Des électeurs ordinaires... Enquête sur la normalisation de l'extrême droite
- Images Guillaume Destombes (via Shutterstock) et ed. du Seuil
Le CRIS propose une rencontre avec le sociologue et politiste Félicien Faury, chargé de recherche CNRS au CESDIP, autour de son ouvrage paru au Seuil, Des électeurs ordinaires. Enquête sur la normalisation de l'extrême droite.
Sciences Po, lundi 9 décembre, salle du Conseil, 12h30 - 14h
L'inscription est obligatoire, merci
Résumé de l'ouvrage (Seuil) :
Ils sont artisans, employés, pompiers, commerçants, retraités… Ils ont un statut stable, disent n’être « pas à plaindre » même si les fins de mois peuvent être difficiles et l’avenir incertain. Et lorsqu’ils votent, c’est pour le Rassemblement national.
De 2016 à 2022, d’un scrutin présidentiel à l’autre, le sociologue Félicien Faury est allé à leur rencontre dans le sud-est de la France, berceau historique de l’extrême droite française. Il a cherché à comprendre comment ces électeurs se représentent le monde social, leur territoire, leur voisinage, les inégalités économiques, l’action des services publics, la politique. Il donne aussi à voir la place centrale qu’occupe le racisme, sous ses diverses formes, dans leurs choix électoraux. Le vote RN se révèle ici fondé sur un sens commun, constitué de normes majoritaires perçues comme menacées – et qu’il s’agit donc de défendre.
À travers des portraits et récits incarnés, cette enquête de terrain éclaire de façon inédite comment les idées d’extrême droite se diffusent au quotidien.
Pour Politis, l'ouvrage est ciselé, clair et brillant, fruit d’une enquête de terrain de plusieurs années. Félicien Faury, propose de prendre au sérieux ces électeurs et électrices du Rassemblement national, entendre leurs discours, comprendre leurs visions du monde et rendre raison – une raison sociologique – à celles et ceux qui donnent leur voix au parti lepéniste. Une prise de position épistémologique dans la continuité des nombreux travaux universitaires sur ce parti, et qui oblige à entendre le racisme qui structure la pensée de cet électorat. Contre la distinction entre social et culturel, grille de lecture bien plus politique et sondagière qu’universitaire, Faury insiste au contraire sur le lien intrinsèque entre toutes les dimensions et dévoile l’économie morale de l’électorat RN...
- Lien vers l'éditeur
- Lien vers la page du chercheur (CESDIP)
- La recension de l'ouvrage, par Nicolas Duvoux (La vie des idées)
Human-AI Coevolution
- Image Elnur (via Shutterstock)
Human-AI Coevolution
Dino Pedreschi, Luca Pappalardo, Emanuele Ferragina, Ricardo Baeza-Yates,
Albert-László Barabási et al.
Artificial Intelligence
Available online November 13th, in Open Access
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.artint.2024.104244
An international team of AI, social, and complexity scientists - including Emanuele Ferragina - work paves the way for a new field of research, merging artificial intelligence and complexity science to understand how the continuous interaction between humans and algorithms can profoundly transform social dynamics.
In a world where algorithms and recommendation systems increasingly guide daily decisions, this paper explores how these processes influence human behaviors, creating a “feedback loop” in which individual choices and automated suggestions reinforce each other. This loop generates complex and often unpredictable effects that evade traditional models of human-machine interaction.
The paper lays the groundwork for studying human-AI coevolution as a phenomenon with crucial ethical and social implications. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the team emphasizes the importance of a new cross-disciplinary perspective to address the challenges of coevolution, presenting concrete examples of human-AI ecosystems. The authors also highlight the need for new regulatory and policy tools to monitor and manage the feedback loop that governs digital interactions.
“The feedback loop between humans and AI,” says Dino Pedreschi, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Pisa, “creates unprecedented forms of interaction, with recommendation systems deeply influencing our preferences. The complexity of this ecosystem is constantly growing, as each interaction adds new levels of complexity and data to analyze.”
“If we want to understand the real impact of AI on our society,” adds Luca Pappalardo, researcher at CNR and professor at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, “we need to reinterpret our understanding of complex systems in light of this continuous feedback between humans and algorithms.”
Finally, Emanuele Ferragina, Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po - CRIS, underscores the urgency of addressing legal and policy barriers: “To fully understand human-AI coevolution, we need greater transparency from major online platforms. Initiatives such as the EU’s Digital Services Act can make a difference, but it’s also essential to ensure an equitable distribution of ‘recommendation tools’ in a more competitive market.”
This study sparks a fundamental debate, inviting us to rethink the relationship between AI and society and to shape a future where humans and artificial intelligence can coevolve consciously and responsibly.
In the name of mixedness
- Image Codeur.com & Jayhermiony/Shutterstock
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2024-2025
Friday, November 22th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K011 (1, St-Thomas)
In the name of mixedness.
First name choices in France for children of mixed-race marriages
and internationally adopted children
Solène Brun
Associate Scientist CNRS, Institut de recherche interdisciplinaire sur les enjeux sociaux (IRIS)
This article, based on a survey of international adoptive parents and mixed-race couples conducted between 2015 and 2017, looks at the considerations involved in naming children in these two types of mixed families in France. Parents in these families have to negotiate multiple affiliations and origins, meaning that choice of child’s first name has particular symbolic implications. These in turn are reflected in parents’ approaches and strategies for integrating the child into the different family lines; they also involve defining identities at both a national and racialized level. In this respect, the article explores an understudied dimension of the sociology of first names in France, with particular attention to the racialized dimension of the naming process.
Open seminar. Please register here to join us.
- Paper, published by the Revue Française de Sociologie (FR) | English version
- To fing out more about Solène Brun
Technologies of Distinction: The Social Stratification in Young People's Video Consumption
- Image Xavier Lorenzo (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2024-2025
Friday, November 15th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K011 (1, St-Thomas)
Technologies of Distinction:
The Social Stratification in Young People's Video Consumption
Abel Aussant
PhD Candidate (Sciences Po-CRIS)
Since the 90s, sociologists have revisited Pierre Bourdieu’s theories on the social stratification of cultural consumption. This revision has shifted attention from exclusive cultural legitimacy to the rise of diversity and omnivorousness in cultural tastes. Youth, often seen as highly responsive to mass media, have been positioned at the forefront of this transformation, where symbolic boundaries between social classes appear to blur. However, over the past two decades, new forms of cultural consumption, driven by technological advances, challenge the assumption of homogenization in cultural practices.
This communication, confront homogenization assertions by focusing on the social stratification of audiovisual consumption practices, particularly through modes of access. This approach moves beyond analyzing taste preferences to investigate how individuals access cultural goods—considering consumption contexts and technologies used.
Using data from the 2018 French "Pratiques Culturelles" survey (N=9238) and applying geometric data analysis (MCA) and regression models, the research reveals that youth consumption patterns remain segmented by education and social origin. These findings counter the "digital-native" narrative, which assumes universal engagement with digital culture among young people. Instead, the study highlights the persistence of stratification in consumption modes, with technology choices serving as markers of distinction.
This research bridges digital inequality literature with the sociology of cultural practices, arguing that technology choices should be understood not just as reflections of skills but as symbols of distinction. Bourdieu's framework of cultural free will among the upper class and choice by necessity in the working class remains relevant for understanding these consumption patterns.
Open seminar. Please register here to join us.
La ségrégation sociale entre les collèges dans le système éducatif français
- Image GreenSkyStudio (via Shutterstock)
La ségrégation sociale entre les collèges dans le système éducatif français.
Mesure, disparités géographiques, évolution temporelle et conséquences
Thèse menée sous la direction de Louis-André Vallet
(Directeur de recherche CNRS, Gemass, Sorbonne Université)
Soutenance à Sciences Po le mardi 3 décembre 2024, 14h30
Composition du jury : Gwenaëlle Audren (AMU-Telemme), Carlo Barone (Sciences Po-CRIS), Jérôme Deauvieau (ENS-CMH), Marc Demeuse (Université de Mons), Fabienne Rosenwald (Cour des comptes), Louis-André Vallet (Sorbonne Université-GEMASS).
Dans le contexte du système éducatif français, la ségrégation sociale entre les collèges se définit par les écarts entre ces établissements suivant les milieux sociaux des élèves qu’ils scolarisent. Cette thèse prolonge des travaux de morphologie sociale de nature statistique menés en tant qu’expert à la DEPP, service statistique de l’Éducation nationale.
Les données sont les bases nationales individuelles d’élèves du second degré et les panels d’élèves de la DEPP.
Selon des recherches récentes menées à une échelle locale, l’existence d’une forte ségrégation entre collèges est préjudiciable au climat scolaire et aux poursuites d’études dans les collèges les plus défavorisés, alors que ces effets sont toutefois modérés en matière d’acquisition de compétences, ce qu’accréditent mes investigations.
La thèse dresse un état des lieux de la ségrégation sociale entre les collèges au début des années 2020. Celui-ci s’appuie sur une étude circonstanciée des principales mesures de la ségrégation qui ont été proposées dans la littérature scientifique, étude qui incite à privilégier l’indice d’entropie.
La stabilité de la ségrégation au plan national depuis vingt ans résulte d’une baisse de la ségrégation entre collèges publics et d’une hausse des écarts entre collèges publics et privés. L’analyse menée dans les principales villes françaises confirme le poids important du secteur privé dans la ségrégation, même si le rôle de la ségrégation résidentielle est prépondérant.
La thèse se conclut par un tour d’horizon des travaux à entreprendre en vue d’approfondir cet état des lieux de la ségrégation sociale et mieux appréhender ses effets sur les parcours et résultats scolaires.
Assistant Professor on Environmental Inequalities
- Image Claire Lise Havet / Sciences Po
Job Talks
Position on Environmental Inequalities
Room K011 (1 Saint-Thomas)
This assistant professorship position is designed to reinforce and complement our expertise in the study of environmental inequalities.
This position will contribute to strengthening environmental research and teaching in the context of the Sciences Po TIERED project (Transforming Interdisciplinary Education and Research for Evolving Democracies), organized jointly by the Open Institute for Digital Transformation and the Institute for Environmental Transformations.
The morning talks are open to the Sciences Po community. Registration is mandatory. Thank you.
Schedule:
8:30am - Welcome Coffee
8:45am - Risto Conte Keivabu, Environmental Disasters and Health at Birth: Evidence from Wildfires in Spain
9:30am - Viktoria Jansesberger, Environmental Stress and Social Inequality: Sudden Weather Disasters as Triggers for Ethnic Protest in Autocracies
10:15am - Christian könig, Ethnic environmental inequality and residential choice--A survey experiment on the role of neighborhood preferences
11:00am - Coffee break
11:20am - Jessica Quinton, Greening the gentrification process: Insights and engagements from practitioners
12:05pm - Ankit Sikarwar, Overlapping Environmental Burdens and Inequalities: Multi-Scale Insights from Sub-Saharan Africa
12:50pm - Guglielmo Zappalà, Propagation of extreme heat in agriculture across sectors and space
1:30pm - Lunch
Appel à candidature - Thèse en contrat CIFRE
- Image Prostock (via Shutterstock)
Le programme Défi Jeunesse accompagne les élèves tout au long du collège, de la 6ème à la 3ème. Durant l’année scolaire 2023-2024, 15 000 jeunes de 37 établissements en réseau d’éducation prioritaire (REP et REP+) ont bénéficié de ce programme dans les 10 territoires où il est déployé.
Porté par l'association Alliance pour l'éducation | United Way, le programme mobilise et fédère de nombreux acteurs présents sur le territoire (établissements scolaires, associations, entreprises, acteurs publics). Ce programme complémentaire à l’école permet aux élèves scolarisés dans un collège du réseau d'éducation prioritaire d’acquérir des connaissances de soi et du monde professionnel, pour mieux prendre leur place dans la société.
Les objectifs sont tournés vers la promotion de l’égalité des chances, à travers plusieurs actions : remobiliser scolairement, aider à définir un parcours professionnel, s'orienter, découvrir le tissus économique local et échanger avec des acteurs professionels.
Alliance pour l'éducation | United Way met en place une recherche-action grâce au financement d'un contrat doctoral CIFRE* pour évaluer l'impact du programme. A travers des dispositifs d'évaluation randomisée et des techniques qualitatives, le ou la doctorant·e pourra explorer plusieurs questions de recherche, établir un diagnostic et formuler des recommandations concrètes pour étendre et améliorer l'efficacité du programme.
Diplômés en master de sociologie, économie, psychologie, science politique ou sciences de l'éducation, pourvus de connaissances en méthodes quali et quanti, et en évaluation de politique publique, vous pouvez envoyer votre candidature avant le 30 novembre 2024. Les modalités de candidature sont précisées dans cette fiche (pdf, 109 ko).
La thèse sera menée au CRIS (Sciences Po), sous la direction du professeur Carlo Barone.
* CIFRE : Conventions Industrielles de Formation pour la Recherche
Residents or undesirables? How ordinary citizens shape policing practices in Paris
- Image Christophe Badouet (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2024-2025
Friday, November 8th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K011 (1, St-Thomas)
Residents or undesirables?
How ordinary citizens shape policing practices in Paris
Charlotte Corchete & Magda Boutros
PhD Student & Assistant Professor (Sciences Po-CRIS)
How do ordinary citizens shape policing practices that disproportionately target racialised groups?
Existing research is inconclusive. Some studies show that quality-of-life policing is driven by resident grievances; others find little correlation between citizen complaints and police actions. We also know little about how the police respond to competing demands for more, or fewer, police interventions.
This paper draws on a qualitative data analysis of interviews, observations, and judicial archives in two Parisian neighbourhoods (12th and 18th arrondissements), to analyse the institutional processes through which the police handle residents' grievances about public space. We show how these processes become a space where the police and a subset of residents jointly construct and legitimate a racialized spatial order, in which Black and Arab young men are deemed "out of place" in the neighbourhoods where they live and work.
Two main mechanisms emerge:
- institutional procedures to respond to resident grievances systematically exclude voices advocating for inclusive public spaces;
- these procedures reinforce a vision of spatial order where certain groups are labeled "undesirable" and their eviction legitimated, regardless of their behaviour.
The paper contributes to the sociology of policing and urban sociology by showing how police procedures for responding to residents' concerns can lead to the legitimation of a racialised spatial order.
CRIS welcomes 7 new PhD Students
- Image Sandrine Gaudin / Sciences Po
The CRIS team is pleased to welcome 7 new PhD students for the next few years, carrying 7 varied research sujects questioning inequalities.
-
Florian Andersen - Understanding Labor Flow Networks and Wage Inequality: an Analysis of Career Trajectories and Labor Market Dynamics (dir. Olivier Godechot).
M.A: University of Mannheim - Camille Voisin - La réforme des groupes de besoins au collège : quels impacts sur les performances, les inégalités scolaires et les compétences socio-émotionnelles des élèves ? (dir. Carlo Barone & Nina Guyon - PSE / ENS)
M.A: ENS - Sciences cognitives - Jeong-A Lee - Fertility intentions and behaviours in the context of changing ideals in South Korea and East Asia (dir. Angela Greulich & Laurent Toulemon - INED).
M.A: Université de Strasbourg / École des Hautes Études en Démographie - Ida Gaede - Migrant Mothers: the Role of Citizenship and Migration in Post-Birth Employment Trajectories in Germany and France (dir. Marta Dominguez-Folgueras).
M.A: ENS - Parcours "Quantifier en Sciences Sociales" -
Sophia Noel - Widowhood and Vulnerability in the Face of Climate Change (dir. Zachary Van Winkle).
M.A: Sciences Po, sociology
- Clara Le Gallic-Ach - Déclarer des violences de genre en France depuis #Metoo (dir. Marta Dominguez-Folgueras).
M.A: "Sociologie quantitative et démographie", Université Paris Saclay et "Data science et sciences sociales", ENSAE -
Ines Malroux - Primes socialisations de genre et de classe sociale et développement dans la petite enfance (dir. Lidia Panico).
M.A: Université Paris Nanterre et École des Hautes Études en Démographie
Holy Cow! Conflicts, Markets, and Costs of Intolerance
- Image Paha1205 (via Shutterstock)
CRIS - AxPo Joint Seminar
Friday, October 18th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K011 (1, St-Thomas)
Holy Cow! Conflicts, Markets, and Costs of Intolerance
Anand Murugesan
Associate Professor of Economics, Department of Public Policy
Central European University, VIenna
& Senior Researcher, Vienna Center for Experimental Economics
Dormant societal conflicts can rapidly escalate into violent outbreaks when aggregators of private opinion and discontent, such as election results, alter norms of tolerance that sustain mutually beneficial market exchanges.
We examine India’s shift towards Hindu majoritarianism post-2014, a period marked by a burst of violent attacks by cow-protection vigilantes on minorities engaged in the informal cattle market, thereby disrupting it.
Using a Regression Discontinuity Design, we find that violence more than doubled in regions where the Hindu majoritarian party won the election. We show that the market disruption increased cattle abandonment — stemming from rural households’ inability to sell unproductive cattle. Abandoned cattle led to large social costs, including human fatalities from road accidents involving stray cattle.
Our unique dataset integrates electoral outcomes, a high-frequency household panel, livestock censuses, road accident statistics, media coverage of vigilante violence, and records of Hindu-Muslim conflicts. Through an event study design informed by a model of interlinked markets, we document a decline of over 10% in cattle holdings in affected areas and a 200% rise in road accidents, leading to human deaths and injuries.
Primary survey data further highlight substantial crop damage from stray cattle in rural regions. The study highlights the staggering social costs incurred when mirrors of public opinion disintegrate a culture of tolerance.
Open Seminar. Please register here to join us!
To find out more:
- Personal Website
- Institutional website
- Poster (AEA Session 2022, pdf, 656 ko)
Inequality and the Environment - James K. Boyce
- James K. Boyce Lecture, April 2024
On April 5, 2024, James K. Boyce, co-winner of the 2024 Global Inequality Research Award (GiRA), gave a lecture at Sciences Po Paris. In his talk, he shared insights from his extensive research on the links between inequality and the environment, reflecting on the travels, encounters, and milestones that have shaped his intellectual journey.
The full lecture is now available as the first in the GiRA series here (pdf, 3,7 Mo).
Boyce expressed his gratitude for receiving the inaugural GiRA, stating:
“I am deeply honored to receive this inaugural Global Inequality Research Award […] with my friend Bina Agarwal, who has done so much to advance our understanding of the interactions between gender inequality and the environment.”
He closed the lecture by highlighting two of the most pressing challenges of our time:
“The first is to halt and, when possible, reverse the degradation of the environment, including destabilization of the planet’s climate. The second is to reduce the inequalities of wealth and power that threaten to tear societies apart. I believe that it is both possible and necessary to tackle these challenges together. These two historic tasks can and must go hand-in-hand.”
About the GiRA Lectures
The GiRA aims to recognize researchers from all disciplines who have made a significant contribution to the understanding of global inequalities. It is a joint initiative between the World Inequality Lab (WIL) and Sciences Po’s Center for Research on social InequalitieS (CRIS).
This inaugural lecture was organized as part of the Social-ecological transitions (SET) initiative supported the OFCE, CEE and CSO, which aims to encourage collaboration between researchers working at the frontier of social and environmental issues, across disciplinary and institutional boundaries.
The GiRA Lecture Series aims to capture and disseminate the knowledge and insights of award recipients, providing a platform to engage with groundbreaking research on global inequalities.
Next GiRA lecture
Bina Agarwal, co-recipient of the 2024 GiRA, will receive her award and deliver a lecture on Wednesday, March 19, 2025, at the Paris School of Economics. Registration will open in January 2025.
Join the ERC-LEARN Project Team!
- Saint-Thomas Campus (Image Bastian Betthaeuser)
The Center for Research on social InequalitieS (CRIS) at the Sciences Po, Paris is seeking to appoint a postdoctoral researcher, doctoral researcher and research assistant to join the Research Team led by Prof. Bastian Betthaeuser working on the ERC-funded project "Understanding the Consequences of Major Health Crises for Education: Learning from the COVID-19 Pandemic (LEARN)".
- Research Assistant / Predoc (pdf, 202 ko), with Bachelor or Master degree,
- Doctoral Researcher / PhD Candidate (pdf, 206 ko), with Master degree or equivalent,
- Postdoctoral Researcher (pdf, 205 ko), with PhD or equivalent.
Please apply by the end of 30 November by completing this online form.
Health crises, natural disasters, and violent conflicts threaten children’s education across the world. Because such disruptive events tend to obstruct data collection, understanding their impact on children’s educational development is challenging.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the extensive data collection it prompted provide a unique opportunity to study the consequences of major health crises for children’s education.
The ERC-funded LEARN project uses high-quality, cross-national data and advanced analytical techniques to investigate the key processes through which major disruptive events affect children’s educational development and the key factors that moderate these processes.
The LEARN project aims to provide a basis for policy makers to future-proof education systems to meet the growing threats posed by major disruptive events, such as health crises, natural disasters, and violent conflicts.
Concours externe chercheurs CNRS 2025
- Image Drawlab19 (via Shutterstock)
Les candidats et candidates au concours de Chargé·e de recherche 2025 du CNRS peuvent bénéficier du soutien actif du CRIS (UMR 7049).
Le Centre de Recherche sur les Inégalités Sociales (CRIS) est rattaché au CNRS (sections 36 et 40) et à Sciences Po. Il accueille des chercheuses et chercheurs issus de plusieurs disciplines souhaitant développer une recherche de pointe sur la stratification et les inégalités sociales.
Les travaux menés au CRIS couvrent une diversité de domaines (genre, origine, milieu social, éducation, ségrégation urbaine, politiques sociales, mobilités et migrations, pratiques culturelles, usages du numériques, inégalités environnementales, inégalités de santé…) et utilisent plusieurs types de méthodologies, y compris expérimentales.
L'internationalisation, la rigueur théorique et méthodologique, le respect de l'autonomie des personnels académiques constituent les piliers de la politique scientifique du CRIS.
Les candidates et candidats intéressés par nous rejoindre sont invités à prendre rendez-vous avant le 15 novembre 2024 avec le directeur de l'unité, Carlo Barone (carlo.barone@sciencespo.fr ; en copie la Secrétaire générale Linda Amrani : linda.amrani@sciencespo.fr) en joignant :
- un CV,
- un descriptif de leur projet de recherche,
- une lettre d'intention explicitant le choix du CRIS.
Le Conseil du laboratoire statuera sur les demandes et pourra proposer une présentation orale en séminaire d'équipe.
- Pour en savoir plus : site CNRS Carrières (lancement du concours en janvier 2025).
What’s a Parent to Do? Socioeconomic Variation in Parenting Logics Measured with Computational Text Analysis
- Image Prostock Studio (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2024-2025
Friday, October 11th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K011 (1, St-Thomas)
What’s a Parent to Do?
Socioeconomic Variation in Parenting Logics Measured
with Computational Text Analysis
Orestes "Pat" Hastings
Associate Professor of Sociology
Colorado State University
Leading theories on parenting in the United States suggest that parenting varies widely by socioeconomic status, with middle-class parents practicing “concerted cultivation”—marked by parents’ intensive efforts to foster their children’s development—and working-class parents engaging in the “accomplishment of natural growth”—with children given more freedom to manage their own time.
