generations benefit from these gains, and will black and white Americans benefit equally? Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this study examines differences in the process of educational reproduction for black and white Americans. The approach considers the implication of race and education differences in marriage, assortative mating, and fertility in the parent generation on the distribution of schooling in the next generation. The analyses use a dynamic, multidimensional model that allows for intergenerational pathways at the individual, family, and population levels. The results show that these demographic mechanisms play an important role in explaining race differences in educational reproduction. Ignoring these pathways underestimates intergenerational effects for whites and overestimates them for blacks.

Understanding Latin American Beliefs about Racial Inequality
Edward Telles and Stanley Bailey

Scholars argue that Latin American ideologies of mestizaje, or racial mixing, mask ethnoracial discrimination. We examine popular explanations for indigenous or Afrodescendant disadvantage in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru using the 2010 AmericasBarometer survey. Findings show that numerical majorities across all countries endorse structural-disadvantage explanations and reject victim-blaming stances; in seven of eight countries, they specifically recognize discrimination against ethnoracial minorities. Brazilians most point to structural causes, while Bolivians are least likely to recognize discrimination. While educational status differences tend to be sizable, dominant and minority explanations are similar. Both are comparable to African-American views and contrast with those of U.S. whites.

Making the Connection: Social Bonding in Courtship Situations
Daniel A. McFarland, Dan Jurafsky, and Craig Rawlings

Sociologists have long argued that the force of a social bond resides in a sense of interpersonal connection. This is especially true for initial courtship encounters when pairs report a sense of interpersonal chemistry. The authors explore the process of romantic bonding by applying interaction ritual theory, extended and integrated with methods from computational linguistics, to the study of courtship encounters and, specifically, heterosexual speed dating. The authors find that the assortment of interpersonal moves associated with a sense of connection characterizes a conventionalized form of initial courtship activity. The game is successfully played when females are the point of focus and engaged in the conversation and males demonstrate alignment with and understanding of the female. In short, initial heterosexual courtship encounters are associated with a sense of bonding when they reflect a reciprocal asymmetrical performance in which differentiated roles are mutually coordinated.

Interethnic Friendship, Trust, and Tolerance: Findings from Two North Iraqi Cities
Jens Rydgren, Dana Sofi, and Martin Hällsten

This article examines correlates of social trust and tolerance within a high-violence context. The authors study first the extent to which friendship ties that cross ethnic boundaries are associated with specific interaction spaces (neighborhoods, workplaces, civil society organizations, and political parties) and, second, the extent to which interethnic friendships are associated with trust and tolerance. Using individual-level data (N = 2,264) on interethnic contacts collected in 2006 in the two northern Iraqi cities of Erbil and Kirkuk, the authors show that people who spend time within ethnically heterogeneous interaction spaces are considerably more likely to have friendship ties that cross ethnic group boundaries and, in turn, also to express general social trust, interethnic trust, and tolerance toward outgroups.