While frequently inferred that these parenting practices reflect different cultural logics of parenting, such logics are inherently hard to measure.
This talk presents a novel way to study parenting logics using computational text analysis applied to a nationally representative survey where respondents provided parenting advice in hypothetical parenting situations.
Analyzing this advice using Biterm Topic Modeling we find that nearly all parenting logics reflect some form of intensive parenting, but within that are multiple nuanced versions varying across two dimensions: (1) assertive vs negotiated parenting, and (2) pedagogic vs pragmatic parenting.
Using fractional multinomial logistic regression, we find little difference in how parenting logics vary by race/ethnicity, education, and income, suggesting more similarity across groups and more variability within groups than commonly understood.
This work is part of a broader project to understand the socioeconomic correlates of parenting and their implications for children’s outcomes.
Open Seminar. Please register here to join us!
To find out more:
Digital Inequalities Symposium for Early-Career Researchers
- Image PrimSeafood (via Shutterstock)
The CRIS aims to strengthen its expertise on the topic of digital inequalities. We invite early career researchers (PhD students and Post-docs from a variety of disciplines, e.g. sociology, economics, psychology, political science, computer and computational science, anthropology, demography and related fields) working with a variety of theoretical perspectives and research methods to submit their papers and participate to the symposium. The event will take place on Thursday 19 December at Sciences Po, in partnership with the Open Institute for Digital Transformation (part of TIERED project). This symposium provides a platform to present groundbreaking research, engage in discussions, and collaborate with other researchers.
The rapid proliferation of digital technologies - from computers, the internet and portable devices to social media, streaming devices and virtual reality, along with artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and algorithms - has transformed modern societies.
Social inequalities both shape and are shaped by these digital tools, raising questions about the persistence, reproduction, and exacerbation of social inequalities. At the same time, an explosion of digital data and methods of analysis, from digital ethnographies to computational methods have broadened our understanding of how society operates in the digital era.
Several lines of inequality research are key factors in the relationship between digital technologies and society:
- Digital inequalities around access is the most long-standing research on tech disparities. While scholars have largely moved on from classic “digital divide” research, much is still to be known about changes over time and place, especially with variation in constantly changing devices and connections. Equally important is understanding the persistence of digital content production and whose voices we are streaming and scrolling – and whose we are not. This research stream considers, for instance, inequalities based on country, social class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, and migration background.
- More research is needed on information inequalities in the use of digital technologies, whether with social connections or news and media resources. More research is needed on the skills and the capacity to evaluate disinformation and AI-generated content. With costs and complexity of digital platforms exploding at the same rate as new apps, who is left out of the savvy and autonomous use of these tools is important to study.
- Algorithmic bias and discrimination research has been growing: how do these inequality mechanisms operate globally and intersectionally? What are other forms of automated inequalities that are understudied?
- How do digital technologies affect people’s life chances, for instance, with respect to education and labor market outcomes, earnings, or capacity for civic engagement and voting? To what extent, if at all, do social groups enjoy different returns to the use these tools?
- How do humans and machines co-evolve within different social environments and technical ecosystems? How do different algorithmic recommendation systems and AI-driven assistants shape concentration, polarization, inequality, and radicalization?
- How can the spread of AI and computational methods support researchers in revealing, understanding, and measuring phenomena traditionally analyzed in social science? How can qualitative and mixed-methods interact with digital methods?
- Big Tech companies are vertically integrated in society and are a growing source of political and economic power. How is this creating inequalities globally, locally, and in the tech job market itself?
- Policy implications: is access to & use of technology more or less unequal than access to and use of traditional media such as broadcast media, newspapers and magazines, telephones? Access to and use of DT is highly unequal, but does their spread represent a net increase or decrease in equality? How might regulatory policies affect digital inequalities?
Join us in this endeavor to bridge the knowledge gap and foster outstanding social science research on inequality and the digital transformation! We look forward to your contributions and insights before the deadline: 15 November 2024.
Please download here the proposal and the submission guidelines (pdf, 148 ko). For any queries, contact allison.rovny@sciencespo.fr.
Earnings segregation at work: evolving isolation of higher earners from others in 12 countries
- Image Who is Danny (via Shutterstock)
The Great Separation: Top Earner Segregation at Work in Advanced Capitalist Economies
Olivier Godechot, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, István Boza, Lasse Folke Henriksen, Are Skeie Hermansen, Feng Hou, Jiwook Jung, Naomi Kodama, Alena Křížková, Zoltán Lippényi, Silvia Maja Melzer, Eunmi Mun, Halil Sabanci, Max Thaning, Paula Apascaritei, Dustin Avent-Holt, Nina Bandelj, Alexis Baudour, David Cort, Marta M. Elvira, Gergely Hajdu, Aleksandra Kanjuo-Mrčela, Joseph King, Andrew Penner, Trond Petersen, Andreja Poje, Anthony Rainey, Mirna Safi, and Matthew Soener
American Journal of Sociology
Vol. 130, n° 2, p. 439-49, September 2024
https://doi.org/10.1086/731603
Earnings segregation at work is an understudied topic in social science, despite the workplace being an everyday nexus for social mixing, cohesion, contact, claims making, and resource exchange.
Analyzing linked employer-employee panel administrative databases, the authors highlight the evolving isolation of higher earners from other employees in 12 countries between 1990 and 2019: Canada, Czechia, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, South Korea, and Sweden.
They find in almost all countries a growing workplace isolation of top earners and a significant decrease in the exposure of top earners to bottom earners.
Tha authors isolate three key intertwined factors that account for this development:
- deindustrialization and reorganization of the manufacturing sector;
- decline in workplace size and restructuring of workplaces, through outsourcing, layoffs, offshoring, and subcontracting and
- digitalization of the labor process.
The paper therefore shows that the restructuring of national economies and workplaces, highlighted by previous research on the current transformation of work and firms, is also leading to a significant change in the potential for social cohesion. Together, these contributions inform the social science literatures focused on segregation, inequality, and cross-class cohesion and antipathy.
These findings open up a future research agenda on the causes and consequences of top earner segregation.
The Intergenerational Persistence of Poverty in High-Income Countries
- Image Inside Creative House (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2024-2025
Friday, October 4th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K011 (1, St-Thomas)
The Intergenerational Persistence of Poverty in High-Income Countries
Zachary Parolin
Assistant Professor of Social Policy, Bocconi University
ExpPov Director (ERC Started Grant funded project)
Childhood poverty increases the likelihood of adult poverty. However, past research offers conflicting accounts of cross-national variation in the strength of, and mechanisms underpinning, the intergenerational persistence of poverty.
This study investigates differences in intergenerational poverty in the United States (U.S.), Australia, Denmark, Germany, and United Kingdom (UK) using administrative- and survey-based panel datasets.
We decompose intergenerational poverty into family background effects, mediation effects, tax/transfer insurance effects, and a residual poverty penalty. Intergenerational poverty in the U.S. is four times stronger than in Denmark and Germany, and twice as strong as in Australia and the UK. The U.S. disadvantage is not channeled through family background, mediators, neighborhood effects, or racial/ethnic discrimination.
Instead, the U.S. has comparatively weak tax/transfer insurance effects and a more severe residual poverty penalty. Should the U.S. adopt the tax/transfer insurance effects of peer countries, its intergenerational poverty persistence could decline by more than one-third.
Open Seminar. Please register here to join us!
To find out more:
The Rise of New Social Risks and Welfare Attitude Change across Generations:
- Image PeopleImages.com-Youri A (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2024-2025
Friday, September 27th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room H405 (28, St-Pères)
The Rise of New Social Risks and Welfare Attitude Change across Generations:
A Cohort Analysis of Social Spending Preferences in Switzerland
Andrew Zola
PhD Candidate, Sciences Po - CRIS
Transformations in the labor market and family structures since the postwar era have contributed to the rise of “new social risks,” including difficulty reconciling work and family life, single parenthood, increased care obligations, and obsolete skills. This work approaches this context with two questions in mind. First, how has exposure to new social risks changed across cohorts? And second, how has this shift contributed to generational change in support for welfare spending in different domains?
Using retrospective life-history data on risk exposure at the family level gathered from a nationally representative sample of participants in the Swiss Household Panel solves the identification problem that arises when attempting to disentangle age, period, and cohort effects. I analyze cohort changes in risk exposure and how this influences preferences for spending on pensions, unemployment protection, childcare, and social assistance. There has been an increase in exposure to new social risks among respondents who were born and raised since the 1960s. This is associated with a shift in support away from spending on pensions and unemployment protection, welfare domains designed to protect against prominent social risks in the postwar era, and towards higher spending on childcare and social assistance, which address new social risks. Hence, with the aggregate shift in risks, intergenerational support appears to move away from transfer-oriented policies and towards an activating framework that encourages employment.
The study sheds light on how socioeconomic changes since the postwar era may influence expectations of the welfare state over the long-run. More broadly, it opens a new research agenda for the politics of the welfare state by highlighting the importance of socialization in the analysis of individuals’ preferences.
Open Seminar. Please register here to join us!
To find out more: Personal webpage
Mitigating the socioeconomic gap in early childcare enrollment:
- Image Poppy Pix (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2024-2025
Friday, September 20th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K011 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
Mitigating the socioeconomic gap in early childcare enrollment:
Evidence from a mixed-methods, multi-arm experiment
Laudine Carbuccia
PhD Candidate, Sciences Po - CRIS, LIEPP
Access to early childcare for low socioeconomic status (SES) families has the potential to mitigate socioeconomic inequalities.
Yet, there is an SES-based gap in early childcare enrollment. While low-SES families would benefit the most from attending early childcare, they access early childcare the least.
This study tackles cognitive and behavioral barriers behind this access gap. Through a mixed-methods, multi-arm experiment in the Paris metropolitan area, we evaluate the effectiveness of informational interventions and personalized administrative support in enhancing early childcare application and access for low-SES families.
Results reveal that the information-only treatment has little to no impact for most families, combining information and administrative support significantly increases application rates for low-SES families, and bridges the SES-gap in early childcare applications for those that receive support. Moreover, we assess treatment heterogeneity based on migration background, level of information and previous experience with early childcare. We observe stronger effects among low-educated mothers born abroad, among families who had never used early childcare before, and among least informed households.
These findings underscore the importance of addressing cognitive and behavioral barriers to early childcare access, particularly for vulnerable populations. However, despite large impacts on application rates, we find limited impact on enrollment rates for low-SES families. By disentangling the impacts of informational interventions and administrative support, our study provides insights for policymakers aiming to promote equitable access to high-quality early childcare, thereby promoting equal opportunities from an early age, which is essential for mitigating inequalities.
Open Seminar. Please register here to join us!
To find out more: Personal webpage
Radically Reimagining the Imagination?
- Taken from LucaAlice (via Shutterstock)
Workshop organized by Maricia Fischer-Souan (Sciences Po - CRIS), Friday September 20th 2024, 14:00 - 18:00, Sciences Po, 1 St-Thomas, room CS16.
In these panel presentations and discussions, scholars working in the areas of art, migration studies, sociology, and urban studies share different approaches to the imagination grounded in their respective archival, creative, discursive, and ethnographic work.
These scholars have in common a reflexive stance toward the imagination that directly or indirectly challenges loose conceptualisations of the imagination/imaginary currently in wide circulation across the social sciences, humanities and public discourse. The imagination - as mental faculty, embodied individual practice or collective process – requires critical examination through empirical, theoretical and aesthetic reflections.
How does the researcher’s imagination and creativity shape his or her work? How do we study and unpack complex processes of the imagination and its products in society, both at individual and collective levels? What are the promises and perils of the imagination, as a social process, object of study or aesthetic disposition of the researcher? Through conversation and sharing works in progress, these panels explore the spatial and temporal dynamics at play in processes of the imagination as well as its relationships to rationality, embodied emotion, representation and action.
with
Maricia Fischer-Souan, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, Sciences Po - CRIS [email]
Foroogh Mohammadi, Assistant Professor, Acadia University
Maxime Christophe, PhD Candidate, Sciences Po - CRIS
Sara Hormozinejad, PhD Candidate, University of Toronto
Sukriti Issar, Associate Professor, Sciences Po - CRIS
Pavel Kunysz, Research Fellow, University of Liège
Pouya Morshedi, PhD Candidate, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Carolyn Defrin, Marie Skłdowska-Curie Fellow, University of Graz
Full programme details (pdf, 615 ko)
If you are interested in attending, please register here (the number of spots are limited).
Leda Perez
- Leda Perez (image B.C./Sciences Po)
Sciences Po and the CRIS are pleased to welcome Leda Perez, associate professor of the Academic Department of Social and Political Sciences at the Universidad del Pacífico (Peru).
Her visiting stay, along 1 semester (September-December 2024) is offered as part of the Gender studies visiting faculty programme 2024 (IdEx - Université Paris Cité).
This programme aims at fostering interdisciplinary opportunities, encouraging the development of new partnerships for collaborative research, as well as facilitating the mobility of English and French-speaking gender studies researchers towards France.
Thanks to Leda for agreeing to tell us more about her and her research work.
A personal & career path across continents, languages & cultures
I was born in New York City and raised in Miami by Cuban immigrants. Given that I am part of the first generation of children of Cubans who settled in the United States following the Cuban Revolution, my experience growing up was very much as part of a subculture of that community in Miami. This was an interesting in terms of navigating the world of my English-speaking school and my Spanish-speaking home. My friends and I developed a special language – Spanglish – to communicate among ourselves. I still use it when I meet people back home!
I grew up speaking Spanish – it is the first language I spoke, although English is the language of my education.I also studied French in high school and have taken conversation courses over several years in my adult life. But I am still learning and not as proficient as I would like to be! Perhaps at the end of this semester, I will finally feel comfortable enough to teach a class in French!
For as long as I can remember, I have always been curious about the world beyond my immediate community. I am easily enamored by different people and cultures – thus, I love to travel and learn languages. I think it is also these empathies that later combined with my passion for social justice.
I completed my doctoral studies in the United States at the Graduate School of International Studies of the University of Miami in Interamerican Studies and Comparative Development.
In the earlier part of this century, I moved to Peru for personal reasons and have remained there for nearly 20 years! Once settled, the opportunity arose to return to academia. I have been a professor with the Universidad del Pacífico in Lima since 2012 and a member of the Social and Political Science Department since 2017.
A Scientist and also a citizen with social beliefs
I worked for about 15 years as a policy activist around health care access issues, moving the needle on health care reform in the United States (the only industrialized country in the world without a universalized health care system). I led the Miami-based portion of a W.K Kellogg Foundation-funded national project, Community Voices, intended to shore up the lived experiences of people without health insurance as well as to lift up community-based solutions.
In this trajectory, I published with my fellow policy advocates in both academic journals and in policy forums. I eventually moved the local project from its first home at a clinic and homeless shelter to a public policy think tank. I would like to think that the seeds of President Obama´s health care reform in 2010 was informed by our national efforts (as well as so many other projects and organizations across the country, of course).
Main research topic, problematics dealing with gender inequalities
I am an Associate Professor and teach an introductory course to political science as well as a seminar devoted to women and development. The latter is informed by my research on women in precarious employment in Peru and in Latin America, particularly the work associated to social reproduction, mainly paid domestic work. This research links with my historic interest – and concern about -- the drivers of inequality, be it unequal access to health care systems or people´s exclusion from basic human and/or citizen rights due to their gender.
Through this work I have been studying paid domestic workers in Peru for the past decade, trying to understand the reasons for this labor sector´s continued marginalization and bringing to light how their rights progress, while challenged at the same time by, on the one hand, a State without the capacity – or will – to enforce these entirely, and social norms, on the other, that continue to sideline these workers. My research has also expanded to the comparative study of the experiences of domestic and care work in other countries of the region. Most recently I have begun to study how emerging care systems are functioning as a possible foundation for improved universalized social protections in Latin America.
I have recently finished writing a book, “A Barometer for Democracy: Social Reproduction, Domestic Work, and Women´s Inequality in Latin America,” which is finalizing its review process under the auspices of Temple University Press. This book is the sum of my research on women´s precarious work, primarily in domestic and/or care-related duties and how this, in essence, sets the stage for how women, generally, are positioned in our Latin American societies. That is, women are not only linked to the domestic sphere because of their paid work there, but they are positioned in all that is domestic and care-related because of their gender. And, perhaps more importantly, they are bound to each other. One woman´s progress is based on another women´s stagnation. If that is the formula, how is it possible for all women to be truly equal partners in our democratic projects? That is my question and concern.
Scientific background, skills and methods
My training is interdisciplinary. The field that I am closest to is political science because of the focus on development and rights in Latin America, but the subject matter that I study, and the literature with which I dialogue, is also related to sociology, feminist economics and gender studies (and increasingly, there is more political science work that examines the questions from a policy perspective). My methods are mostly qualitative. I work with in-depth interviews and focus groups to inform my work. I also use short surveys. I have published papers that are the result of partnerships with other colleagues that have also informed my work through quantitative analyses.
A visiting stay with benefits and expectations...
I am thrilled to be visiting Sciences Po and the Centre for Research on Social Inequalities – CRIS. During this semester, I am teaching a seminar titled “Gendered Inequality in Latin America and Emerging Responses.” I am happy to report that I have 28 students registered for the class. Likewise, CRIS has offered me a space and I am happy to be participating in the weekly research discussions. I hope that we might find some common points of interest that are comparable between Peru and other countries of Latin America and other regions of the world including, of course, France and Europe, especially considering how welfare models have evolved on this side of the Atlantic and elsewhere versus some Latin American countries´ current exploration of care systems.
I will be giving a public lecture at the auditorium at the Rue des Saints-Peres on 22 October at 5 p.m. and another talk about my specific research in Peru at the Latin America Centre on 24 October at 5:30 p.m. (to be fully confirmed with the promotional flyers that are being prepared!).
The visiting faculty program is supported by the IdEx Université Paris Cité (ANR-18-IDEX-0001) and implemented through the partnership between Université Paris Cité and Sciences Po.
To find out more:
- Leda Perez Webpage (Universidad del Pacífico)
- Google Scholar
- Gender studies visiting faculty programme
Women in the Inner Circle in France and the United States from an approach based on networks of places
- Image Zamrznuti tonovi (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2024-2025
Friday, September 13th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K011 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
Women in the Inner Circle in France and the United States
from an approach based on networks of places
Catherine Comet
Professeure, Université Paris 8, CRESPPA-CSU
Since the early 2000s, more women have been appointed to boards at the request of investors and, in some countries such as France, under the pressure of quotas. What authority do women appointed in this context have? Do they sit on boards simply to balance the pressure to increase the number of female directors, or do they exert real influence? And if so, what kind of influence?
The data relate to male and female directors of large companies in France and the United States (the 100 largest listed companies in France in 2008 and 2014, and the 250 in the United States in 2011), looking not at their respective authority on boards but at their external influence, particularly through their presence in think tanks.
The comparison between France and the United States serves two purposes. Firstly, it helps to justify the think tank approach by showing that positions linked to these organizations are among the most central in corporate networks in both countries. It also provides an opportunity to compare the role of female directors in the United States, where there are no quotas (soft law), and in France, where there are quotas imposed by the 2011 Copé-Zimmermann law (hard law).
The analyses show no significant difference in the propensity of female directors to be interlockers or reform entrepreneurs. The differences are more subtle. They are expressed, on the one hand, in slightly different profiles and, on the other, in the type of think tanks in which male and female directors are involved. Men are concentrated in the most business-oriented, very liberal and/or specialized in economic issues, while women seem to prefer more generalist think tanks and those linked to international relations and European issues.
Open Seminar. Please register here to join us!
To find out more: Personal webpage (CRESPPA)
Call for PhD Candidates
- Image Alphavector (via Shutterstock)
The Center for Research on social InequalitieS is hiring 2 PhD candidates, for the WIDOW Project (ERC) managed by Zachary Van Winkle (Associate Professor at Sciences Po). Start date: September 1, 2025.
The WIDOW Project
Despite its growing relevance, widowhood research remains underdeveloped compared to other disruptive events, such as divorce. This ground-breaking research moves beyond the state-of-the-art in at least four ways to establish a social demography of widowhood.
(1) The foundation of this project lies in an innovative conceptual and methodological approach to the risk and vulnerability to widowhood. While risk aims at the probability and duration of widowhood, vulnerability focuses on its mental health and economic consequences. Current assessments of widowhood effects are limited to change in wellbeing directly after bereavement with a special focus on unexpected deaths. However, the most prevalent scenario entails a process of terminal health decline in the years before death. The consequences of the often neglected longer process of expected widowhood may be larger than the shorter process of unexpected widowhood.
Three ground-breaking pillars build on risk and vulnerability to examine:
(2) social inequalities by socioeconomic status, race-ethnicity and nativity, social support networks, gender and age, as well as (3) country differences and (4) change over time.
High-quality cross-sectional and longitudinal data sources will be harmonized and applied to an advanced set of statistical methods for up to 60 ageing countries varying in demographic trends and welfare systems from 1985 with projections to 2050. A social demography of widowhood will supplement fragmented evidence with systematic and comprehensive estimates on risk and vulnerability, provide insights into the challenges facing a growing widowed population and their family members, and facilitate new research on sustainable pension and elder care systems.
Responsabilities
- Completion of a PhD in Sociology by developing an independent research project within the remit of the WIDOW project on (A) the risk of widowhood or (B) the vulnerability to widowhood
- Quantitative data preparation and analysis
- Drafting, submission, and revision of own and collaborative English language academic articles
- Presentation and dissemination of own and collaborative project results at academic conferences
- Assistance with the fulfillment of reporting requirements
We offer
- PhD supervision by Zachary Van Winkle, Principal Investigator. Candidates will have the option to have a member of the international WIDOW project’s expert committee as a second supervisor
- Enrollment in Sciences Po’s School of Research PhD program, including access to language classes and other topical and methodological seminars as well as an extensive international institutional network
- An internationally competitive salary
- Funding for multiple international conferences and trainings each year
- Well remunerated and flexible teaching possibilities (optional)
- Work space at the Saint-Thomas campus in central Paris and options for remote work
- Possible funding for a fourth year
Requirements
- Master’s degree in sociology, demography, economics, gerontology or a related field
- A background or strong interest in family sociology and/or demography as well as quantitative methods
- Previous experience with cross-sectional and/or longitudinal data preparation and analysis in Stata, R or a similar program
- An ability to work independently and collaboratively
- Excellent English language skills
Deadline: December 1, 2024.
Please downolad here the application procedure and complete description of the call (pdf, 128 Ko)
Gendered pathways: How do STEM majors fare in the labor market?
- Image Halfpoint (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2024-2025
Friday, September 6th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K011 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
Gendered pathways: How do STEM majors fare in the labor market?
Rosa Weber
Postdoctoral researcher, Stockholm University & INED
There is a rich literature on gender disparities in STEM* fields, especially with a focus on educational trajectories.
While a growing number of studies addresses the later labor market outcomes of women who majored in STEM, there is a notable gap in our understanding of the comprehensive work and family pathways followed by women with STEM majors, as well as how they relate to gender earnings gaps.
In response, we carry out a longitudinal analysis of the pathways followed by men and women with STEM majors, focusing on computer science and engineering.
Exploiting Finnish register data covering the years 1987-2022, we use multi-channel sequence analysis to identify the most common work and family pathways followed by men and women between ages 30 and 40 (N=150,796). In a second step, we study gender differences in the returns to these pathways, in terms of earnings in ages 41-43.
We report two main findings.
First, we document clear evidence of a leaky pipeline, whereby women are underrepresented in computer science and engineering careers even when we focus on majors from these disciplines.
Secondly, women earn less across trajectories. However, gender earnings gaps are especially pronounced among parents with careers outside of the field they majored in.
This suggests that the mechanisms pushing men and women to pursue careers outside of their major differ.
* Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics
Penser par cartes et diagrammes
- L.A. Bertillon et des exemples de cartes et diagrammes de mortalité (1874)
Alain Chenu, Professeur des universités émérite au CRIS vous propose une exposition inédite mettant en relief les travaux de Louis-Adolphe Bertillon (1821-1883), un des précurseurs en France de la démographie moderne. Médecin, Bertillon se fait statisticien pour mieux détecter et démontrer les causes de mort prématurée.
Penser par cartes et diagrammes
La démographie figurée de Louis-adolphe Bertillon (1874)
Exposition présentée à Sciences Po, campus Saint-Thomas, espace MS00 (cour Ladreit de Lacharrière) du 11 au 23 septembre 2024, avec le soutien de Ined Éditions. 18 panneaux reprennent des planches cartographiques et des diagrammes réalisés à la main par Bertillon dans l'atlas "La démographie figurée de la France", publié par Masson aux frais de l'auteur. En rendant visible ses travaux statistiques par une expression graphique et figurative, Bertillon force ses contemporains - dont les décideurs de l'époque - à « penser autrement » les politiques de santé publique.
Visites guidées et accès pour le public extérieur à la communauté Sciences Po : nous contacter.
Ressources autour de Bertillon
Connecting through public transport: accessibility to health and education in major African cities
- A bus on the way to Douala (Silvia Truessel, via Shutterstock)
Connecting through public transport:
accessibility to health and education in major African cities
Aiga Stokenberga, Eulalie Saïsset, Tamara Kerzhner & Xavier Espinet Alegre
Area Development and Policy, Published Online June 28th
This paper is available online (via Taylor & Francis) doi 10.1080/23792949.2024.2364619
Sub-Saharan Africa is urbanizing faster than any other region, and with rapid city growth, access to schooling and healthcare is becoming a significant issue. Efficient public transport is crucial for health and education outcomes, but many face barriers leading to missed appointments, delayed care, and reduced uptake of services, particularly among low-income individuals. School accessibility positively impacts education, especially for children at risk of failing. However, there is limited evidence on accessibility levels and inequality within SSA's cities. A detailed understanding of these gaps is essential for better planning and targeting investments in public transport and connectivity.
This study examines accessibility to advanced health services and schools in ten large African cities, chosen for their national importance and availability of spatial data. It compares how well current public transport connects people to education and healthcare and assesses the drivers of accessibility inequality, including land use and transport coverage. Using spatial modeling techniques and public transport data (General Transit Feed Specification), the study maps healthcare facilities and schools, revealing significant pockets of 'accessibility poverty' where travel times are unacceptably high. This inequality in access disproportionately affects the poor.
Findings show that while proximity to public transport matters, its impact is limited due to uneven resource distribution and the informal nature of many service providers. The low 'value added' by public transport compared to walking highlights the need for policy interventions focused on improving public transport systems and ensuring equitable distribution of urban resources. The study advocates for targeted interventions to address accessibility issues, from small-scale efforts in cities like Douala and Nairobi to large-scale investments in Harare and Dar es Salaam.
Fig. 4 - High overlap between poverty incidence and poor accessibility to advanced healthcare facilities
in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso)
Typologie et taxonomie des trajectoires de changement des pays de l'OCDE
- Image HJBC (via Shutterstock)
Protection du marché du travail dans l’espace et dans le temps
Une typologie et une taxonomie des trajectoires de changement dans les pays de l’Organisation de coopération et de développement économiques (OCDE)
Emanuele Ferragina, Federico Danilo Filetti
Revue des politiques sociales et familiales, 2024/2, n°151, p. 39 - 58
Cet article est disponible en ligne sur CAIRN
L'étude interprète sur 30 ans l'évolution de la protection du marché du travail dans les pays de l'OCDE. La diversité institutionnelle et les trajectoires de changement sont comparées à travers quatre dimensions : la protection de l'emploi, la protection contre le chômage, le maintien du revenu et la politique active de l'emploi.
L'article propose une typologie des pays tenant compte des processus de changement entre 1990 et 2015, sur la base des niveaux de coordination et de solidarité, et une taxonomie caractérisant cinq évolutions : libéralisation, dualisation, flexicurité, dé-dualisation et protection renforcée.
Parmi les enseignements, on constate que malgré un écart toujours présent, la grande majorité des économies coordonnées (idéal-type caractérisant une économie où les entreprises sont liées à acteurs et ressources hors marché) ont connu une baisse du niveau de protection du marché du travail et se sont rapprochées des économies libérales (à forte concurrence). D'autre part, une taxonomie à cinq catégories de trajectoires de changement (libéralisation, dualisation, flexicurité, dé-dualisation, protection renforcée) montre que ces trajectoires ne sont pas toujours dépendantes ni cohérentes avec les variétés institutionnelles précédemment identifiées dans la littérature scientifique.
The paper develops a typology for processes of change between 1990 and 2015, and clusters countries on the basis of coordination and solidarity levels and a fivefold taxonomy of countries’ trajectories of change by liberalisation, dualisation, flexibility, de-dualisation and higher protection.
Despite a persistent gap, a large majority of coordinated market economies, which have experienced a decrease in the level of labour market protection, have moved closer to liberal market economies. The taxonomy of countries’ trajectories of change shows that these trajectories are not always path-dependent and consistent with institutional varieties previously developed in the scientific literature.
Variétés de protection du marché du travail en 2015 par pays
Congé parental, modes d’accueil petite enfance et fécondité
- Image MarutStudio (via Shutterstock)
Congé parental, modes d'accueil dans la petite enfance et fécondité
Lidia Panico (Sciences Po - CRIS, INED), Anne Solar (INED)
Informations sociales, 2023/3, n° 2011, p. 51-56. Disponible en ligne sur CAIRN
En France, malgré la réforme du congé parental adoptée en 2015, la baisse du niveau de fécondité amorcée depuis les années 2010 s’intensifie, à l'image d'autres pays européens. Lidia Panico et Anne Solaz (INED) interrogent les déterminants du phénomène et le rôle que peuvent jouer les politiques publiques sur le niveau de fécondité. Sur quels leviers en faveur de la petite enfance les politiques peuvent-elles agir pour l'influencer positivement ? La question de l'articulation entre famille et travail est-elle un des facteurs à prendre en compte ?
L'article analyse les effets des mesures prises en matière de congé parental et d'évolution des modes d'accueil de la petite enfance.
Au final, les auteures constatent que la mise en place de modes d'accueil peu onéreux et de congés parentaux donnent des signaux encourageants aux futurs parents, mais ne sont que quelques éléments partiels d'une politique familliale. qui n'est elle-même pas suffisante pour influer sur la fécondité. Les démographes ne peuvent que constater la multiplicité des déterminants amenant au désir d'enfant à un instant T.
L'article est disponible en ligne.
Sciences Po is hiring: Assistant Professor on Environmental Inequalities
- Image Caroline Maufroid / Sciences Po
We're recuiting a full-time, Assistant Professor (tenure-track). Position beginning on January 1st 2025. The successful candidate will be affiliated to the Center for Research on social InequalitieS (CRIS). Candidates should have a PhD.
This assistant professorship position is designed to reinforce and complement our expertise in the study of environmental inequalities. We welcome applications from candidates with a recent PhD in the social or environmental sciences and with an ambitious research agenda in the area of social stratification and inequality, targeting publications in leading disciplinary and interdisciplinary journals. All disciplines are welcome as far as the research has strong connections with the social sciences.
Rising inequality and environmental degradation are two critical challenges of our time. Our knowledge about the interplay between socio-economic inequality, environmental degradation, and environmental policies remains limited. More research is needed to measure these inequalities, understand their micro-, meso- and macro-level mechanisms, and identify policies to address them.
Three research domains are particularly relevant to this position:
- inequalities in contributions to environmental damage
- inequalities in the impacts of environmental degradation
- inequalities in the capacities to impact environmental policies.
This position will contribute to strengthening environmental research and teaching in the context of the Sciences Po TIERED project (Transforming Interdisciplinary Education and Research for Evolving Democracies), organized jointly by the Open Institute for Digital Transformation and the Institute for Environmental Transformations.
The successful candidate will be expected to play an active role in the center’s collective activities: seminars, academic events, participation in research networks. The candidate should also engage in responding to national and international calls to fund research projects. The successful candidate will teach in Sciences Po’s undergraduate and graduate programs (in Paris and in other campuses).
Please read the job description and application procedure here (pdf, 120 ko)
Deadline for applications September 30th, 2024. This position is expected to start on January 1st 2025.
The ‘two lives’ of Esping-Andersen and the revival of a research programme:
- Image Mongta Studio (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, June 28th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K011 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
The ‘two lives’ of Esping-Andersen and the revival of a research programme:
Gender equality, employment and redistribution in contemporary social policy
Emanuele Ferragina
Full Professor
Sciences Po - CRIS
This presentation makes two conceptual contributions to social policy literature.
First, it summarises key concepts and insights from Esping-Andersen's major books, tracing his work in ‘two lives’: ‘the foundations, or the welfare state between states and markets’ and ‘the demographic turn’.
Analysing the ‘first life’, it revisits the centrality of the decommodification and social stratification concepts and the seeds of the social investment approach. Further, it explores Esping-Andersen's masterful analysis of the double bind of the welfare state (supporting full-employment and redistributional harmony) in a post-industrial era and how countries belonging to different regimes have dealt with it.
Through his ‘second life’, it explores the ‘impossible marriage’ between full employment and equality, and the development of the social investment approach.
The second contribution is to critically analyse a tension—generated by the shift from a broad to a narrow social policy perspective—between the two lives and how it raises questions for contemporary social policy. It suggests the field should take stock of Esping-Andersen's work holistically, going beyond a simplistic use of welfare regime typologies and the universal proposition of a Scandinavian-style social investment approach.
This approach tends to overlook factors related to the international context (e.g., the expansion of the market logic, and questions of exchange, inflation and debt) when assessing the impact of social policy on key outcomes.
The ultimate goal of the presentation is to revive a research programme based on the integration between social policy and international political economy, a programme geared at critically assessing issues related to gender equality, employment and redistribution.
Fatherhood and Men’s Working Hours in a Part-Time Economy
- Image Dusan Petkovic (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, June 21st 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K011 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
Fatherhood and Men’s Working Hours in a Part-Time Economy
Thijs Bol
Professor of Sociology
University of Amsterdam
How do fathers adjust their working hours after the birth of their first child?
Though the impact of childbirth on women’s employment is well-established, less is known about its effect on fathers.
We investigate this question in the Netherlands (2006-2017), a country characterized by a high prevalence of part-time work. We focus on two contexts that might shape the extent to which first-time fathers reduce their working hours after childbirth: the household and the organization. For this purpose, we use detailed longitudinal register data.
The results reveal that men’s employment displays a high degree of stability around the first childbirth: even in the Dutch “part-time economy,” the vast majority of fathers remain full-time employed.
We do find substantial heterogeneity in labor market responses following childbirth. Fathers earning relatively less than their partner pre-childbirth are more likely to scale down their working hours. The organizational gender composition is also associated with working hours reductions following childbirth. Although we find that fathers’ employment is contingent on both the household and organizational context, the substantial stability in men’s labor supply remains an obstacle to a more equal division of (un)paid labor.
Personal Website
A Silver Handle of Wishes: Social and Spatial Stratification in Early Colonial Bombay
- The Bombay Commercial Gymkhana (1905 - Public Domain)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, June 14th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
A Silver Handle of Wishes: Social and Spatial Stratification in Early Colonial Bombay
Sukriti Issar
Associate Professor
Sciences Po - CRIS
In this talk I will discuss work-in-progress on enumeration, occupations and stratification, and segregation in early colonial Bombay. What were the categories used for enumerating populations? What can we say about spatial segregation in this period? Was there a middling ‘sort’? Using previously unexplored archival data (qualitative and quantitative) I analyse segregation, and use new data to classify occupational structure and consumption practices in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The talk will reflect on methods of history writing and archival research.
Sukriti Issar is Associate Professor in CRIS (Center for Research on Social Inequalities) at Sciences Po, Paris. She is the scientific advisor of the Governing the Large Metropolis master's program at the Urban School. Her research interests focus on urban policy, regulations, property and law, and social history. To find out more about Sukriti Issar
Open Seminar. Please register here to join us!
Estimating the Impact of Prenatal Opioid Exposure on Infant Health: Evidence from Multiple Identification Strategies
- Image Maria Sbytova (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, June 7th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
Estimating the Impact of Prenatal Opioid Exposure on Infant Health:
Evidence from Multiple Identification Strategies
Lawrence (Lonnie) Berger
Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor
Associate Vice Chancellor for Research in the Social Sciences
Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The adverse effects of the opioid epidemic in the United States are well documented. Moreover, high rates of prenatal opioid exposure, particularly among disadvantaged populations, has generated concern that a large number of children may be at risk of poor prenatal and, potentially, lifelong health and development. Whereas research has established that maternal opioid use during pregnancy is associated with a host of negative child outcomes, prenatal exposure is also strongly correlated with other socioeconomic and psychosocial risks to child development. As such, existing studies have yet to identify plausibly causal effects. This study uses longitudinal administrative data from Wisconsin and six identification strategies—standard (e.g., OLS) regressions with extensive controls; propensity score matched regressions; inverse probability (of prenatal exposure) weighted regressions; sibling fixed-effects regressions (comparing exposed and nonexposed siblings); cousin fixed-effects regressions (comparing exposed children to unexposed children of their mothers’ sisters), and instrumental variables regressions—to produce bounded estimates of the plausibly causal effects of prenatal opioid exposure on multiple domains of child health during the first year of life. Comparing estimates produced using each strategy provides new insights into whether associations of prenatal opioid exposure with specific aspects of infant health are likely causal and, if so, at what orders of magnitude.
To find out more about Lawrence (Lonnie) Berger (cv)
Open Seminar. Please register here to join us!
Job Talks
- Image Didier Pazery / Sciences Po
These job talks follow the Assistant Professor position published in March 2024.
Schedule:
-
Thursday June 13th 2024 – Room B108 (Salons scientifiques) - 1, Place Saint-Thomas d’Aquin 75007 Paris
Open to Sciences Po community - Please register here
8:45am - Welcome Coffee
9:00 - 9:45 Mélusine Boon-Falleur, Understanding the socioeconomic gradient in patience: evidence from higher-education choices
9:50 - 10:35 Alessandro Ferrara, The Immigrant Selectivity Hypothesis: Measuring Immigrant Health Selection and its Consequences at Destination
10:40 - 11:25 Nathan Hoffmann, How Policy Shapes Queer Migration and Union Formation
11:25 - 11:40 - Coffee Break
11:40 - 12:25 Alejandra Rodriguez Sanchez, Algorithms of our Social Fabric: Machine Learning in Computational Social Science Research
12:30 - 1:15pm Ioana Sendroiu, Making a market to save the planet
1:15 - 2:30pm - Lunch
-
Thursday June 13th 2024 – Internal
2:30 - 4:40 Interviews by the Selection Committee
4:40 - 6pm Selection Committee meeting - ranking of the candidates
Please contact us if you have any questions: info.cris@sciencespo.fr
About inequalities and the digital divide... Jen Schradie
- Image pathdoc (via Shutterstock)
What is the digital divide today, and its evolution since the 1990s, given the emergence of new technologies? Should be talk about digital inequalities?
Today mobile broadband internet is accessible pretty much everywhere. Why is class still mattering? Why does that still a social divide around people of different class, ethnicity, gender?
What is going to happen to digital inequalities as, digital technology becomes cheaper and cheaper, more available, better, speed is available, better devices, are available at lower prices ?
What inequalities in the use of artificial intelligence?
Listen the podcast On Digital Inequality and its Political implications, 40 min., may 2024, part of the Sergei Guriev conversations [Ausha - Also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music...]
As a digital scholar, It's been both fun and challenging to track digital inequalities because they're changing so rapidly!
From the 1990s to 2000, Twitter was launched, YouTube was diffused... and so there was all this utopianism around, how anyone can, be a content producer, but I sought to really look at who are these people creating online content.
I do want to challenge this idea that everyone is online.
There's a lot of arguments around how, especially among youth, too much digital technology can impact, negative, have a negative impacts on mental health. But it's actually, people that have less internet access that have, lower self-reports of social well-being.
My research switches the causal arrow and really looks at how do societal differences shape the use of technology itself.
People who are in more precarious work positions, are much less likely to feel safe posting online something that might be perceived as as controversial.
Communal Sustainability: A socio-material approach to elucidating the links between inequality and the environment
- Image PradeepGaurs (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, May 31st 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
Communal Sustainability:
A socio-material approach to elucidating the links between inequality
and the environment
Manisha Anantharaman
Assistant Professor
Sciences Po - CSO
How do Bengaluru’s middle-class environmentalists envision and enact green practices and communities, and what consequences does this have for the (re)production of inequality in the city?
Based on a recently published book Recycling Class: The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability, this talk will draw on interviews, participant observation and community-engaged research methods to present detailed case studies of green lifestyle movements and communities articulating around mobility and waste in Bengaluru, India.
I develop the term communal sustainability to describe neighborhood-based interventions into the city’s waste metabolisms. I show how housewives, retired men, and other unlikely suspects deploy affective and reproductive labor to change household behavior, build small-scale infrastructures, and convene collaborative systems of governance.
Examining communal sustainability through the lens of social reproduction theory, I reveal how the socially reproductive labor of middle-class women and the working poor produces zero-waste management as a form of sustainability. In its material solutions to environmental problems, communal sustainability mobilizes metabolic divisions of community that are gendered, classed, and casted; just as its symbolic registers portray only well-to-do sustainability practitioners as ecologically legitimate, othering the poor and deepening stigmas over poverty.
At the same time, I caution that there are limits to seeing communal sustainability solely as a site for the reproduction of material and symbolic difference. What is also operative here is a sense of empowerment, a building of shared identity, and an enactment of politics for those engaged in this work, which cannot be reduced to narrow economism or top-down governmentalization. Rather, under some conditions, communal sustainability, with its metabolic reliance on volunteer effort and manual labor, undermines neoliberal agendas and opens new avenues for political participation by marginalized groups in urban environmental politics.
To find out more about Manisha Ananthatraman
Open Seminar. Please register here to join us!
La culture du consentement
- Image 4 MP production (via Shutterstock)
Soutenance de la thèse La culture du consentement : Recompositions des rapports de genre et de la sexualité depuis MeToo, par Rébecca Lévy-Guillain, à Sciences Po, le mardi 11 juin 2024, 14h30.
Composition du jury :
Marie Bergström, chargée de recherche INED (codirectrice)
Sébastien Chauvin, professeur associé, Université de Lausanne
Marta Domínguez-Folgueras, associate professor, Sciences Po - CRIS (codirectrice)
Christophe Giraud, professeur des universités, Université Paris Cité (rapporteur)
Camille Masclet, chargée de recherche, CNRS/EHESS/CESSP
Emmanuelle Santelli, directrice de recherche, CNRS-Centre Max Weber (rapportrice)
Depuis le début du moment MeToo, la question du consentement sexuel devient centrale dans les débats publics et s’accompagne de la diffusion d’un modèle de « bonne » sexualité égalitaire, imprégné par les savoirs féministes et thérapeutiques. La sexualité et les rapports de genre s’en trouvent-ils transformés ?
Au croisement de la sociologie du genre, de la sexualité et de la socialisation, et à partir de l’analyse d’un corpus de sources écrites et de la conduite de 130 entretiens biographiques auprès de femmes et d’hommes âgé.es de 18 à 65 ans issu.es de milieux sociaux différents, cette thèse s’intéresse aux réceptions individuelles socialement différenciées de la morale sexuelle égalitaire.
Celles et ceux qui s’approprient la morale sexuelle égalitaire ont en commun d’avoir vécu des violences symboliques dont l’effet est intense ou durable, de trouver légitimes les savoirs féministes et thérapeutiques, et de se trouver dans des configurations relationnelles rendant possible le changement de leurs représentations.
Bien que les hommes continuent de prendre les initiatives et que les femmes parviennent difficilement à dire non, elles et ils problématisent dorénavant l’inadéquation entre leurs pratiques et leurs aspirations morales.
Les hommes résolvent rapidement cette dissonance et déploient des stratégies de présentation de soi pourvoyeuses de prestige. Les femmes en revanche s’engagent dans des spirales d’autodévalorisation qui limitent leur latitude d’action et cherchent activement à mettre en cohérence leurs conduites sexuelles avec leur idéologie. Le contrôle de la sexualité féminine ainsi que les inégalités de genre sont alors reconduits sous de nouvelles formes.
Accès aux personnes invitées et publics internes à Sciences Po.
Rébécca Lévy-Guillain est l'auteure de l'ouvrage Le désir est un sport de combat aux éditions Arkhé.
Neighbourhood peer effects in school choice and variations by socioeconomic background and grade
- Image Lara Brow (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, May 24th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K011 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
Neighbourhood peer effects in school choice and variations
by socioeconomic background and grade
Quentin Ramon
Assistant Professor
Universidad Mayor (Santiago, Chile) - Center for Economics and Social Policy
Adjunct Researcher
Center for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES)
This presentation examines the extent to which neighbourhood peers influence school choice, and whether this effect varies according to socioeconomic background and grade.
Using geocoded administrative data from Chile, I build a unique longitudinal dataset linking four applicant cohorts (2020-2023) to their census tract and to their nearest neighbours and grademates who applied to the same grade the year before, which allows me to control for endogeneity issues when measuring peer effects. I estimate logistic regressions to analyse similarity in application as well as similarity in the ranking of these applications.
Results show that low socioeconomic status (SES) students are more likely to conform to their neighbours’ choice, particularly when those neighbours also come from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. Similarity in school choice is also higher at pre-school levels. Then, using propensity score matching methods, I found that conforming to low-SES neighbours’ school choice is associated with application and enrolment in lower-SES and lower-performing schools. Overall, I argue that geographically embedded social interactions influence the process of school choice and thereby contribute to sustaining school segregation, with potential far-reaching consequences for the reproduction of social inequality.
The results also stress the need for public policies to consider local social interactions to mitigate spatial and social disparities in educational opportunities.
To find out more about Quentin Ramond
Open Seminar. Please register here to join us!
The emergence of health gaps in early life: the role of multidomain childhood deprivation
- Image Studio Romantic (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, May 17th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
The emergence of health gaps in early life:
the role of multidomain childhood deprivation
Lidia Panico
Professeure des Universités, Sciences Po - CRIS
Evidence suggests that inequalities in health begin from the starting gate and that early childhood is crucial to understand the production of health inequalities in later life. A body of research has put an emphasis on multi-domain deprivation as a tool to better understand the lived experience of childhood disadvantage, rather than classic measures such as income poverty. However, the health inequalities literature still uses relatively simple concepts of (parental) “socio-economic status”, such as income, to describe health gaps in the early years.
In previous work, we proposed a conceptual framework and methods to construct multidomain, longitudinal indicators of early childhood deprivation (see below). In this paper, we apply these indicators to describe how multidomain deprivation links to early health. We will present results from the nationally representative French birth cohort Elfe, as well as preliminary results with harmonized data from the US Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Birth cohort (ECLS-B) and the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) to examine whether different national settings produce different patterns of inequalities across countries.
- Barbara Castillo Rico, Marion Leturcq, Lidia Panico, « La pauvreté des enfants à la naissance en France. Résultats de l'enquête Elfe », Revue des Politiques Sociales et Familiales, 2019/2-3, n° 131-132, p. 35-49.
[EN] Childhood poverty and deprivation at the starting gate in France. Examples using Elfe survey (p. 175-188) - Marion Leturcq & Lidia Panico, "The long-term effects of parental separation on childhood multidimensional deprivation: a lifecourse approach", Social Indicators Research, vol. 144, n° 2, p. 921-954.
Open Seminar. Please register here to join us!
From Workplace to Home: How Maternal Job Demands affect Cognitive and Non-cognitive Early Child Development
- Image santypan (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, May 3rd 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
From Workplace to Home:
How Maternal Job Demands affect Cognitive and Non-cognitive
Early Child Development
Gundula Zoch
Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Oldenburg
Research Fellow, Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories, Bamberg
Increased maternal employment and modernised labour market have altered the physical and psychological challenges for mothers, yet, evidence on the role of job demands for child development remains limited.
This presentation provides initial evidence whether and how maternal job demands are associated with early child development in Germany.
Drawing on theories on early dynamic skill production, status attainment, time-availability and work-family conflict, we formulate contrasting hypotheses on the link between higher job strain and child development as well as its mediators and moderators.
We utilize longitudinal data from the Newborn Cohort of the National Educational Panel Study, and its link with administrative records on mothers’ employment biographies (NEPS-SC1-ADIAB, person-years ≈ 5300) and the BIBB/BAuA-job-exposure matrix, measuring occupational physical and psychosocial work strain.
We examine cognitive as well as non-cognitive child development during the first ten years after birth using linear regressions, thereby exploring potential mediating factors such as parent-child interaction and quality.
Finally, we exploit occupational changes in our longitudinal data and assess the impact of altered job demands on child development over time using fixed-effects models.
To find out more (personal website)
Open Seminar. Please register here to join us!
Du désir de l'accès aux biens culturels...
- Voix croisées sur l'économie - Philippe Coulangeon
Que conclure du Pass Culture ?
Voix croisées sur l'économie, podcast, 3 mars, 34 minutes
En écoute sur la plateforme Spotify
Cet épisode animé par Aurélie Lachkar reçoit Philippe Coulangeon et Françoise Benhamou (Professeure d'économie, Présidente du Cercle des économistes).
Le Pass culture, inspiré d'un précédent italien, est l'une des réalisations phare de la politique culturelle menée sous les gouvernements d'Emmanuel Macron. Doté de 260 millions d'euros, il comporte deux volets, individuel et social. Il permet d'acheter des biens culturels pour les jeunes, et de financer des projets d'éducation artistique et culturelle dans le cadre scolaire. Mais quels sont ses objectifs, qu'en est-il de son usage, de son impact ? Ces questions font débat.
Conçu pour favoriser l'accès des jeunes à la culture pour renforcer et diversifer les pratiques culturelles sur tout le territoire, il prête à controverse dès que l'on aborde la question de son évaluation, plusieurs notions étant sujette à interprêtation dans ce domaine.
Les chercheurs sont donc invités à poser les termes du débat :
- Le frein majeur pour accèder à l'offre culturelle est-il d'ordre financier ? Le Pass est-il une incitation à la pratique culturelle ?
- Quels sont les autres facteurs qui déterminent ces usages, consommations et pratiques ? Où sont les barrières ?
- Quelles sont les limites d'une politique culturelle tournée vers la demande ?
- Quelle prise en compte des inégalités liées à la socialisation familiale et celles liées à la médiation de l'accès aux biens culturels ?
- Y-a-t'il des inégalités territoriales ?
- Quels dispositifs d'accompagnement (y compris une offre de transport) ?
- Quels effets d'aubaine ? Faut-il questionner son aspect universel ?
- Que dire des choix faits par les jeunes ? Le Manga superstar... Quels sont les producteurs qui bénéficient indirectement de ces subventions ? Est-ce justifié ?
- Le Pass permet il une légitimation, une labellisation, de produits et pratiques jusque là non prises en compte par la politique culturelle ?
- Qu'apporte le nouveau volet orienté vers le cadre scolaire ? Est-ce une évolution correctrice ? S'orienter vers le système éducatif, est-ce un tournant historique ?
- Son coût est-il excessif ? Le Pass est-il pérenne, notamment s'il y a plus de demandes ?
Philippe Coulangeon amène des éléments de réflexion sur la difficulté d'appréhender par les pouvoirs publics le "désir de biens culturels" et la nécessité d'une évaluation et d'une expérimentation pour quantifier finement et sur le long terme (y compris à l'âge adulte) les effets induits par ce dispositif.
Transition écologique, justice et inégalités sociales
- GiRA with James K. Boyce (image B. Corminboeuf, Sciences Po - CRIS)
Dans le cadre de la première remise du Global Inequality Research Award (GiRA), James K. Boyce, professeur émérite en économie à l’Université du Massachusetts à Amherst, était l'invité de Sciences Po le 5 avril. L’occasion de revenir sur sa carrière, ses travaux pionniers dans la compréhension des liens entre dégradations environnementales et inégalités sociales et ses outils conceptuels pour entrer en action.
James Boyce est co-lauréat de ce prix porté par le CRIS et le World Inequality Lab, aux-côtés de Bina Agarwal, Professeure en développement économique et environnement à l'Université de Manchester qui sera à son tour invitée début 2025.
Pendant plus de deux heures, l'économiste est revenu sur ses intuitions puis les nombreux travaux qu'il a fallu mener pour démontrer le lien entre les problématiques environnementales - pollutions, changement climatique, disparition de la biodiversité par exemple - et celles des inégalités sociales. Ce sont les populations pauvres, vulnérables, sous-représentées politiquement qui en sont les premières victimes et supportent les coûts des atteintes environnementales. Ses travaux se basent sur des indicateurs de mesure des revenus et des richesses, croisés avec les origines raciales et ethniques de populations géolocalisées. Diverses modalités comme le genre, le taux d'alphabétisation et de scolarisation, des données de santé ou fiscales y sont ajoutées.
Le chercheur est le témoin et l'acteur d'une lente évolution des mentalités, que ce soit au niveau scientifique (les économistes se sont longtemps polarisés sur la croissance, et les environnementalistes sur la relation homme / nature), politique ou sociétal. Dans les années 80-90, désintérêt et scepticisme dominent, avant la production dans les années 2000 de données officielles sur les dégradations environnementales, et l'identification des zones à risque pour les habitants (après la catastrophe chimique de Bhopal notamment).
James K. Boyce revient sur son parcours institutionnel de chercheur : seul étudiant en 1983 d'un nouveau cours sur l'économie de l'environnement pendant son doctorat à Oxford ; un de ses premiers articles marquant, Inequality as a Cause of Environmental Degradation écrit en 1994 après une bourse Fulbright au Costa-Rica ; son cours d'économie politique de l'environnement lorsqu'il est nommé à l'Université du Massachussets ou les actions de protection de l'environnement au bénéfice de populations locales, menées par la Fondation Ford.
Tout au long de sa présentation l'orateur illustre ses propos d'exemples qui nous permettent de saisir les enjeux : les 4 millions de femmes décédées chaque année par la pollution de leurs foyers (données OMS) ; les flux d'exportation de déchets des pays riches vers les pays pauvres ; le dilemme du consommateur qui privilégie les produits à prix bas nocifs pour l'environnement ; le programme d'immersion de blocs de béton au large de l'Inde pour empêcher les chalutiers d'épuiser les ressources halieutiques et créer un nouveau éco-système ; la réforme agraire en Asie de l'Est qui permet de redistribuer des terres confisquées par une oligarchie foncière.
James K. Boyce regrette toutefois de ne pas avoir toujours pu convaincre des pratiques nocives des firmes agro-alimentaires, semenciers ou fabricants de produits phyto-sanitaires et des tenants d'une agriculture productiviste favorisant l'érosion génétique.
Au milieu des années 2000, les travaux de James K. Boyce peuvent être appréhendés sous le concept de justice environnementale. Il suggère un droit pour une égalité d'accès à un environnement propre et sain, un respect des ressources naturelles et une répartition équitable des dividendes tirés de leur exploitation.
La source d'inspiration est Peter Barnes, ancien journaliste puis entrepreneur dans l’énergie solaire, promoteur du Sky Trust, un dispositif calqué sur le Fonds permanent de l’Alaska. Ce dispositif bénéficie depuis les années 80 à tous les habitants de cet État. Entre 1000 et 2000 $ annuels sont versés en échange de l'expoitation des forages pétroliers car les ressources naturelles de l’Alaska appartiennent à tous les Alaskiens, notamment les Amérindiens.
Le Sky Trust est baptisé “Dividendes Carbone”. Il est basé sur des permis à polluer mis aux enchères permettant de faire entrer ce carbone fossile dans l’économie et de redistribuer les revenus de ces permis aux habitants. Des économistes ont validé l’impact distributif, très progressif, du dispositif, en Chine puis aux États-Unis. Certes, les producteurs répercutent le coût des taxes sur les prix de vente des produits, mais ce sont les gros consommateurs, ceux à forte empreinte carbone qui sont exposés. Les petits consommateurs - notamment en raison de leur faible pouvoir d'achat - sont bénéficiaires de la redistribution des revenus.
Deux projets de loi sont déposés au Congrès, à Washington en 2009 pour mettre en place un système d'échange de quotas d'émission (un marché carbone, comme en Europe), plus un dispositif de fléchage de 25% des recettes vers les énergies propres. Ils n’ont hélas jamais abouti, notamment du fait de la puissance des entreprises utilisant des combustibles fossiles et de la frilosité des politiques.
Un autre concept est développé par James K. Boyce, celui de la propriété universelle. La biosphère peut être considérée comme un bien appartenant à tous. En rationnant, limitant son usage, on peut en tirer des revenus répartis entre tous. Le système financier lui-même pourrait générer des revenus sur les mouvements de capitaux et avoir des effets incitatifs pour limiter l’utilisation des ressources rares. La propriété universelle s’adresse aux individus, pas aux états, elle est inaliénable.
En conclusion, James K. Boyce a consacré toute sa carrière scientifique à répondre aux 2 grands défis de notre époque : inverser, sinon arrêter, la dégradation de l’environnement, notamment du climat et réduire les inégalités.
Il affirme avec conviction qu’il est possible de combiner les deux puisque les deux vont de pair.
En complément
- Ecologie et inégalités, Revue de l'OFCE, n° 165, 2020
- Petit manuel de justice climatique à l'usage des citoyens, Les Liens qui libèrent, 2020 - Recension de Vincent Lucchese dans Usbek & Rica
- Site internet édité par l’Université de Massachusetts recensant les 100 plus grosses entreprises pollueuses aux USA
3 questions à James K. Boyce (en anglais, 3 min.)
Focusing in on life course processes to understand how racism patterns ethnic inequities in health
- Image Ink Drop (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, April 26th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
Focusing in on life course processes to understand
how racism patterns ethnic inequities in health
Laia Becares
Professor, King's College London
Ethnic inequalities in health are entrenched and persistent in the UK and elsewhere.
This seminar explores the role of racism, experienced over the life course, in structuring ethnic inequalities in health.
Anchored around key tenets of life course theory, this presentation will discuss findings from multiple studies that centre racism as the root cause of ethnic inequalities, exploring life course mechanisms that pattern stark ethnic inequities in later life.
Open Seminar. Please register here to join us!
Le désir est un sport de combat
- Image Cool_photo (via Shutterstock)
Le désir est un sport de combat
Rébecca Lévy-Guillain
240 p., isbn 978-2383411260 (imprimé ou Ebook), février 2024
Les discordances liées à l’affaiblissement du désir sexuel chez les femmes et à sa persistance chez les hommes donnent lieu à des conflits conjugaux au sein des couples, déclenchant parfois ruptures et divorces.
Fondé sur des entretiens biographiques conduits auprès de 130 femmes et hommes âgé.es de 18 à 65 ans, cet ouvrage propose une analyse sociologique des discordances de désir au sein des couples hétérosexuels.
Depuis ces dernières décennies et notamment depuis le début du moment MeToo, les approches envisageant les différences de désir sous le prisme de la domination masculine se diffusent : les femmes n’auraient naturellement pas moins de désir mais elles seraient contraintes par la société. Dans ce contexte, les femmes, en particulier celles qui appartiennent aux nouvelles générations ou à la bourgeoisie culturelle, sont de plus en plus nombreuses à considérer leurs rapports sexuels non désirés comme un indicateur de leur soumission et font donc du respect de leur désir une exigence éthique.
Pour les hommes toutefois, l’accès à la sexualité est à la fois un gage de leur appartenance au groupe des hommes, un vecteur de création d’intimité (et donc un moyen de lutter contre le sentiment de solitude) et une façon de faire l’expérience d’émotions codées comme positives.
Au sein du couple, l’effritement du désir féminin est interprété comme un signe de désamour et un indicateur de mauvaise santé conjugale. Cependant, la régularité sociale d’une telle configuration (moindre désir des femmes par rapport à leurs partenaires) invite à se défaire d’une lecture purement individuelle et contextuelle. Sans nier le rôle de facteurs interpersonnels, propres aux constructions conjugales individuelles, cet ouvrage déplace le regard vers des facteurs structurels en examinant les processus sociaux à l’œuvre. Il montre notamment comment l’apprentissage du désir se décline différemment pour les femmes et pour les hommes, que ce soit au cours de l’enfance ou après l’entrée dans l’âge adulte.
L’ouvrage met par ailleurs au jour plusieurs facteurs sociaux contribuant à expliquer pourquoi ces discordances de désir au sein des couples sont vécues comme étant éminemment problématiques par les femmes et par les hommes.
Image : Studio Cabrelli
Is high culture delegitimized?
- Image Stock for You (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, April 12th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
Is high culture delegitimized?
Cohort variations in participation rates in the arts in France and the United States (1973-2018)
Stéphane Dorin
Professor, University of Limoges
Philippe Coulangeon
Senior Scientist, CNRS, Sciences Po - CRIS
This study examines the decline in highbrow cultural participation since the last decades of the 20th century with regard to the debates and cross-fertilization of European, especially French, and American cultural sociology.
We use data from four decades of large-scale surveys in France and the US to compare the two countries with regard to the role of high culture in social stratification and the relation of more recent cohorts to what is usually considered 'high culture.' (i.e., the most institutionalized and broadly recognized forms of prestigious culture throughout Europe and the Americas).
Focusing on two emblematic and debated high culture practices – reading literature and attending classical music concerts – we implemented the APC-I model (Luo and Hodges, 2022) to disentangle the age, period, and cohort dimensions of the observed temporal change. We identified significant inter-cohort differences and intra-cohort dynamics in the evolution of participation in high culture in both the US and France, even though educational attainment remains a major driving factor of high culture participation rates.
These cohort effects reflect the time lag observed in the chronology of secondary education expansion in the two countries. However, they are stronger in France, and there are two different patterns for older cohorts between the two countries, whereas younger cohorts tend to converge in their declining participation rate in artistic activities.
We also address the sociological question of cohort behavior and identify various patterns of intra-cohort life course dynamics that both confirm and challenge the usual notions of temporal dynamics of taste formation and cultural participation, beyond the assumption of constant and additive cohort effects.
The comparison between the two countries highlights the changing definition of cultural capital over time and place and its relationship to educational expansion, which leads us to challenge the idea of a decline in the arts as the major form of cultural capital in France and the US.
Open Seminar. Please register here to join us!
Enquête sur l'articulation entre handicap et genre sur le marché de l'emploi en France
- Image AnnaStills (via Shutterstock)
Quand le genre travaille le handicap :
enquête sur l'articulation entre handicap et genre sur le marché de l'emploi en France
Soutenance de thèse de Mathéa Boudinet le 14 mai 2024 à Sciences Po
Membres du jury : Pierre Brasseur (Université Libre de Bruxelles - METICES), Didier Demazière (Sciences Po - CSO), Aude Lejeune (Université de Lille - CERAPS), Sophie Pochic (ENS - Centre Maurice Halbwachs), Anne Revillard (Directrice de recherche, Sciences Po - CRIS & LIEPP), Maud Simonet (Université Paris Nanterre - IDHES).
Cette thèse s’intéresse aux situations des femmes handicapées sur le marché de l’emploi en France. Qu’implique l’appartenance à plusieurs catégories dominées dans les rapports sociaux, sur les positions occupées sur le marché de l’emploi ? Elle s’inscrit dans la sociologie de l’emploi, du genre, du handicap et au champ des recherches consacré à l’articulation des temps sociaux.
La littérature en sociologie a principalement étudié les inégalités professionnelles liées au genre et au handicap de manière séparée, et, quand elle croise explicitement ces variables, elle se divise quant à la manière de qualifier les positions des femmes handicapées : « double discrimination » ? Désavantages liés au handicap tellement importants et structurants que les inégalités de genre sont quasiment inexistantes ?
La thèse étudie la manière dont s’articulent concrètement genre et handicap sur le marché de l’emploi et en emploi, et permet de distinguer les mécanismes sociaux s’appliquant de manière différenciée à la population handicapée ou féminine, de ceux qui seraient spécifiques aux femmes handicapées.
Elle s’appuie sur des méthodes mixtes, croisant l’exploitation de 51 entretiens biographiques individuels auprès de femmes et hommes ayant une déficience visuelle, motrice ou une maladie chroniques, et l’analyse de la vague 2018 de l’enquête INSEE « Emploi en continu ».
La thèse souligne l’intérêt d’analyser les situations professionnelles des personnes handicapées en termes d’articulation des temps sociaux, et met en lumière la prégnance de formes de travail supplémentaires que celles-ci doivent gérer : le travail de santé - l’ensemble des activités contraignantes relatives aux soins et à la gestion de la santé à une échelle individuelle - et le travail de handicap, qui correspond aux activités en lien avec la dimension sociale du handicap, notamment l’adaptation de la personne aux contraintes imposées par son environnement. L’investissement des personnes handicapées dans le travail rémunéré se module selon l’importance que prennent ces deux formes de travail en plus à effectuer pour elles, mais, pour les femmes handicapées, également par le travail domestique induit par la conjugalité et la parentalité. Leur surreprésentation dans l’inactivité économique et le temps partiel s’explique en partie par les effets de la division sexuée du travail.
La thèse met également en lumière les phénomènes de ségrégation horizontales et verticales qui structurent l’emploi des personnes handicapées par rapport aux personnes valides, mais également en fonction du genre au sein de ce groupe. Les personnes handicapées se concentrent plus dans des emplois situés en bas de l’échelle sociale, et leur répartition est cohérente selon le genre : les femmes handicapées sont principalement des employées, et les hommes des ouvriers. En termes de partitions verticales, les femmes handicapées sont désavantagées par rapport aux hommes handicapés, et aux hommes et femmes valides, que ce soit dans l’accès aux professions et catégories professionnelles les plus hautes (cadres, chef-fes d’entreprise, professions intellectuelles supérieures), ou dans l’accès aux responsabilités d’encadrement.
Certaines formes de discriminations en lien avec le handicap se retrouvent à la fois chez les hommes et les femmes handicapées, comme les licenciements, les discriminations à l’embauche, les insultes, ou les refus de promotions. Ces traitements inégalitaires se superposent à ceux relatifs à la race pour les personnes racisées. Cependant, certaines discriminations prennent des formes spécifiques en fonction du genre, et particulièrement du croisement entre genre et handicap. En plus des expériences sexistes « classiques » dont font l’objet l’ensemble des femmes (harcèlement sexuel, inégalités de salaires, violences conjugales), les femmes handicapées font l’objet de stéréotypes au croisement du genre et du handicap (figure de femmes « folles », soupçon d’incompétence). De plus, leurs parcours professionnels sont freinés par leur inadéquation aux critères d’évaluation masculins et valides, et par leur mobilisation des politiques d’aménagements relatives à la maternité et aux aménagements de poste. Enfin, les structures du service public de l’emploi semblent moins adaptées à ce public, du fait de leur représentation implicitement masculine de l’usager-ère typique, et de la prégnance des représentations genrées traditionnelles en termes de division sexuée du travail.
La thèse contribue à une sociologie de l’intersectionnalité. Elle met en lumière l’intériorisation des systèmes de domination par les hommes et femmes handicapées, qui se manifestent notamment par des phénomènes d’euphémisation des discriminations en lien avec le genre et le handicap et par le peu de recours au droit. De plus, ce travail montre que les interprétations en termes d’intersection sont rares dans les discours des personnes handicapées, et que le handicap semble constituer le principal facteur explicatif des inégalités vécues sur le marché de l’emploi pour cette population.
Les soutenances sont réservées aux personnes invitées et aux publics internes de Sciences Po (étudiants, enseignants, chercheurs, salariés).
Socioemotional Development during Adolescence: Evidence from a Large Macro Shock
- Image Fizkès (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, April 5th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
Socioemotional Development during Adolescence:
Evidence from a Large Macro Shock
Ghazala Azmat
Professeure des Universités
Sciences - Po, Department of Economics
(joint with Katja Kaufmann and Yasemin Ozdemir)
We take advantage of a large quasi-exogenous shock to study the development of socioemotional skills during early adolescence and their links to long-term behavior and labor market outlook. Using novel, longitudinal, microdata on cohorts of East German adolescents before and after a large macro shock (the German Reunification), we causally estimate the impact on socioemotional skills (self-confidence and impulse control), finding negative effects in the short run.
These effects are substantially larger among those affected by the shock in early adolescence (13/14 years old), relative to later adolescence (16/17 years old). Changes in socioemotional skills have a lasting (negative) impact on them as adults, especially among those affected early in their adolescence, in terms of externalizing behavior (e.g., physical fighting), behavioral control problems (i.e., substance abuse), internalizing behavior (i.e., mental health) and in their (labor-market) optimism and expectations.
This study highlights the permanent effects of uncertainty on socioemotional skills during formative years.
To learn more about Ghazala AZMAT, consult her website
Open Seminar. Please register here to join us!
Are occupations “bundles of skills”? Identifying latent skill profiles in the labor market using topic modeling
- Image Robert Kneschke (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, March 29th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
Are occupations “bundles of skills”?
Identifying latent skill profiles in the labor market using topic modeling
Marie Labussière
Postdoctoral researcher
University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences
Occupations are a central unit for understanding inequalities in the labor market. In the literature, it is often assumed that workers in different occupations obtain different labor market returns because they perform different skills and tasks. However, this premise that occupations form distinct bundles of skills has never been empirically tested.
In this study (co-authored with Thijs Bol), we use a unique dataset of millions of online job postings in the United Kingdom to map the skill structure of the labor market and analyze its relationship to existing occupational classifications.
While previous literature has often defined skills as unidimensional and independent factors, we conceptualize and operationalize the notion of "skill profile", which refers to the combination of general and specialized skills that workers are required to master for their jobs.
Using topic modeling on highly detailed job skill requirements, we identify the skill profiles of job postings and analyze the extent to which they vary within and between occupational categories.
Our results reveal both overlap in skill content between occupations and significant heterogeneity within occupations, even using the detailed 3-digit occupational classification. These findings challenge the often assumed role of occupations as distinct bundles of skills, and instead offer new perspectives for analyzing labor market stratification.
Open Seminar. Please register here to join us!
Belonging to the nation, belonging to Europe?
- Image Lightspring (via Shutterstock)
Belonging to the nation, belonging to Europe?
Varieties of particularism and universalism in migrant identity negotiation
Maricia Fischer-Souan
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Post-doctoral Fellow
CRIS & CÉRIUM (Université de Montréal)
Journal of Contemporary European Studies
Published online 2024, February 8th
doi: 10.1080/14782804.2024.2311200 (Taylor & Francis Online)
This article focuses on the relationship between migrants’ identification with the national (destination) community and European identification. How first-generation ‘immigrant patriots’, who consider themselves to be French, British, or Spanish (regardless of formal citizenship status) relate to European identity.
Through a series of case studies of South Asian, North African, and South American migrants’ identity narratives in the metropolitan areas of Paris, Madrid, and London, Maricia Fischer-Souan argues that immigrant relationships to Europe vary a great deal. In addition, she finds that (dis)inclinations toward the supranational dimension have a lot to do with how migrants achieve and conceive of belonging in the new homeland in the first place.
Beginning with the ambivalent figure of the postcolonial migrant subject as a starting point for the analysis, she sketches out two different pathways toward inclusion at the (sub)national level that produce different relationships to the supranational level. One involves particularistic and culturally-defined orientations to belonging, while the other takes a universalistic and civic-based understanding of membership. Whether or not Europe is included in the identity equation depends on whether the conception of European membership is coherent with the identity work undertaken to achieve a sense of national belonging.
An important contribution of this article is to highlight how elements of national (host society) cultural repertoires resonate with migrant vocabularies of belonging, yet – crucially – are filtered by experiences and processes of racialization and Othering.
Consciousness and experience of stigmatisation and exclusion can be offset by personal narratives of postcolonial cultural proximity. European colonial legacies can thus be construed in terms of cultural and human connections, in addition to oppression and violence. Whether postcolonial migrants view these historical connections as being undermined or not by intra-EU connections may depend on the ways in which they achieve a sense of belonging with respect to their society of adoption.
Do Children Perform Better in Religious Schools?
- Image Yakobchuk Viacheslav (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, March 22th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
Do Children Perform Better in Religious Schools?
Christiaan Monden
Professor of Sociology and Demography
University of Oxford and Nuffield College
Religious schools enjoy a high academic reputation among parents in many societies. Previous studies that assessed the effect of religious schools mostly focused on Catholic schools and were conducted in countries where religious schools are private or where they charge fees and set admission criteria. As a result, the effect of religious schooling could not be separated from the effect of private schooling.
We contribute to the literature by studying the effect of six most prominent religious school denominations in the Netherlands, a country in which both public and religious schools have been publicly funded since 1917, schooling is free of charge and admission is independent of the child’s religious or ideological character.
We use Dutch data that include the entire population of children born between 1999 and 2007.
Combining postcode fixed effects models with treatment effect bounds, we find that children in religious schools outperform children in public schools on a high-stakes standardized test in primary education. The benefits of primary religious schooling were largest for children in Orthodox Protestant, Islamic and Hindu schools, which mostly attract children from a disadvantaged socioeconomic background.
However, the influence of religious schooling fades out by the end of secondary education.
Conférence James K. Boyce
- Bina Agarwal & James K. Boyce
L’étude des inégalités globales a connu ces dernières décennies un essor remarquable : inégalités économiques, sociales et environnementales ont fait l’objet de travaux théoriques et empiriques de plus en plus nombreux, visibles et influents partout dans le monde. Le Laboratoire sur les inégalités mondiales (World Inequality Lab) et le Centre de Recherche sur les Inégalités Sociales (CRIS) s’associent pour la première édition du Global Inequality Research Award (GiRA). Remis tous les 2 ans, il distingue des chercheuses et chercheurs de toutes disciplines, ayant contribué de manière décisive à la compréhension des inégalités globales.
Le GiRA valorise des travaux majeurs dans le domaine des inégalités mondiales comprenant deux dimensions clés : des recherches sur les inégalités menées aux quatre coins du monde ; et le traitement de l’inégalité en tant qu’objet complexe qu'il convient d'aborder sous tous les angles pour être pleinement appréhendé, compris et finalement atténué.
Pour cette première édition, le prix GiRA est décerné conjointement à Bina Argawal et James K. Boyce pour leurs travaux essentiels dans le champ des inégalités sociales et environnementales.
Bina Agarwal (Professeure en développement économique et environnement, Université de Manchester), est l’auteure de travaux pionniers sur les inégalités de genre, la gouvernance environnementale, l’environnementalisme féministe et les inégalités environnementales.
James K. Boyce (Professeur émérite en économie, Université du Massachusetts à Amherst) est l’auteur de travaux fondateurs sur les relations entre inégalités sociales et dégradations environnementales et a largement contribué à structurer le champ de l’économie politique de l’environnement.
Les deux lauréats sont invités à recevoir leur prix et à donner un aperçu de la portée de leurs travaux lors d’une conférence à Paris, respectivement à l’automne et au printemps 2024, organisée en lien avec l’initiative Social-Ecological Transitions (SET) de Sciences Po.
James Boyce recevra le prix GiRA le vendredi 5 avril 2024 à Sciences Po en Amphithéâtre Claude Erignac à 19h15 et dressera un panorama de ses travaux, 30 ans après la parution de "Inequality as a cause of environmental degradation (pdf, 159 ko)".
La conférence sera introduite par Lucas Chancel et Éloi Laurent.
L’entrée est libre dans la limite des places disponibles. Inscription obligatoire pour les publics externes à Sciences Po.
Le comité scientifique de la première édition du Prix GiRA est composé de Lucas Chancel (Sciences Po/CNRS, CRIS and World Inequality Lab, Paris School of Economics), Éloi Laurent (Sciences Po/OFCE), Thomas Piketty (EHESS & World Inequality Lab, Paris School of Economics) et Mirna Safi (Sciences Po/CNRS, CRIS).
Cette conférence est organisée dans le cadre de l’initiative SET (Social-Ecological Transitions) portée par l’OFCE, le CEE et le CSO, qui vise à encourager les collaborations entre chercheur(e)s travaillant à la frontière des questions sociales et environnementales, au-delà des limites disciplinaires ou institutionnelles. En savoir plus sur la SET
They have Black in their blood: Exploring how genetic ancestry tests affect racial appraisals and classifications
- Image Hyejin Kang (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, March 15th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
They have Black in their blood:
Exploring how genetic ancestry tests affect racial appraisals and classifications
Marissa E. Thompson
Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University
How do genetic ancestry tests (GATs) affect how Black Americans decide when others can – or cannot – identify as Black?
This study explores the role of GATs in shaping racial appraisal and classification logics.
Using a pre-registered nationally representative survey experiment that integrates causal inference with computational text analysis, we disentangle how ancestry (as measured by a GAT) affects how U.S.-born Black Americans draw boundaries around group membership and how these effects vary across setting and prior identification.
We find that, though higher levels of Sub-Saharan African ancestry predict higher likelihoods of approval and classification as Black, even individuals with low levels of such ancestry are likely to have their self-identification validated by respondents, consistent with the practice of hypodescent.
Furthermore, ancestry treatment effects are primarily mediated by perceptions of the integrity of the individual’s self-identification, suggesting that respondents believe there exists an underlying legitimate and honest way to identify that is partially based on one’s GAT result.
However, we also find that the aspects that affect approval and evaluations differ from those that affect classification; the ways that respondents selectively integrate different sources of information, including ancestry, occurs via a dual appraisal and classification process which we term racial contextualism.
The Startup Nation Paradox:
- Image OPOLJA (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, March 8th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
The Startup Nation Paradox:
How the French Welfare State Amplifies Gender Inequalities
Jen Schradie
Assistant Professor, Sciences Po - CRIS
Does the welfare state paradox apply to the startup tech sector? If so, how?
This theory posits that welfare states improve gender equality but not with leadership positions because women are perceived to overuse state-supported family leave policies. At the same time, digital technology was supposed to flatten societal differences. An early view of the dot-com era was that anyone with a novel idea or a computer could launch a startup. This Silicon Valley Ideology suggests that Internet technology can help overcome previous work-place hierarchies and inequalities because the playing field is more level in a networked capitalist society.
In this multi-method analysis of the French digital startup ecosystem, I find that the welfare state paradox does not operate with the tech sector in the same way as with existing corporate structures. Instead, the French state, in this case, indirectly benefits men more than women but not at the point of hiring or promotion. Instead, the mechanism is through the welfare state itself: government-funded unemployment and childcare benefits. Men are more strategically able to leverage employment payments as an investor while women wrestle with whether or not to make use of these payments at all, and due to family responsibilities women cannot always take advantage of limited childcare options as a new entrepreneur. Simply, a mismatch has emerged between policy design and market forms, especially with less formal, higher-risk work arrangements. The result is a startup nation paradox.
Losing Your Apartment and Losing Your School:
- Image Vectorium (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, March 1st 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
Losing Your Apartment and Losing Your School:
Prevalence and Consequences of Eviction-Led Forced Mobility for School-Age Children in Houston
Peter Hepburn
Assistant Professor, Rutgers University - Newark
Research Fellow, Eviction Lab, Princeton University
Eviction cases are concentrated among renter households with children, yet we know little about the repercussions of these cases for those children’s educational trajectories. Despite a large body of literature on the negative impacts of residential and school mobility on children’s educational outcomes, little research has been conducted specifically on involuntary moves, which are the moves likely to be most consequential to students.
In this study, we link eviction records in Harris County, TX to educational records of students enrolled in the Houston Independent School District between 2002 and 2016.
At least thirteen thousand public school students in Houston lived in households that were filed against for eviction during this period, with many facing repeated eviction cases. We describe the socio-demographic characteristics of these students, the school moves precipitated by eviction filings, and the effect of both eviction filings and school moves on the risk of absences and suspensions.
Choisir l'école privée ?
- Image olrat (via Shutterstock)
Choisir l'école privée ?
Discussion autour de l'ouvrage
À l'école primaire catholique: Une éducation bien ordonnée
Émilie Grisez, Éditions PUF, EAN 9782130836391, 2023, 280 p.
Lundi 4 mars 2024, 17h30-19h, Sciences Po, Campus Saint-Thomas, salle K011
Cette table ronde propose une réflexion sur les dynamiques éducatives de l'enseignement privé catholique, en explorant l'ouvrage paru en novembre 2023 aux PUF "À l'école primaire catholique. Une éducation bien ordonnée".
L'autrice de l'ouvrage, Émilie Grisez, sera accompagnée de deux chercheuses en sociologie de l'éducation pour aborder les thèmes et questions traités dans l'ouvrage, en particulier dans les chapitres portant sur l'imbrication des instances de socialisation et le projet éducatif de l'école.
Elles examineront les spécificités de l'éducation dispensée dans les écoles privées catholiques, et notamment ce qui les distinguent des écoles publiques et d'autres écoles privées dites "alternatives".
Cette rencontre offrira une plateforme d'échange pour explorer diverses perspectives sur l'éducation privée et le rôle de l'enseignement catholique dans le paysage éducatif contemporain.
Émilie Grisez est doctorante en sociologie au Centre de Recherche sur les Inégalités Sociales (CRIS, Sciences Po – CNRS) et à l’Institut national d’études démographiques (Ined). Ses recherches portent sur la sociologie de l’éducation, de l’enfance, de la famille, des religions et des inégalités.
Amelia Legavre est Maîtresse de conférences à l'Inspé de Bretagne, laboratoire CREAD.
Elle s'intéresse aux méthodes pédagogiques de la petite enfance à l'université, en particulier celles faisant appel à l'expression personnelle des enfants et des jeunes.Elle mobilise la sociologie du curriculum, des émotions, et de la famille. Sa thèse a porté sur les pédagogies dites "alternatives" au niveau du primaire, et leurs modalités visant à permettre aux élèves de partager leurs intérêts et leurs besoins au sein de la classe.
Audrey Chamboredon est doctorante en sociologie au Centre de Recherche sur les Inégalités Sociales (CRIS, Sciences Po – CNRS). Ses recherches portent sur l'articulation des choix résidentiels et scolaires des familles dans les métropoles de Lille et Toulouse.
Cette table ronde est ouverte sur inscription préalable : merci de vous enregistrer ici
Handbook of Human Mobility and Migration
- Image Sergii Gnatiuk (via Shutterstock)
Handbook on Human Mobility and Migration
Edited by Ettore Recchi
Professor of Sociology, Sciences Po - CRIS, and Part-time, European University Institute - MPC and
Mirna Safi, Full Professor of Sociology, Sciences Po - CRIS
Edward Elgar Publishing, 320 p., ISBN 978 1 83910 577 7
This book is organized in three major sections dubbed Rethinking, Mapping, and
Governing. The first section aims to establish the scene theoretically, discussing the historical,
sociological and political backdrop of migration and rethinking some conventional categories
of migration studies that are challenged by a mobility perspective. The second section intends
to describe the geographic scope of transnational human movements and the characteristics of critical mobile populations.
The third section revolves around the regulation and control of mobility and migration on a supra-national and global scale.
In each section the contributions are designed to answer what the editors of this volume deem to be key research questions in the field – a list that constitutes a first building block of readings for anyone wanting to explore mobility and migration studies.
·Is Homo sapiens a growingly mobile species (in the very long run)? Massimo Livi Bacci
·Have migrants become a distinct category in social stratification research? Mirna Safi
·Are migrants a select population? Mathieu Ichou
· Is there an end to mobility? Circular and onward migrants Louise Caron
· Are international and internal migration distinct phenomena? Marine Haddad and Haley McAvay
· How global is international mobility? Emanuel Deutschmann and Ettore Recchi
· Are high-speed rail and airplane mobilities socially stratified? Yoann Demoli and Frédéric Dobruszkes
· Where, when and why are students internationally mobile? Christof Van Mol, Joep Cleven and Benjamin Mulvey
· Child migration: who, where, when and why? Chiara Galli
· International retirement migration: who, where, when and why? Russell King
· Public opinion on immigration: is it converging globally or regionally? James Dennison and Alina Vrânceanu
· Visas and border infrastructures: what makes them tighter or looser? Fabian Gülzau and Steffen Mau
· Does the forced/voluntary dichotomy really influence migration governance? Hélène Thiollet, Ferruccio Pastore and Camille Schmoll
· Free movement regimes: is the EU experience exportable? Rainer Bauböck
· Transnational mobility and welfare rights: are they compatible? Maurizio Ferrera and Anna Kyriazi
· Who governs migration and mobilities globally? Andrew Geddes
Interview with editors to describe the project and its added value
The multiverse of social class:
- The Micro Socio-Economic Class Scheme
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, February 16th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
The multiverse of social class: a multi-scheme, multi-outcome
and multi-country analysis of class stratification
Carlo Barone
Professeur des universités, Sciences Po, CRIS, LIEPP
Social class is a central concept in sociology but sociologists have paid limited attention to its measurement.
This study contrasts the traditional ‘big class’ approach with more recent meso- and micro-class approaches to class analysis with respect to their capacity to explain inequalities in education, income and labor market outcomes, social attitudes and voting.
Different class theories suggest competing mechanisms behind social class stratification and assume primacy of different levels of occupational aggregation. Assessing 10 class schemes across 13 outcomes using data from up to 66 countries and more that 650.000 individuals, we offer the most comprehensive multi-scheme, multi-country analysis of class stratification.
We measure scheme performance in terms of average effect strength and model fit and carry out both pooled analyses and cross-national comparisons to assess whether the construct validity of class schemes varies across countries.
Partager les données de la recherche
- Image Mircea Moira (via Shutterstock)
La question du partage des données de la recherche est depuis plusieurs années devenue centrale dans le monde académique. Pour encourager la transparence, l’intégrité scientifique, la mise en partage et la ré-employabilité des données, les chercheur‧es sont encouragé‧es à rendre accessibles les données de leurs recherches. Mais quelles sont les conséquences de cette pratique ? Comment la mettre en place concrètement ?
Célia Bouchet est post-doctorante au CEET (Centre d'études de l'emploi et du travail) du CNAM. Ses recherches, menées notamment au CRIS et au LIEPP (au sein de l'axe Discriminations et Politiques catégorielles), portent sur les mesures et les mécanismes des inégalités sociales, notamment celles liées au handicap et au genre. Depuis la soutenance de sa thèse, elle a largement contribué à disséminer ses résultats de recherche, en facilitant l'accès à ses données. Elle est lauréate du Prix de thèse du Défenseur des Droits 2023 et du Prix science ouverte des données de la recherche 2023, remis par le Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche.
- Aviez-vous dès le départ de votre travail de thèse l'idée de conserver, documenter, permettre une réutilisation de vos données ?
Non, je pense que cette idée est venue parce que je n’avais pas vraiment de modèles d’ouvertures de données de thèse à disposition. Je n’ai pas été formée à la mise à disposition des données lors de mon master. J’avais plutôt des réflexes de protection des données allant à l’encontre d’une ouverture : protéger l’anonymat des personnes rencontrées en entretien, respecter l’engagement de non-partage des données passé avec l’Adisp (Archives de Données Issues de la Statistique Publique, qui gère la mise à disposition des enquêtes de la statistique publique). Cela étant, c’est une idée qui est arrivée tout de même assez rapidement, au bout d’un an de thèse environ, par deux intermédiaires différents. D’abord, j’ai participé à une formation de l'École de la recherche sur la gestion des données de la recherche, où cette question du devenir des données à l’issue de la recherche était évoquée. Ensuite, au moment du lancement de ma campagne d’entretiens quelques mois plus tard, ma directrice de thèse, Anne Revillard, m’a conseillé de profiter de la fiche d’information que je comptais distribuer aux personnes interrogées afin d’obtenir leur accord explicite pour que d’autres chercheur‧es puissent réutiliser les entretiens. Ces deux influences ont eu un rôle important.
- Est-ce que du personnel support vous a accompagnée dans la gestion de ces données ?
J’ai pu m’appuyer sur plusieurs collègues des équipes de soutien à la recherche. Cyril Heude, data librarian à Sciences Po, s’est rendu disponible pour créer mon compte sur Data Sciences Po, répondre à mes questions, émettre des suggestions, et publiciser mes jeux de données avec Guillaume Garcia, ingénieur de recherche au CDSP de Sciences Po. Paul Colin, anciennement responsable de la gestion et de l’ouverture des données pour le PPR Autonomie, m’a aussi conseillé lorsque j'ai commencé à rédiger un article méthodologique sur mon travail d’ouverture des données. Enfin, deux déléguées à la protection des données de Sciences Po, Marion Lehmans puis Nawale Lamrini, m’ont accompagnée pour garantir la conformité de ma recherche doctorale et du processus d’auto-dépôt au cadre réglementaire.
Légende: Page d’accueil de data.sciencespo, l’entrepôt de données de Sciences Po
- Aujourd’hui, comment gérez-vous les données de recherche que vous produisez ?
Légende: Page d’accueil du carnet Hypotheses de Célia Bouchet.
URL: https://celiabouchet.hypotheses.org/
- En tant que jeune chercheuse, comment vivez-vous le contexte croissant d’incitation à l’ouverture des données de la recherche ?
- Quels aspects vous semblent poser problème ?
- Est-il chronophage pour vous de préparer ces données ? Comment articulez-vous ce travail avec votre temps de recherche ?
C’est un travail d’une ampleur que je n’imaginais pas. Pour contextualiser, j’ai mis en ligne deux jeux de données : un jeu centré sur les matériaux qualitatifs de ma thèse, notamment les transcriptions d’entretiens, la fiche d’information que j’ai transmise aux personnes rencontrées, la grille d’entretien, etc ; et un jeu centré sur une exploitation statistique de l’Enquête emploi en continu, réalisée dans le cadre du volet quantitatif de ma thèse. Pour le volet qualitatif, comme je récoltais mes propres données, il a fallu beaucoup d’anticipation et de formalisation. Pour le volet quantitatif, j’ai pris la décision plus tard et j’avais davantage de marge de manœuvre. Mais dans les deux cas, cela impliquait un gros travail : changer tous les noms propres sur 1400 pages d’entretiens (pour une pseudonymisation renforcée) ; trier et nettoyer mes scripts de code, puis ajouter des explications didactiques au fur et à mesure ; déterminer les autres documents méthodologiques pertinents et les mettre en forme ; documenter tout ce processus dans des fichiers Read-Me… Cela m’a pris plusieurs centaines d’heures au total. Comme j’avais un contrat de recherche en journée, sur un projet différent, je prenais ce temps sur mes pauses déjeuners, mes soirées, mes week-ends. Je l’ai vécu comme long et fastidieux, et je n’encouragerais pas nécessairement quelqu’un d’autre à se lancer dans ces conditions.
- Avez-vous été confrontée à d’autres obstacles liés au partage de données ?
- Vos jeux de données facilitent-ils d'après vous la valorisation de vos travaux ?
Oui, mais de façon indirecte. J’ai été frappée par l’intérêt qu’a suscité mon travail d’auto-dépôt, davantage peut-être que les données déposées. J’ai été invitée à plusieurs reprises pour présenter ce processus d’ouverture des données : lors de la semaine DataSHS 2022, dans le cadre d’un séminaire CIVICA Open Science… J’ai aussi publié un article méthodologique dans la revue Genèses, où j’analyse mon expérience d’auto-dépôt. Ce sont de belles opportunités. En revanche, je n’ai pas connaissance de projets de recherche en cours qui envisagent de réutiliser mes données. Et je peux le comprendre, car on n’apprend pas vraiment à utiliser ce type de sources lors des formations en sciences sociales.
- Vous êtes lauréate du Prix science ouverte des données de la recherche 2023, pour votre Projet « EHDS: Enquête Handicap et destinées sociales ». Qu’est-ce que le jury a récompensé selon vous ?
Tracés, 2019, numéro spécial 19, “Les sciences humaines et sociales au travail (ii): Que faire des données de la recherche ?” DOI: 10.4000/traces.10518
Genèses, 2022, numéro 129, “Le procès des données”. DOI: 10.3917/gen.129.0003
Propos recueillis par le Centre de Recherche sur les Inégalités Sociales et le Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire d'Evaluation des Politiques Publiques de Sciences Po.
Publié dans la collection des Entretiens, notes & analyses du LIEPP
EN SAVOIR PLUS :
BENDJABALLAH Selma, GARCIA Guillaume, CADOREL Sarah et al., « Valoriser les données d’enquêtes qualitatives en sciences sociales : le cas français de la banque d’enquête beQuali », Documentation et bibliothèques, 2017/4 (Vol. 63), p. 73-85
BOUCHET, Célia. « Comment j’ai déposé les données de ma recherche (sans savoir ce qui m’attendait) » Genèses, 2023/4 (Vol 132), p. 113-129.
BOUCHET, Célia. Rendre accessible et visibiliser ses données et ses codes : retours sur une expérience d'entreposage. Semaine Data-SHS. Traiter et analyser les données quantitatives en sciences humaines et sociales 2022, Plateforme Universitaire de Données des Grands Moulins; Université Paris Cité; Centre de Données Socio-Politiques, Dec 2022.
LEPRINCE, Chloé. Butin à monnayer ou manne à partager : avec les données, les chercheurs peuvent-ils faire feu de tout bois ?, France Culture, 2023.
REBOUILLAT, Violaine. Ouverture des données de la recherche : de la vision politique aux pratiques des chercheurs. Sciences de l'information et de la communication. Conservatoire national des arts et metiers - CNAM, 2019.
REVELIN, Florence, LEVAIN, Alix, MIGNON, Morgane, NOEL, Marianne, QUEFFELEC, Betty, et al.. L'ouverture des matériaux de recherche ethnographiques en question. Rapport d'enquête du projet "Partage et protection des données qualitatives à l’ère du numérique : expériences, enjeux, stratégies". Rapport de recherche. Centre national de la recherche scientifique. 2021.
Guide thématique, Données de la recherche : suivez le guide, Bibliothèque de Sciences Po
Guide thématique, Qu’est ce que la science ouverte ?, Bibliothèque de Sciences Po
Guide thématique, Actualités de la science ouverte, Bibliothèque de Sciences Po
Guide thématique, Demande des bailleurs de fonds pour les projets financés, Bibliothèque de Sciences Po
Plus d’informations sur l’entrepot de données Nakala : https://www.nakala.fr/about
Pivots, Populism, and Moral Panics:
- Image JessicaGirvan (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, February 9th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
Pivots, Populism, and Moral Panics:
The Impact of Trump’s Position Reversal on Facemasks
Bartholomew Konechni
PhD Student, Sciences Po - CRIS
Populist leaders are often held responsible for their followers' poor compliance with public health recommendations. But what happens when populist leaders change position and endorse previously discouraged behaviours? This scenario is understudied in extant literature.
To fill this gap, the present work examines Trump’s pivot over masks on 1st July 2020, when he first encouraged their use.
Using a difference-in-differences (DiD) design, the paper finds that whilst Trump’s pivot lifted Republican’s propensity to wear facemasks, it didn’t change views about facemasks’ efficacy.
However, this study does find that Trump’s intervention was more impactful amongst Republicans living in parts of the country worst hit by the early-summer 2020 spike in COVID cases, suggesting that his capacity to shape behaviours lay not so much in persuading followers but in capitalising on a moment of moral panic when individuals were open to adopting new behaviours.
Sciences Po is hiring an Assistant Professor
- Sciences Po, 1 Saint-Thomas Campus
The position of Assistant Professor in Sociology (tenure-track) is affiliated to the Sciences Po - CRIS with the aim to reinforce and complement our expertise in the study of social inequality.The sucessful candidate is expected to play an active role in the center’s collective activity. He / she should also engage in responding to national and international calls to fund research projects and will teach in Sciences Po’s undergraduate and graduate programs.
Applications are due by March 11th 2024. Job talks expected in June 2024 (Paris). Position starting on September 1st, 2024.
We welcome candidates engaged in any of our faculty members' fields, such as education, gender, life course, labor market and economic inequality, social mobility, urban segregation, migration, ethnoracial minorities, cultural, digital, health, criminal justice and environmental inequality.
We particularly encourage applicants capable of stimulating new expertise in the center on algorithm and AI related inequalities, environmental inequalities or on labor market inequalities.
Profiles that broaden our comparative perspectives by adopting global approaches and/or focusing on low- and middle-income countries are also welcome.
Please download the complete job description and application procedure here (pdf, 121 ko)
Why Do Young Adults Co-Reside with Their Parents?
- Image Monkey Business (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, February 2nd 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
Why Do Young Adults Co-Reside with Their Parents?
Arthur Acolin
Associate Professor, Runstad Department of Real Estate,
College of Built Environments, University of Washington
Nearly one in every two adults aged 18–29 currently lives with their parents in the US, compared to slightly more than one in four in 1960.
The literature focuses on changing labor market conditions and marriage- childbearing delays to account for this shift.
Using a Blinder-Oaxaca procedure, we identify a role for housing affordability, measured by market level median housing rent or price to median household income ratios, as an additional factor in the increase in co-residency since but not before 2000.
We endogenize the marriage-childbearing decision with a Heckman selection model and attribute up to a quarter of the observed 9-percentage-point increase in the co-residence share between 2000 and 2021 to a decrease in housing affordability.
We find a non-linear relationship between affordability and co- residence with the relationship strongest in the least affordable metros where affordability constraints might be more binding. Overall, these results show changes in market level housing affordability are associated with the increase in young adult co-residence in the US over the first two decades of the 21 st century.
(Co-authors: Desen Lin, Cal State Fullerton, and Susan Wachter, University of Pennsylvania)
Migrant Farmworker Injury: Temporality and Eventfulness
- University of California Press , CNRS Editions, Dedovstock/Shutterstock
CRIS + LIEPP TALK
Migrant Farmworker Injury: Temporality and Eventfulness
Professor Seth M. Holmes
Cultural and medical anthropologist, Physician
University of California, Berkeley
ERC FOODCIRCUITS (2023-2028)
University of Barcelona, ICREA Catalan Institution of Research and Advanced Study
Thursday February 8th, Sciences Po, room C210/d'Innovation, 5 p.m. - 7 p.m.
How do social structures and social hierarchies impact bodies, health, injury, and disease for different categories of people?
How do social hierarchies and socially structured health assymetries come to be understood as normal and natural in society and in medicine? And when are they confronted or resisted?
The Centre for Research on social InequalitieS and the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies are pleased to invite Professor Seth Holmes, anthropologist and physician at the University of California at Berkeley. During his talk, Professor Holmes will share with us some of his original ethnographic work, partly explained in the book Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, recently updated and published by the University of California Press (2nd ed. nov. 2023). This work has been translated in French by CNRS Editions (Fruits frais, corps brisés: Les ouvriers agricoles migrants aux États-Unis).
Professor Holmes explores the ways in which social differences come to count – and be counted – in various senses. His main problematics are the gaze, racialization and racism; the subjectivation of the health professional and the embodied production of the clinical and epidemiological gaze; the legitimation, normalization and naturalization of social inequality.
He shared the daily life, suffering and resistance of Mexican migrants in the United States. He treked with his companions clandestinely through the desert into Arizona, lived with Indigenous families in the mountains of Oaxaca State and in farm labor camps. Exploited by the contemporary food system he planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, and accompanied sick workers to the hospitals.
During this talk, Professor Holmes will expand on his experience and discuss ths various ways in which social inequities come to be perceived as normal in society and in health care.
Please register here to join us. Thanks.
Daily use of social media increases body dissatisfaction of adolescent girls in a large cross-cultural survey
- Image Victor Velter (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, January 19th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
Daily use of social media increases body dissatisfaction of adolescent girls
in a large cross-cultural survey
Thomas Breda
CNRS - Paris School of Economics
We provide a large-scale investigation of the relationship between social media consumption and body dissatisfaction among a sample of more than 50,000 teenagers between 15 and 16 y.o.
This relation is positive and large for girls—higher use of social networks is associated with higher dissatisfaction about their body—and negative for boys.
The positive relation for girls is observed in all eight countries included in the study, covering very different cultural contexts (e.g., Georgia, Ireland, Spain, Mexico, Panama or Hong Kong).
It is observed for all girls, no matter their body mass index (BMI), their academic performance, and their socioeconomic background. Instrumenting social networks consumption by students’ or students’ peers’ internet access at home while controlling finely for other students’ or students’ peers’ household characteristics finally suggests that the relationship between social media consumption and girls' body dissatisfaction could be causal.
How do transparent admission standards increase the application to the college-bound upper-secondary school track:
- Image StockImageFactory.com (via Shutterstock)
CRIS & LIEPP Scientific Seminar
Friday, January 12th 2024, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K011 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
How do transparent admission standards increase the application
to the college-bound upper-secondary school track:
A series of randomized field experiments
Tamás Keller
HU-REN - Institute of Economics at the Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Budapest
Students require accurate information to navigate the education system. In response to this need, various information campaigns have emerged in different fields of social science, with the goal of providing students with essential details. A growing body of empirical literature suggests that schools’ admission standards may discourage students from applying due to the associated risk of non-admission, which students tend to avoid.
This study makes two key contributions to the literature on educational decision-making.
Firstly, we examine how the perception of schools’ admission standards influences students’ perceived admission chances, potentially dissuading them from applying.
Secondly, we conduct a series of pair-matched, cluster-randomized field experiments, revealing schools’ actual admission standards to qualified students to encourage their application.
Our findings indicate that our light-touch treatment led to a small and statistically insignificant main effect.
The paper further delves into heterogeneity in the treatment effect and speculates on reasons why pure information campaigns may not be fully effective.
Inequality and the Environment Symposium for Early-Career Researchers
- Image Lightspring (via Shutterstock)
Inequality and the Environment Symposium for Early-Career Researchers
Organized by Sciences Po's Center for Research on social InequalitieS,
in partnership with the World Inequality Lab - Paris School of Economics
and the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy - Harvard Kennedy School
Thursday, 18 January 2024
Sciences Po, 1 Place Saint-Thomas d’Aquin 75007 Paris
Rising inequality and environmental degradation are two critical challenges of our time. The social sciences have increasingly focused on their interactions over the last two decades (Martinez Alier 2003, Laurent 2012, Chancel 2020). Nevertheless, our knowledge about the interplay between socio-economic inequality, environmental degradation, and environmental policies remains limited. The literature on inequality and the environment presents various conceptual, empirical, and theoretical gaps hindering societies’ ability to effectively address these issues.
Substantively, important questions remain unanswered, such as: How can governments address inequality while averting the exacerbation of climate and biodiversity crises, both domestically and internationally? Which welfare regimes could be compatible with deep decarbonization? What types of political coalitions can support these changes? What role have income and wealth inequality played in accelerating or slowing environmental degradation? How can public policies promote changes in citizens’ environmental behaviour while taking social inequalities into account?
This symposium aims to present, discuss, and foster innovative approaches to social science research on environmental inequality across three broad research streams : (i) Inequalities in the impacts of environmental degradation; (ii) Inequalities in contributions to environmental damage; and (iii) Inequalities in capacities to act against pollution or to cope with environmental policies.
PROGRAM
- Welcome and introduction
- Session 1 Global Inequality of Contributions (9:10-11:10, plenary, location B108 Salon scientifique)
- Federica Cappelli - Unequal Contributions to CO2 Emissions along the Income Distribution Within and Between Countries
- Markus Nabernegg - Environmental Engel Curves with Predicted Consumption of High-Income Households, Applied to Ecuador
- Elisa Palagi - Revisiting the Emission-Inequality Nexus across Stages of Development
- Yannic Rehm - The Carbon Footprint of Capital – Evidence from France, Germany and the US based on Distributional Environmental Accounts
- Parallel session 2A: Inequality in Policy Impacts (11:30-13:30, location B108 Salon scientifique)
- Philipp Bothe - Inequality in Exposure to Harmful Air Pollution
- Clara Dallaire-Fortier - A Balancing Act? Local Fiscal Resilience After Mine Closures
- Jacob Greenspon - Locally-tailored Policy Responses to the U.S. Decarbonization Job Transition
- Lena Kilian - Achieving Emission Reductions without Furthering Social Inequality: Lessons from the 2007 Economic Crisis and the COVID-19 Pandemic
- Parallel session 2B: Inequality of Impact: Climate Shocks (11:30-13:30, location CS16)
- Filippo Pavanello - Adapting to Heat Extremes with Unequal Access to Cooling: Evidence from India
- Risto Conte Keivabu - Temperature and School Absences: Evidence from England
- Matteo Coronese - Raided by the Storm: Impacts on Income and Wages from Three Decades of U.S. Thunderstorms
- Giulia Valenti - Temperature and Health Capital: Long-Term Consequences of Exposure in Early Childhood
- Parallel session 3A: Inequality of Capacity to Act and Political Representation (14:30 - 16:30, location B108 Salon scientifique)
- Mélusine Boon-Falleur - Leveraging social cognition to promote effective climate change mitigation
- Matthias Petel - Litigating for Future Generations... and for the Just Transition? The Unequal Integration of Climate Justice Dimensions by the Courts
- Laura Silva - Climate Extremes and Socio-Political Attitudes: A European Social Survey Analysis
- Nathalie Vigna - Who is ready to pay for protecting the environment? Social and spatial divides in Western countries
- Parallel session 3B: Climate Inequalities: Contributions, Impacts, Capacities (Urban segregation, elite strategies, policies) (14:30 - 16:30, location CS16)
- Jens Ergon - Inequality and Emissions: Managing the Interlinked Challenges of a Just Transformation
- Thomas Neier - The Green Divide: A Spatial Analysis of Segregation-Based Environmental Inequality
- Shay O’Brien - Parasite: The Relational Continuity of Extraction in a Settler Colonial Upper Class
- Martina Pardy - Climate Impacts and Wealth Inequality: Global Evidence from a Novel Subnational Dataset
- Session 4: Climate Inequalities and Poverty and Concluding Remarks (16:45-18:00 plenary, location B108 Salon scientifique)
- Thomas Bézy - The Incidence of Flood Risk
- Manisha Mukherjee - Scorching Heat and Shrinking Horizons: The Impact of Rising Temperatures on Marriages and Migration in Rural India
Organizing committee
Carlo Barone (co-chair), Lucas Chancel (co-chair), Eloi Laurent, Allison Rovny.
Registration for this event is closed. However, if you are interested in attending, please send us an email, and we will do our best to accommodate your request.
Digital Divides? The Heterogeneous Effect of Broadband Internet Expansion on Adolescent Educational Outcomes
- Image from pathdoc (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, December 15th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
Digital Divides?
The Heterogeneous Effect of Broadband Internet Expansion on Adolescent Educational Outcomes
Pablo Gracia
Professor, Trinity College Dublin
The expansion of internet is likely to influence adolescent academic outcomes. Yet, how internet coverage impacts students’ educational performance remains poorly understood.
The present study addresses this major knowledge gap by using a quasi-experimental approach to causally assess how the gradual introduction of home broadband internet across Norwegian municipalities impacted the academic outcomes of graduates from lower-secondary schools (N = 103,796).
Analyses apply sibling fixed-effects models with micro-level registry data from adolescents aged 15 to 16, and compare differences by gender, social background, migrant status, and achievement levels.
Findings show that the introduction of broadband internet across municipalities led to moderate grade improvements, concentrated on boys in the subject areas of Mathematics, Arts and Crafts, Social Sciences, and Norwegian. The positive effect of broadband internet coverage on academic performance was three times larger for boys than for girls. For boys, broadband internet coverage led to strong grade improvements among students of lower-achievement levels and from disadvantaged socioeconomic background, and to moderate grade increases in boys of Norwegian background, while boys from higher-achieving groups and privileged socioeconomic backgrounds reduced their grades moderately.
By contrast, for girls, the expansion of broadband internet coverage worsened substantially the academic performance of those from disadvantaged socioeconomic background, but led to higher grades among girls of migrant origin.
These findings imply that broadband internet growth impacts adolescent educational performance, but differently across population groups, revealing a complex intersection across gender, social background, migrant status, and achievement levels.
The implications of the study are globally discussed by considering literature on digital divides, stratification, and adolescent academic outcomes.
To find out more
Women in Times of Crisis
- Image by Mary Long (via shutterstock)
Women in Times of Crisis: Rethinking the Extraordinary and the Everyday
Columbia University, Sciences Po, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University
Alliance on-line conference, Friday, October 18, 2024
The 21st century has been one of crisis, including the geopolitical shock of September 11, 2001, the global financial crisis (2007-2008), the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine (2022) and the new war in Israel and Gaza (2023). These events have come on top of disasters associated with climate change, and the anxieties stemming from populist political discourses. Such multiple, extraordinary phenomena have led to extraordinary policy responses, stretching governmental powers; they have altered distributions of resources, and disrupted the organization of everyday life. As they have hardened inequalities, crisis politics and policies have also exacerbated polarization and favored rising illiberalism.
In these contexts, women have often, though not always, been disadvantaged: the pandemic, for example, brought increased gender-based violence as well as excess burdens of care; climate change- related displacement has affected women and children disproportionately; war and conflict have – yet again – been marked by sexual violence and casualities among women as non-combatants; while illiberalism has been characterized by direct attacks on gender-related rights (regarding sexual and reproductive health, freedom of expression and mobilization in the public square).
Researchers and advocates have examined the impacts of these crises on gender relations, and, specifically, on the status of women in relation to the intersectional factors that determine their life chances. Such analyses explore specific situations (e.g., the pandemic or the war in Ukraine), uncovering the gender-differentiated effects of the policies and politics they have led to. The specific crises to which they refer provide a temporal/spatial frame – but the significance of ‘thinking through’ crisis as an episteme is rarely thematized. Turning points that alter pre-existing equilibria and which are located in specific series of events, that we denote as “crises,” are often framing devices whose implications remain unexamined.
Two sets of implications of these analyses need to be discussed. Substantively, this research often reveals how the effect of a particular crisis reflects underlying structural factors. The crisis, in other words, illuminates the everyday as much as the extraordinary. As such, looking at crises ought to allow us to re-examine our perspectives on social organization more broadly, and not simply at a particular moment: we can debate feminist theory by ‘thinking through’ the literature on crisis.
Epistemologically, the literature of crisis invites a reflection on crisis as an episteme: as a way of making sense of the world that simultaneously highlights rupture in social life, and which justifies such rupture as driving political and policy responses. The “work” that “crisis” does is worth investigating per se. What does it mean for feminist scholarship as well as policy-making that we lurch from crisis to crisis? How useful is the notion of “crisis” really? What does it allow us to think, and what does it obscure?
This on-line conference, co-organized by Columbia University, Sciences Po (Paris), and Paris 1 Sorbonne-University, seeks to bring together scholars in the Alliance network who have examined the impacts of recent crises on women to ask both what we have learned substantively about gender relations when policies are formulated in apparently extraordinary – and dire – contexts, and how our frames of reference have held up. In this rapid succession of critical moments, does the distinction between the extraordinary and the everyday, or, to put it somewhat differently, between ordinary life and times of crisis, continue to make sense? In which contexts is the distinction relevant? The conference seeks, therefore, to address both the substantive and the epistemological lessons for the analysis of women’s conditions of the recent past.
Independent of the type of crisis, women seem disproportionately vulnerable. As a result, equity between women and men is under further pressure, in all regions of the world (including in high income countries), and women’s economic, social and political participation is increasingly at risk.
Feminist scholars traditionally aim to understand the nature of gender inequalities in societies which are often at the intersection of income, country-of-origin, age and family status.
This conference intends to bring together social scientists in the Alliance network who work on gender-specific topics related to crises such as:
• climate change
• the global pandemic
• economic downturn and/or economic change (linked to AI, for example)
• demographic shocks linked to migration, fertility and/or mortality
• war and conflict
• illiberalism and/or political radicalization
Besides assembling empirical work about the impact of crises on women across the world, the conference will allow a holistic theoretical framework of women in times of crisis to be formulated. By considering different crises not only as risks of pushback, but as potential turning points, we may discuss how different crises affect feminist thinking, what the constant risk of crisis implies for feminism today, and what work on women in crises has brought and can bring in terms of policy reactions, dangers and opportunities.
The conference will take place on Friday, October 18th, 2024, as an on-line webinar, between 2 pm CET/8 am EST and 8 pm CET/2 pm EST.
The conference is part of the Alliance Program, but external submissions are also welcome. It aims to produce scientific contributions to the field, as well as policy-briefs for government, public institutions and other actors. The conference will also help to link up researchers in view of creating a more or less formal network of persons working in the areas covered by the conference. The conference will eventually figure as kick-off meeting for work on a joint publication (not mandatory).
Submission deadline: February 29, 2024. Proposals for communications should be about 300 words long and include a short biography of authors (institution, position, main research and teaching activities). Communications should be sent to Angela Greulich (angela.greulich@sciencespo.fr) and Nicholas Sowels (nicholas.sowels@univ-paris1.fr).
Scientific committee: Laurie Breban (Université Paris 1), Ariane Dupont (Université Paris 1), Yasmine Ergas (Columbia), Marta Dominguez Folgueras (Sciences Po - CRIS), Angela Greulich (Sciences Po - CRIS), Emmanuelle Kalfon (Université Paris 1), Hélène Périvier (Sciences Po - PRESAGE), Nadeera Rajapakse (Université Paris 1), Nicholas Sowels (Université Paris 1).
Organization committee: Angela Greulich (Sciences Po - CRIS), Nicholas Sowels (Université Paris 1).
Racial-Ethnic Stratification in Work-Family Strategies among Black, Hispanic, and White Couples
- Image GingerKitten (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, December 8th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
Racial-Ethnic Stratification in Work-Family Strategies among Black, Hispanic, and White Couples
Léa Pessin
Assistant Professor of Sociology, ENSAE-CREST
This presentation builds on work-family scholarship and intersectional frameworks to document racial-ethnic variation in couples’ work-family strategies, i.e., the strategies couples deploy to respond to their work and family demands.
Existing research on the division of labor finds traditional gender norms continue to dictate how couples share paid and unpaid work in the United States. Yet, this narrative relies primarily on the structural conditions and cultural expectations of white and middle-class women. Black and Hispanic women and men face different labor market opportunities and hold different cultural expectations about gendered responsibilities in families.
We use the 2017-2019 Panel Study of Income Dynamics (https://psidonline.isr.umich.edu) and multi-group latent-class analysis to determine typical work-family strategies for paid work, housework, and carework among U.S. different-sex couples, as well as how the prevalence of these strategies vary across racially homogamous Black, Hispanic, and white couples.
Results illustrate the variety of work-family strategies employed by different-sex Black, Hispanic, and white couples, with some following gender traditional norms, and others sharing their domestic load more equitably. Compositional differences between couples explain little of the racial-ethnic differences in work-family strategies prevalence, though parenthood emerges as an important stratifying mechanism of how couples spend their time.
This work provides support for an intersectional, couple-level approach to explaining how racialized couples spend time in work and family domains.
A l'école primaire catholique
- Image Monkey Business (via Shutterstock)
À l'école primaire catholique
Une éducation bien ordonnée
Émilie Grisez
PUF, Collection Éducation et société, 290 p.
Code ISBN: 978-2-13-083639-1
Lien vers l'éditeur
Le secteur d'enseignement privé sous contrat prend en charge 17,6 % des élèves du primaire et du secondaire, soit plus de deux millions d’élèves. Il accueille deux enfants sur cinq au cours de leur scolarité. À Paris, l’enseignement catholique sous contrat scolarise plus de 80 000 élèves, soit 23 % des élèves parisiens (rentrée 2021).
L’attachement des familles aux écoles catholiques et leur importance numérique ont constitué deux éléments motivant l’étude de leur mode de socialisation, auxquels s’ajoute un troisième : l’intérêt pour leur « caractère propre ». Chaque école promeut un projet éducatif fondé sur l'Évangile imbriquant apprentissages, connaissances, valeurs et vérités.
L'ouvrage propose de rendre compte de la socialisation des enfants dans ce type d’établissement, c’est-à-dire de la façon dont ils sont formés et transformés par l’institution. Une école primaire privée catholique sous contrat, dans un quartier privilégié, a été choisie pour mener une enquête de terrain. L'ouvrage analyse le processus de socialisation des enfants entre école, famille, paroisse et groupe de pairs. Il décrit la construction en train de se faire de dispositions socialement différenciées et différenciatrices. Le terme dispositions recouvre ici les façons d'être, de faire, de voir le monde, comme les inclinaisons à agir de telle ou telle manière ou de ressentir les choses.
D’octobre 2019 à mars 2020, l'auteure a mené un travail ethnographique mêlant observations, entretiens et questionnaires, au contact de tous les aspects de la vie scolaire : classes, cour de récréation, cantine, séances de sport et sorties, mais aussi catéchèse et célébrations religieuses. Au total, 214 heures d’observation et plusieurs centaines de pages de journal de terrain ont été saisies.
L'ouvrage vise à contribuer à la sociologie de l’école, des styles éducatifs parentaux et de la différenciation
sociale durant l’enfance, en se focalisant sur un contexte de socialisation spécifique, celui de l’école catholique, et un milieu particulier, celui des classes supérieures à fort capital culturel et économique.
Une question a guidé l’enquête : quel type de personne l’école et les parents visent-t-ils à former, par quels moyens, et y parviennent-ils ?
Ce travail scientifique a pour ambition d'étudier ce que le dispositif "école catholique" fait aux enfants, mais également ce que les enfants font dans et de ce dispositif.
Les concepts d’éducation globale, de contrôle social, de coordination, de disposition et d’épreuve de socialisation sont mobilisés.
Il est à noter que les travaux sociologiques sur ce type d'établissements sont largement moins nombreux que ceux consacrés à l'école publique.
En conclusion l'auteure évalue un dispositif socialisateur des parents et de l'école particulièrement puissant et efficace. Quand les enfants quittent l'école primaire, ils ont acquis à la fois des dispositions valorisées sur le plan scolaire et des compétences relationnelles qui leur permettent de vivre dans une société de pairs partageant un même statut social. On remarque leur capacité à adapter leur attitude aux situations et à l’adulte référent, selon la légitimité qu’ils accordent à l’activité qui leur est proposée et à la personne qui l’encadre. Ils développent un statut collectif élevé et un sens de leur position privilégiée. Ils ont de grandes ambitions pour leur futur et un sens social qui leur permet de se repérer dans le monde.
Measuring the educational gradient of period fertility
- Image Ground Picture (via Shutterstock)
Measuring the educational gradient of period fertility in 28 European countries:
A new approach based on parity-specific fertility estimates
Angela Greulich, Laurent Toulemon (INED)
Demographic Research, vol. 49, art. 34, p. 905-968, doi.org/10.4054/DemRes.2023.49.34
By delivering a new method for measuring the educational gradient of fertility for women who are of childbearing age (15-49) rather than for women who have already completed their reproductive years, the research enables a timely analysis of within-country differentials of period fertility behavior.
To measure period fertility by education for 24 EU and 4 non-EU countries in Europe, data from the European Union’s Survey of Income and Living Conditions, EU-SILC (Eurostat 2020) have been used. With a semi-retrospective approach, the authors observe the parity-specific fertility behavior of cohorts that are of childbearing age, while at the same time recording the educational level correctly. Bayesian statistics allow to obtain credible intervals for the age-, education-, and parity-specific birth probabilities for each country. These birth probabilities are then combined into a multi-state life table in order to obtain parity-specific and total birth intensities by education. A post-stratification of birth probabilities allows consistency with national fertility estimates, enabling international comparisons of specific groups (e.g., highly educated women) or of particular dimensions of fertility behavior (e.g., childlessness).
The analytical-setup reveals whether there are significant differences in fertility behavior between education groups in each European country and how these differentials vary between countries.
The authors answer the question of whether heterogeneity in period fertility behavior is greater among the higher- or the lower-educated. In addition, they show for which parity the heterogeneity between education groups is the largest.
Even if low-educated women have the highest period fertility levels in almost all covered European countries, the educational gradient is not always negative. In one-third of European countries, period fertility levels in 2010 exhibit a U-shaped pattern, with the middle-educated having the lowest fertility. The diversity in period fertility levels among highly educated women in Europe is due to the transitions to first and second childbirth of highly educated women being higher in some countries than in others, while higher-order childbirths exhibit a more negative educational gradient across Europe.
The Politics of Nationhood: A Theory of Diversity Culture in the Contemporary United States
- Image based on melitas (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, December 1st 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1, St-Thomas-d'Aquin)
The Politics of Nationhood:
A Theory of Diversity Culture in the Contemporary United States
Mitchell L. Stevens
Professor, Stanford Graduate School of Education
The idea that ethno-racial and cultural diversity is a positive attribute in organizational life has become deeply divisive in contemporary US culture.
Elites in many institutional domains of US society — higher education, tech, corporate America and the Democratic Party — perform strong commitment to the diversity idea.
Yet diversity also engenders fierce opposition among cultural and political conservatives.
Sociologists have amply investigated the rise of the diversity idea but have little explanation for the strong emotions and costly activism it engenders across the political spectrum.
Drawing on institutional theory, political-historical sociology, cultural theory, and the sociologies of nationalism and religion, my coauthors and I develop a syncretic theory of diversity culture as a strand of American civil religion: an ongoing tradition of practice and discourse about who constitutes the American nation.
Developed initially among academic elites in the 1970s, diversity culture has sought to extend the idea of e pluribus unum to explicitly include people who are not white.
While obvious to many, the hegemony of this idea has never been absolute, and is increasingly challenged by populist movements anchored in enduring traditions of racial hierarchy.
Non-standard work and children’s education consequences
- Fig 1 - Parents’ temporary contracts and children’s school track (B. Betthäuser)
The temporal dimension of parental employment: Temporary contracts, non-standard work schedules, and children’s education in Germany
Bastian Betthäuser, Nhat An Trinh, Anette Eva Fasang
European Sociological Review, jcad073, https://doi.org/10.1093/esr/jcad073
Even though non-standard employment is on the rise, we still know little about how common non-standard work is amongst parents, and whether its negative consequences are further transmitted to their children. Using data from the German Microcensus (2012-2019), this article documents the prevalence and concentration of temporary employment and non-standard work schedules in households with children in Germany. It also examines the extent to which variation in this temporal dimension of parental employment is associated with children’s school track.
Results show that in about half of all German households with children in lower-secondary school at least one parent has a temporary contract or regularly works evenings or Saturdays. The authors find that children whose mother always works evenings or Saturdays are substantially less likely to transition to the academic school track. By contrast, they find no significant association between fathers’ non-standard work schedules and children’s school track and no evidence of an association between parents’ temporary employment and children’s school track placement.
These divergent findings highlight the importance of disaggregating non-standard work into its specific components and differentiating between mothers' and fathers' non-standard work when investigating the consequences of parental non-standard work for children’s educational and life chances.
Displacing Refugees: Resettlement and the Reconstitution of Families
- "Families Belong Together" protest, Image Jana Shea (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, November 24th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room F. Goguel (27, St Guillaume)
Displacing Refugees: Resettlement and the Reconstitution of Families
Molly Fee
Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow in Sociology
Nuffield College, University of Oxford
Sociologists traditionally use integration as the framework for studying the benefits and shortcomings of refugee resettlement, which is considered a durable solution for forced migrants.
This paper problematizes dominant narratives of resettlement as a time of integration and a solution to displacement.
Based on over one thousand hours of ethnographic fieldwork and 102 interviews with refugees and services providers in two U.S. cities, I show how displacement extends through initial resettlement.
By using families as the unit of analysis, this paper demonstrates how the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program reconstitutes kinship structures in three distinct ways,
1) by prolonging earlier separations caused by forced migration,
2) by creating new separations that become difficult to rectify, and
3) by bringing together outdated family units.
Consequently, resettlement engenders social, emotional, and economic consequences that are further disruptive to refugees’ lives.
This paper offers a novel framework for understanding the early stages of a refugee's resettlement. I center refugees’ experiences to make visible all of the tensions caused by this humanitarian program. By focusing on how resettlement reconstitutes refugee families, I contribute to the scholarship on immigrant families and advance sociological understandings of displacement.
Réception du congé de paternité, parentalités et masculinités de la grossesse à la petite enfance
- Image Fumika Shibata (via Shutterstock)
Se montrer présent
Réception du congé de paternité, parentalités et masculinités
de la grossesse à la petite enfance
Soutenance de thèse de Alix Sponton
Vendredi 15 décembre 2023 à 14h30, à l'IEP de Paris, 1 place Saint-Thomas d'Aquin (présentiel uniquement).
Les congés postnataux destinés aux pères sont aujourd’hui considérés comme des leviers d’action clés pour réduire les inégalités femmes-hommes, notamment parce qu’ils contribueraient à un meilleur partage des responsabilités familiales. À partir d’enquêtes quantitatives et d’entretiens répétés auprès d’hommes avant et après la naissance de leur premier enfant, cette thèse questionne dans quelle mesure, et par quels procédés, le congé de paternité de deux semaines (2002-2021) favorise effectivement la participation masculine aux tâches parentales et ménagères en France. Elle croise sociologie de l’action publique, de la famille et du genre.
Alors que la littérature a davantage examiné les effets de la durée des congés posés par les hommes sur leur engagement parental, cette thèse souligne l’importance de considérer les différentes manières dont les pères emploient la politique publique, en pratique. La période à laquelle les deux semaines sont mobilisées révèle des interprétations et usages variés du congé, qui n’ont pas les mêmes implications. Lorsqu’il est posé dès la naissance, le congé de paternité entraine un pic d’engagement paternel et un meilleur partage du sommeil au cours de l’après-accouchement. Par contraste, lorsque le congé de paternité est reporté de quelques semaines, avant que les mères n’aient repris leur activité professionnelle, les pères l’utilisent le plus souvent au cours de périodes de vacances pour profiter de moments conviviaux en famille, souvent loin du domicile et du quotidien.
À plus long terme, les hommes qui ont posé un congé participent légèrement plus aux tâches parentales les plus valorisées, mais leurs compagnes ne réduisent pas leur propre investissement temporel. Ainsi, sans la mise en place d’autres arrangements professionnels durables, le recours perturbe peu la division genrée des rôles parentaux. Par ailleurs, le suivi des trajectoires parentales souligne que la façon dont les pères s’approprient la politique préfigure, plus qu’elle n’influence, les pratiques paternelles.
Finalement, le recours au congé est particulièrement emblématique des normes de « présence paternelle » actuelles, en ce qu’il permet à la plupart des pères de rendre visible un intérêt pour l’enfant sans compromettre l’activité professionnelle.
Composition du jury:
Laura Bernardi, professeure ordinaire, Université de Lausanne (rapportrice)
Marta Domínguez Folgueras, associate professor, Sciences Po, CRIS (codirectrice)
Alban Jacquemart, maître de conférences, Université Paris Dauphine, IRISSO (examinateur)
Agnès Martial, directrice de recherche, CNRS, CNE/EHESS (rapportrice)
Ariane Pailhé, directrice de recherche, Ined (codirectrice)
Olivia Samuel, professeure des universités, Université Paris Nanterre, Cresppa (examinatrice)
Call for Two PhD Candidates
- Image Antonio Guillem (via Shutterstock)
The Center for Research on Social Inequalities (CRIS) at Sciences Po invites applications for two three-year PhD fellowships within the remit of the ERC project: A Social Demography of Widowhood across Ageing Societies.
This ground-breaking research moves beyond the state-of-the-art in at least four ways to establish a social demography of widowhood.
The foundation of the project lies in an innovative conceptual and methodological approach to the risk and vulnerability to widowhood. While risk aims at the probability and duration of widowhood, vulnerability focuses on its mental health and economic consequences. Current assessments of widowhood effects are limited to change in wellbeing directly after bereavement with a special focus on unexpected deaths. However, the most prevalent scenario entails a process of terminal health decline in the years before death. The consequences of the often neglected longer process of expected widowhood may be larger than the shorter process of unexpected widowhood.
Three ground-breaking pillars build on risk and vulnerability to examine social inequalities by socioeconomic status, race-ethnicity and nativity, social support networks, gender and age, as well as country differences and change over time.
High-quality cross-sectional and longitudinal data sources will be harmonized and applied to an advanced set of statistical methods for up to 60 ageing countries varying in demographic trends and welfare systems from 1985 with projections to 2050. A social demography of widowhood will supplement fragmented evidence with systematic and comprehensive estimates on risk and vulnerability, provide insights into the challenges facing a growing widowed population and their family members, and facilitate new research on sustainable pension and elder care systems.
Two openings:
- the risk of widowhood
- the vulnerability to widowhood.
Applicants should specify whether they are applying to the position focused on the risk or the vulnerability of widowhood. It is expected that the successful applicants will contribute to research on how the risk or vulnerability to widowhood varies across social groups and across countries. Interested persons are asked to refer to the project proposals for more information and contact Zachary Van Winkle (zachary.vanwinkle@sciencespo.fr) with any questions.
Requirements:
- Master’s degree in sociology, demography, economics, gerontology or a related field,
- Background or strong interest in family sociology and/or demography as well as quantitative methods,
- Previous experience with cross-sectional and/or longitudinal data preparation and analysis in Stata, R or similar
- Ability to work independently and collaboratively
- Excellent English language skills
Start date September 1st, 2024, on the Sciences Po Campus (Paris Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin).
Please download the complete job description and application procedure here (pdf, 266 ko)
Reproduction of inequalities: the role of Justice and police institutions
- Magda Boutros (Image Alexis Lecomte / Sciences Po)
Since this fall, Magda Boutros is a new permanent researcher, joining the CRIS team.
In addition to her personal page and C.V., Magda Boutros agreed to answer a few questions to better present her field of study and her ongoing / future projects.
- Can you tell us a little more about your background before joining CRIS?
Before getting into academia I worked as a human rights researcher in Egypt on issues of policing, criminal justice, and prison conditions, including during the 2011 revolution. I decided to get a PhD in sociology because I wanted to better understand how these institutions function, and how people organise collectively to resist the violence and inequalities that they produce. I got my PhD from Northwestern University; then I spent one year at Brown University as a postdoc, before taking on a faculty position at the University of Washington in 2021. I joined CRIS in September 2023.
- How would you describe your area of expertise and your main field of investigation?
My research examines the violence and inequalities produced and reproduced by policing and criminal justice institutions, and how people act collectively to challenge them.
I'm currently finalising a book about French movements against racialised policing, which compares three activist coalitions. The book analyses how activists challenge the power of the police to determine what is known, and what remains unknown, about policing and the inequalities it generates - how they produce evidence of the policing practices they denounce, and how their knowledge-making practices shape their discourse and their influence on the political debate.
Previously, I studied how Egyptian activists developed novel tactics to make up for the police's failure to protect women from sexual violence in public spaces, through "intervention teams" that they deployed during protests and in large crowds.
- What do you particularly want to develop in terms of research over the next few years? What work will mark the beginning of your career at CRIS?
So far, my work has focused on activist movements against policing. In my upcoming projects, I intend to focus more on analysing policing practices that reproduce violence and inequalities, and on the mechanisms that undergird these practices. For example, I'm currently involved in a collaborative project with Aline Daillère on the "eviction of undesirables" from public spaces (the police's term, not mine), through identity checks, detention in police custody, and monetary fines. We're looking at why these practices are growing in France over the past decade, what they look like in practice, who they target, and what their consequences are for marginalised groups.
- What current events are currently attracting your attention in the public arena, that you're following, or that raise questions for you?
Right now, the extreme violence and destruction unleashed in the Middle East is taking all my attention. It raises similar questions that I work on, about state violence and how racialisation processes help justify and normalise it.
The Principle of Dynastic Succession in Wealth Transmission
- Image Monkey Business Images (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, November 17th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room Salle du Conseil (13, Université)
The Principle of Dynastic Succession in Wealth Transmission
Nhat An Trinh
Research Officer
Institute for New Economic Thinking
Department of Social Policy and Intervention
Nuffield College, University of Oxford
Mounting research documents that wealth strongly persists across generations. Inheritances and inter-vivo gifts from parents to children are key contributors to this persistence. Intergenerational transfers are yet not only made unequally between families. It has been shown that a substantial share of intergenerational transfers is also made unequally within families.
In this study, we address this puzzle of unequal division and empirically investigate the distribution of intergenerational transfers through the lens of what we call the ‘principle of dynastic succession’.
This principle states that intergenerational transfers are made such that the family and its wealth are carried on into the long-lasting future, leading to unequal division.
Analyzing administrative data from the German inheritance and gift tax register (2007-2020), we argue that the principle is particularly salient in the presence of structuring assets (e.g. family business) and that its application varies along the estate distribution.
Going beyond individual parent-child transactional relationships, the principle of dynastic succession allows to link intra-familial disparities to long-term persistence in overall wealth inequality more broadly. Thereby, it sheds light on a so far neglected mechanism through which the family generates inequalities both within and between generations.
Beyond “Do neighbourhoods matter?”
- Image Andriy Blokhin (via Shuterstock)
Beyond “Do neighbourhoods matter?
Investigating heterogeneous neighbourhood effects on youth development
PhD Thesis Defence
Laura Silva
Thursday, November 30th, Sciences Po
Jury:
Lidia Panico, Professeur des universités, Sciences Po, CNRS, CRIS
Haley McAvay, Lecturer, University of York
Mirna Safi, Full Professor, Sciences Po, CNRS, CRIS (supervisor)
Geoffrey Wodtke, Associate Professor, University of Chicago (rapporteur)
Fabrizio Bernardi, Catedratico , Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (rapporteur)
Felix Tropf, Associate Professor, University College London (UCL) and Purdue University
Neighbourhoods are meso-level social structures within which individuals live and develop and are therefore known to affect youth education-related outcomes. I try to better understand the specific conditions under which neighbourhood effects may take place and the specific underlying mechanisms.
In this PhD thesis, I investigate three research questions: Does neighbourhood deprivation shape the development of cognitive and non-cognitive skills and how does this vary by gender?
Is there a multigenerational neighbourhood effect on cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes ?
Do neighbourhood conditions interact with education-related genes in affecting education-related outcomes?
I provide answers building on the UK - National Child Development Study (NCDS) data, the ongoing 1958 cohort. I use a wide range of estimation methods to identify the effects of neighbourhoods on a large range of outcomes that relate to either the cognitive or the non-cognitive youth development dimensions.
In particular, I exploit the process of allocation of social housing in the UK in the 1970s as well as regression with residuals modelling to improve the causal estimation of neighbourhood effects.
This thesis shows that growing up in relatively disadvantaged areas negatively affects both cognitive and non-cognitive development. Neighbourhood deprivation particularly negatively affects girls, as compared to boys. Moreover, individual family histories of neighbourhood disadvantage have a lingering effect.
As for the interaction with genetic predispositions, I find that living in more advantaged neighbourhoods narrows the gap between individuals characterised by high and low genetic predispositions for academic motivation and achievement. This emphasises the compensating role that advantaged neighbourhoods might play in reducing social inequalities in education.
Overall, this thesis highlights the complex interplay between individual characteristics and neighbourhood environments in shaping the production and re-production of education inequalities. I emphasise the need for policies and interventions to create supportive and equitable neighbourhood environments.
The Changing and Uneven Landscape of Gender Gaps in STEM
- Vector from Angela Matthews, via Shutterstock
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, November 10th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1 St Thomas)
The Changing and Uneven Landscape of Gender Gaps in STEM
Joseph Cimpian
Professor of Economics and Education Policy, New York University
Gender disparities in science, technology, engireering and mathematics (STEM) college majors have received substantial attention, with varying gender gaps across fields.
While biology and mathematics approach a 1-to-1 male-to-female ratio, physics, engineering, and computer science (PECS) remain at a 4-to-1 gap.
This talk explores potential causes and solutions for the PECS gender disparity.
Surprisingly, low-achieving men outnumber women in PECS, which cannot be easily explained by student-level factors suggested in the literature. With this background, we turn to understanding the role of institutions in perpetuating or closing gender gaps.
Analyzing a near census of 34 million U.S. Bachelor’s degrees awarded from 2002 to 2022 reveals considerable disparities across institutions. Schools serving lower-achieving students witness a widening PECS male-to-female ratio, reaching 7:1, while those with higher-achieving students narrow the gap to below 2:1.
Despite accounting for key student-level factors including prior achievement and majoring intentions, institutional differences persist, emphasizing the need for interventions in institutions serving lower-achieving students, where men dominate PECS programs.
The Brilliance Barrier: Stereotypes about Brilliance Are an Obstacle to Diversity in Science and Beyond
- Image eamesBot (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, October 27th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1 St Thomas)
The Brilliance Barrier:
Stereotypes about Brilliance Are an Obstacle to Diversity in Science and Beyond
Andrei Cimpian
Professor of Psychology, New York University
I propose that a field’s diversity is affected by what its members believe is required for success: Fields that value exceptional intellectual talent above all else may inadvertently obstruct the participation of women and (some) minority groups.
The environment in these fields may be less welcoming to women and minority groups because of the cultural stereotypes that associate intellectual talent -- brilliance, genius, etc. -- with (white) men.
This proposal is supported by observational and experimental data from a wide range of fields in the sciences and the humanities, as well as by developmental data that reveal how early these stereotypes take hold.
The Long Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism
- Image Anton Ivanov (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, October 20th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Salle du Conseil (13 Rue de l'Université)
The Long Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism
Jordanna Matlon
Associate Professor, School of International Service, American University
In this talk, Matlon examines competing constructions of modern manhood in the West African metropolis of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire.
Engaging the histories, representational repertoires, and performative identities of men in Abidjan and across the Black Atlantic, Jordanna Matlon shows how French colonial legacies and media tropes of Blackness root masculine identity and value within labor, consumerism, and commodification.
Matlon provides a broad chronological and transatlantic account of Black masculinity that culminates in an ethnography of the livelihoods and lifestyles of vendeurs ambulants, underemployed men in Abidjan's informal economy. In doing so, Matlon demonstrates how men's subjectivities are formed in dialectical tension by and through hegemonic ideologies of race and patriarchy.
Why are there so few female executives? Evidence from the equality frontier
- Image pics five (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, October 13th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1 St-Thomas)
Why are there so few female executives? Evidence from the equality frontier
Øyvind Skorge
Associate Professor of Political Science at Oslo New University College
Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Research (ISF)
(co-author Sigtona Halrynjo, ISF)
In top executive business positions, women are rare—also in countries otherwise characterized by gender egalitarian norms and high inclusion of women in work and politics. To address this puzzle, we build on the nascent literature on overwork and assortative mating to argue that since women professionals are more likely than their male counterparts to have equally ambitious partners, they have less flexibility at home to take on leadership positions requiring long hours and constant availability.
Using unique survey, experimental, and qualitative interview data of employees and executives in ten large Norwegian enterprises, we examine the argument against other influential explanations, including implicit gender/motherhood bias, personal ambitions, and inclusion experiences.
Norway is consistently ranked among the most gender-equal countries globally, yet women's representation in top executive positions remains modest. We find no evidence of implicit bias or gender differences in stated career ambitions, negotiations for position or pay, or being heard at work. Instead, the study shows that availability for clients and colleagues beyond regular working hours is a crucial predictor of suitability for executive positions. We document that the conditions to meet these demands are skewed against women, and particularly mothers, due to demands at home.
Our findings imply that as long as career success remains dependent on 24/7 availability during childrearing years, women will remain underrepresented among top executives.
Assess the effects of migrants’ initial legal status
- Image jef77 (via Shutterstock)
Diverging pathways:
the effects of initial legal status on immigrant socioeconomic and residential outcomes in France
Tianjian Lai (University of Chicago), Haley McAvay (University of York), Mirna Safi
European Sociological Review, 28 September, doi: 10.1093/esr/jcad047
Read or download the Paper (available in Open Access)
This article provides an empirical assessment of the effects of migrants’ initial legal status on socioeconomic attainment focusing on three outcomes:
- household income,
- neighbourhood disadvantage,
- concentration in immigrant neighbourhoods.
The regulation of migration in modern nation-states entails the sorting of newcomers along legal lines of demarcation that define residency status. These legal distinctions upon arrival grant or deny rights and opportunities and determine access to citizenship and socioeconomic resources. Certain legal statuses allow migrants to enter the labour market immediately (i.e. work permits), while others provide a faster track to citizenship (i.e. marriage permits). These classifications further shape the degree of inclusion and reception that immigrants encounter.
In this article, we draw on a unique, large-sample data source from France, the Trajectories and Origins (TeO) survey, which includes rare information on migrants’ first residency permit and a wide range of premigration variables. We focus on five initial permit categories - refugee, student, worker, spouse of a French citizen, and family reunification - and measure their impact on socioeconomic attainment and residential attainment as reported at the time of the survey.
Our empirical strategy seeks to disentangle the effects of legal status from confounding factors implementing a series of different methodological approaches.
The results first show that immigrants’ outcomes vary by their initial legal status. Migrants who arrived in France with student, worker and French spouse permits tend to be more advantaged in socioeconomic outcomes, while refugees face greater disadvantage. Yet, some of these disparities disappear once premigration variables and/or individual heterogeneity are accounted for. These results suggest that most initial legal status categories are stratified prior to arrival and not stratifiers in the destination country per se. However, we consistently measure a negative effect of refugee status on respondents’ income across diverse model specifications, suggesting a lasting impact of this legal category.
People interact closer when a face mask is worn but risk compensation is at best partial
- Image bvldone (via Shutterstock)
People interact closer when a face mask is worn
but risk compensation is at best partial
Martin Aranguren, Alice Cartaud, Ibrahima Cissé, Yann Coello
European Journal of Public Health
ckad161, Published First 17 September, doi 10.1093/eurpub/ckad161
View or Download the Paper (Open Access)
As dramatically illustrated by the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, nonpharmaceutical interventions can be crucial in the effort to contain the spread of infectious diseases. During the still ongoing COVID-19 crisis, two of the most common interventions of this type have been the recommendation or mandate to wear a face mask and to keep a minimal physical distance from others. These measures are highly generic and low cost, in the sense that they can be implemented in response to a wide array of similarly transmissible infectious diseases, in the short term and with relatively modest economic effort. However, despite their clearly beneficial potential, the relationship between wearing a face mask and keeping a minimal distance from others is still an object of controversy.
The article addresses the following questions:
- Do people interact closer when the face mask is worn?
- Do people interact closer because they believe that the mask reduces the risk of contagion?
- If the mask induces people to interact closer, does the increase in risk entailed by shorter distances entirely offset the decrease in risk offered by the mask?
We performed a large field experiment on real-life interactions (n > 4500) in the streets of Paris between July and September 2021, and a controlled laboratory experiment in virtual reality in the IrDIVE Platform (Innovation Research in the Digital and Interactive Visual Environments, Tourcoing) with 64 volunteers.
Although the present report focuses on the effect of face mask use, the experiment was also conceived to test those of perceived race and social status.
Linking Wealth and Power
- Image miniartkur (via Shutterstock)
Linking Wealth and Power: Direct Political Action of Corporate Elites and the Wealthiest Capitalist Families in the United States and Germany
Lukas Arndt (PhD, Sciences Po - CRIS & MPIfG Cologne)
CRIS Papers n° 2023-1, October 2023, 32p., doi 10.25647/osc.papers.05
Download the Paper (Hal Sciences Po)
Download the Appendix (Data.sciencespo)
As Thomas Piketty argued, wealth concentration at the top of the distribution in many economically developed countries might lead to continuous concentration of large fortunes among a few super-rich families. At the same time, what he calls “superstar managers” receive astronomical salaries.
Do individuals with power in the economy translate it into political power in capitalist democracies? And if yes, what do these individuals want to achieve?
Are they just pragmatically using access to influence economic policy, maximizing their own profits? Or do they use their economic power to advocate for an ideological agenda that might be different from the rest of the voters?
This study inquires whether two groups of individuals with power in the economy directly translate it into political power in capitalist democracies: The corporate elite and super-rich capitalist families.
It does so by analyzing three potential “avenues of influence”: Lobbying or party donations through controlled firms, and individual party donations.
Shareholders and managers of the largest German and US firms are analyzed.
First, 6,227 members of US and German families with large assets are identified.
Second, the national corporate elites are identified.
Individual and firm data is then used to predict lobbying and party contribution in 2019-2021 with logistic regressions.
Results suggest that direct political action on the part of the super-rich and the corporate elite is much more prevalent and more ideological in the United States than in Germany. If they engage at all,
the super-rich tend to be a very conservative group who use all three avenues of influence complementarily. However, the magnitude of super-rich and elite money does not favor the idea of an “oligarchy” in either of the two countries, at least not through these direct and visible channels.
Beyond Borders:
- Image FHPhoto (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, October 6th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, Room K008 (1 St-Thomas)
Beyond Borders: Does Firm-Level Exposure to State and Local Paid Sick Leave Mandates Lead to Policy Diffusion?
Daniel Schneider
Professor of Sociology and Malcom Wiener Professor of Social Policy
Harvard Kennedy School
In the face of precarious working conditions, states and localities across the United States have passed labor standards to raise the floor on job quality. Where innovation in the American states might have once diffused to shape federal legislation, contemporary polarization in the US makes the enactment of national labor standards unlikely. Nevertheless, the resulting patchwork of state and local standards may, paradoxically, produce another kind of national policy diffusion.
Faced with this “patchwork,” large multi-state firms may align company labor practices with the most stringent regulatory environments that they face given the geographic distribution of their establishments.
To test this possibility, we take advantage of new employer-employee linked data from The Shift Project and focus on the case of paid sick leave.
We find that state and local paid sick leave mandates spill-over through multi-state employers to provide workers in places without mandates effective access to paid sick leave, and these findings survive a placebo test using other fringe benefits. These associations are stronger at firms headquartered in places with paid leave mandates and weaker at firms with franchise models. Companies act as conduits through which the reach of local mandates that raise the floor on job quality are expanded to a broader set of workers.
Inequality and the Environment Symposium for Early-career Researchers
- Image Lightspring (via Shutterstock)
Inequality and the Environment Symposium for Early-career Researchers
Organized by Sciences Po's Center for Research on social InequalitieS, in partnership with the
World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics
Co-Chairs: Lucas Chancel (Sciences Po - CRIS and Harvard Kennedy School)
Carlo Barone (Sciences Po - CRIS)
Committee: Carlo Barone, Lucas Chancel, Eloi Laurent, Allison Rovny
Rising inequality and environmental degradation are two critical challenges of our time. Our knowledge about the interplay between socio-economic inequality, environmental degradation, and environmental policies remains limited. The literature on inequality and the environment presents various conceptual, empirical, and theoretical gaps hindering societies’ ability to effectively address these issues.
Important questions remain unanswered, such as: How can governments address inequality while averting the exacerbation of climate and biodiversity crises? Which welfare regimes could be compatible with deep decarbonization? What types of political coalitions can support these changes? What role have income and wealth inequality played in accelerating or slowing environmental degradation?
From a methodological standpoint, the basic measurement and analysis of environmental inequalities is a complex task. How can emission inequalities between individuals and social groups be systematically measured? How can the multidimensional distributional impacts of environmental regulations be tracked and explained? How to accurately measure and understand the intersection of social class, gender, racial, and spatial inequalities to better explain observed pollution and depollution patterns?
This symposium aims to present, discuss, and foster innovative approaches to social science research on environmental inequality across three broad research streams :
- Inequalities in the impacts of environmental degradation;
- Inequalities in contributions to environmental damage;
- Inequalities in capacities to act against pollution or to cope with environmental policies.
We invite PhD students and Post-Docs from economics, sociology, psychology, political science, geography, demography, history, environmental sciences and related fields to submit their papers and participate in the symposium. The event will take place on one day at Sciences Po (Paris). This symposium provides a platform to present groundbreaking research, engage in discussions, and collaborate with other researchers. The participation in person is highly encouraged to facilitate scientific exchanges among researchers, but online participation is possible particularly for researchers from outside Europe.
Please download here the submission guidelines.
Deadline for Submission: November 1st, 2023.
For queries, contact : lucas.chancel@sciencespo.fr and carlo.barone@sciencespo.fr.
Join us in this endeavor to bridge the knowledge gap and foster the outstanding of social science research on inequality and the environment. We look forward to your contributions and insights!
Evaluation des politiques publiques
- Images esbc et Shutterstock (eamesbot)
Policy Evaluation: Methods and Approaches
Méthodes et approches en évaluation des politiques publiques
Edited by Anne Revillard
24 méthodes ou approches utilisées pour l'évaluation. Ouvrage conçu par le LIEPP sous la direction de Anne Revillard, édité par les éditions Sciences et Bien commun (Québec). L'ambition est de combiner des outils issus de la recherche fondamentale avec ceux développés par les praticiens, en ouvrant un dialogue entre méthodes quantitatives et qualitatives. Plus d'informations sur le projet, sur le site du LIEPP.
Cet ouvrage est consultable en ligne en accès libre. Version de l'ouvrage en français.
Two fundamental choices guide this book: combining tools from fundamental research with others developed in evaluation practice, and opening a dialogue between quantitative and qualitative methods. This book is also available in English.
Plusieurs fiches méthodologiques ont été rédigées par des chercheurs du CRIS.
- Essais contrôlés randomisés (Carlo Barone) Randomised Controlled Trials
- Méthode des doubles différences (Denis Fougère et al.) Difference-in-differences method
- La régression sur discontinuité (Denis Fougère et al.) The Regression Discontinuity Design
- L'analyse historique comparée (Emanuele Ferragina) Comparative Historical Analysis
- Les comparaisons de niveau macro (Emanuele Ferragina) Macro Comparisons
Immigration News Remix: Unraveling Online Distortions of Mainstream Narratives
- Image BalkansCat (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, September 29th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, 27, rue Saint-Guillaume, room François Goguel
Immigration News Remix: Unraveling Online Distortions of Mainstream Narratives
Katharina Tittel (PhD Student, Sciences Po - CRIS & Medialab)
Media studies have long scrutinized the portrayal of migration, primarily within traditional newspapers, and assuming a top-down influence of elite-produced news frames on audiences. However, social media has disrupted these dynamics, challenging conventional media effects theories and raising questions about the roles of political actors, citizens, and civil society organizations in content distribution and framing effects. Which contents actually circulate, by whom, and how are they shared?
This research diverges from past content-centric studies, focusing on the circulation of news content online. It relies on digital-trace data from Facebook shares of immigration-related articles from mainstream newspapers in Germany and France from 2015 to 2019, as well as the sources shared in French immigration-related tweets from 2020 to 2021, using natural language processing, manual source classification, and combining the Twitter dataset with Chapel Hill expert survey data to estimate users' ideological leanings.
The analysis reveals that far-right political activists, along with anti-immigrant civil society groups, not only extensively share content from far-right outlets but also remix and recontextualize mainstream news, selectively emphasizing elements that further their agendas. In contrast, centrist and leftist voices, as well as refugee solidarity groups, exhibit markedly reduced engagement.
In the current political climate marked by the ascent of far-right movements in Germany and France, this research exposes how ostensibly "neutral" immigration news can become instruments to advance far-right political agendas. The observed silence among centrist and leftist groups further invites contemplation regarding how such behaviors may inadvertently leave the online space to extremist voices.
Just as organizations and scholars increasingly discuss the challenges of "fake news" and the necessity of fact-checking, this study underscores the urgency of addressing not only the spread of factually false information but also the subtler transformations of factually true mainstream news narratives.
Mandatory Registration. Thank You !
Where Do Local Voting Patterns Mirror the National Vote? A Micro-scale Study on Party Political Segregation in Germany
- Image 1take1shot (via Shutterstock)
CRIS & Axpo Scientific Seminar
Friday, September 22nd 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, 1 place St-Thomas, room K008
Where Do Local Voting Patterns Mirror the National Vote?
A Micro-scale Study on Party Political Segregation in Germany
Ansgar Hudde
Lecturer, University of Cologne, Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology
This study analyses the spatial segregation in political voting behavior at the voting district (“neighborhood”) level in Germany. The degree of segregation versus integration is gauged by the extent to which local voting patterns diverge from overall, national-level voting patterns. If a neighborhood’s voting pattern resemble Germany's overall pattern, there is no segregation; conversely, if the neighborhood’s pattern strongly deviates from national trends, segregation is deemed high.
Small-scale political segregation matters because those residing in politically segregated areas are less likely to experience and “feel” the country’s general, political climate in their everyday life. This could lead to a sense of alienation from politics.
I analyze voting district-level results from the German federal elections from 1983 to 2021. With ~65,000 voting districts in 2021, this allows an extremely granular perspective.
Findings uncover two main patterns. Firstly, Eastern German neighborhoods typically exhibit higher levels of local segregation compared to those in Western Germany. Secondly, the relationship between segregation and the rural-urban continuum is U-shaped. Local voting patterns in rural areas and in large cities strongly deviate from national patterns. On the contrary, the voting patterns in mid-sized towns, ranging from 20,000 to 100,000 inhabitants, better represent Germany’s overall voting patterns. Further, the analyses identify additional patterns and deviations from these broader trends, such as differences between Bundesländer or outlying city-clusters like traditional university towns.
This study contributes to broader discussions on social cohesion, political polarization, and the urban-rural divide. Notably, it puts a spatial category at the center, which is often overlooked in urban-rural discussions: mid-sized towns.
Discussant: Edmond Préteceille (Sciences Po - CRIS).
Mandatory Registration. Thank You ! This event is a joint seminar CRIS & AxPo
Assessing responsibility for GHG emissions
- Image Visual Generation (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, September 15th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, 1 place St-Thomas, room K008
Assessing responsibility for GHG emissions
Antonin Pottier (Maître de Conférences, EHESS - CIRED)
Numerous assessments of the responsibility for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions already exist in the literature. Assessing responsiblity however assumes a responsibility principle, that is a connection between emissions and the social entities deemed responsible for them. While the responsibility principles for countries have long been debated, the recent focus of the literature on individual emissions has relied only on consumer responsibility. I will highlight that the problem is analogous for both countries and individual: measuring emissions presupposes a perspective on the responsibility of agents.
I will then present two recent empirical studies that assess GHG emissions inequality in France. These studies are founded on contrasting responsibility principles: downstream responsibility, also known as income-based accounting, and upstream or consumer responsibility, often referred to as consumption-based accounting. Additionally, I will delve into a comprehensive discussion of the limitations of our data when it comes to evaluating consumption-based emissions, often referred to as the carbon footprint.
A Social Demography of Widowhood across Ageing Societies
- Image Ground Picture (via Shutterstock)
The WIDOW Project (2023-2028)
A Social Demography of Widowhood across Ageing Societies
The principle investigator is Zachary Van Winkle, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po - CRIS.
Widowhood is a critical life event entailing profound grief and consequences in the short-term and long-term. It remains one of the prime life course risks in contemporary societies.
Most research demonstrates that spousal loss commonly may lead to an immediate decline in both mental health and economic wellbeing. In fact, existing evidence is mixed as to whether widows and widowers recover from grieving quickly or remain chronically and clinically depressed for years.
It is also unclear whether the financial consequences of spousal death are short lived or push large numbers of widows and widowers into a persistent state of old-age poverty.
As many countries grow older, the number of marriages ending with the death of a spouse is increasing dramatically, despite high separation rates. Although widowhood remains a common life event, many countries have cut or even abolished survivor benefit schemes targeted at securing the wellbeing of widows and widowers. The consequences of these reforms remain unknown.
Despite this social scientific research has been less interested in widowhood than other disruptive life events, such as job loss or divorce. The WIDOW project aims to remedy this.
This ground-breaking research will establish a social demography of widowhood. The foundation of this social demography is an innovative conceptual and methodological approach to estimate the risk of widowhood as well as the mental health and economic vulnerabilities of spousal loss. This research will concentrate on marital spousal loss among adults age 50 and older.
The risk of widowhood subsumes the probability of spousal loss and the duration of remaining widowed. The concept of vulnerability broadly denotes the consequences of widowhood during the pre- and post-widowhood periods for those who expect or not the loss of their spouse. Two types of outcomes are taking into account: mental health, including anxiety, insomnia, depression, and loneliness, as well as economic wellbeing, including household income, poverty, and wealth.
Three pillars support that social demography.
The first assesses social inequalities in the risk and vulnerability to widowhood by focusing on how the probability and consequences of spousal loss vary by socioeconomic status, race-ethnicity, nativity, and networks of social support, as well as gender and age.
The second pillar zooms on cross-national differences in the risk and vulnerability to widowhood and their social inequalities. The geographic scope of this project spans middle- and high-income countries with ageing populations varying in demographic trends and welfare systems. The research will analyze all data sources from up to 60 countries.
The third pillar expands the comparative aspect of the project to examine both past and future change over time in the size and composition of the widowed population. Population changes will be assessed over time since 1989, with a projection to 2050.
Ethnic diversity at the local local level and prejudice, in the UK
- Image Claire Louise Jackson (via Shutterstock)
Effects of absolute levels of neighbourhood ethnic diversity vs. changes
in neighbourhood diversity on prejudice:
Moderation by individual differences in personality
Laura Silva, Franco Bonomi Bezzo, James Laurence & Katharina Schmid
Social Science Research, Vol. 115, September 2023, 102919
doi: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2023.102919 (View or Download the paper here)
This paper examines drivers of prejudicial attitudes among adults in the UK, focusing on the interaction between ethnic out-group size and personality traits.
Leveraging data from the National Child Development Study (NCDS), we use two survey waves carried out in 2000 and 2008, just before and after the EU enlargement policy that drove a wave of immigration in the UK.
We test the extent to which personality traits moderate the relationship between both absolute levels and changes in ethnic diversity at the local level, respectively, and prejudice.
Key findings suggest that both an individual's personality traits and the level of neighbourhood diversity matter for their intergroup attitudes. Secondly, personality traits, and in particular, one's levels of agreeableness, do appear important for conditioning how the proportion of non-white British in one's neighbourhood affects their prejudicial attitudes. Individuals with high agreeableness tend to be more tolerant of outgroup members and less likely to hold negative stereotypes.
One's level of agreeableness appears to determine how one reacts to neighbourhood diversity, potentially leading to an even greater polarisation in outgroup attitudes between low-/high agreeableness residents as neighbourhoods become more diverse.
Contrary to our predictions and prior research, we were unable to find robust evidence for the effect of openness to experience.
These findings have important implications for theorising how contextual and individual characteristics jointly affect intergroup relations.
Moving up the civic stratification ladder: inconsistency in citizenship declarations in French longitudinal data
- Image Darren Brode (via Shutterstock)
- Bulletin individuel du recensement, INSEE
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2023-2024
Friday, September 8th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, 1 place St-Thomas, room K008
Moving up the civic stratification ladder: inconsistency in citizenship declarations
in French longitudinal data
Mirna Safi, with Louise Caron (Ined) and Haley McAvay (University of York)
Drawing on longitudinal data, this work tracks individual changes in self-reported citizenship over 30 years in France.
Census respondents tick one of three categories: “French by birth,” “Became French,” or “Foreigner”.
The first category should be stable over the life course: one is born, but cannot become, “French by birth”. Yet, our findings indicate that about 19% of foreign-origin respondents observed in a given census switch to “French by birth” declarations at the next census, in a process we call reclassification.
Key immigrant assimilation variables, such as nativity and migrant length of stay, as well as events such as intermarriage, naturalization, and residential mobility, trigger reclassification. Yet we also show that reclassification is higher among individuals with lower socioeconomic status and respondents of African and Southeast Asian origin, as well as those with origins in former French colonies. These findings suggest that reclassification is a byproduct of immigrant assimilation, which triggers feelings of national identity, and that it also possibly stems from status upgrading, whereby disadvantaged and discriminated groups change their citizenship declaration to compensate for low social status.
Empirically novel, these findings offer original theoretical insights into the meanings of citizenship, civic stratification, and boundary-crossing.
Lauréats du Programme Jeune recherche 2023
- Image Marta Nascimento, Sciences Po
Charlotte Corchete et Bartholomew Konechni, parmi les lauréats 2023 du programme Jeune Recherche
Proposé par le LIEPP et l'Université Paris Cité, ce programme s'adresse aux doctorants et jeunes docteurs, toutes disciplines confondues. Une subvention d'appui de 2000€ est attribuée aux lauréats.
Parmi les 16 projets lauréats, 2 sont portés par des doctorants du CRIS.
Charlotte Corchete : Corriger les conséquences des biais ethno-genrés lors de l'évaluation des élèves à l’aide d’un barème de notation ? Un essai randomisé contrôlé auprès des enseignant.e.s de français au collège
En France, les récentes statistiques produites par la DEPP ont montré qu’il existe des écarts de performance non expliqués par l’origine sociale pour les garçons de troisième d'origine maghrébine ou subsaharienne et que de potentiels biais ethno-genrés peuvent s’activer lors des processus d’évaluation et de suivi scolaire. Il est intéressant de mesurer et de réduire ce phénomène afin de favoriser l’égalité.
Le projet comprend une revue de littérature systématique de l'ensemble des expérimentations portant sur les potentiels biais ethno-genrés des enseignant.e.s (notamment concernant les notes, le comportement et l'orientation scolaire). Il se fixe aussi pour objectif de réaliser une expérimentation peu coûteuse et facile à mettre en oeuvre par l'action publique afin d’encourager le recours aux barèmes de notation précis, déjà utilisés pour le brevet des collèges.
Bartholomew Konechni: Studying the Changing Pattern of Protective Behaviours During the COVID-19 Crisis - Etudier l'évolution des mesures de protection pendant la crise de Covid
La pandémie a posé un défi fondamental à la politique de santé. En l'absence de mesures efficaces, les gouvernements ont eu recours à trois grandes solutions : la coercition, le soutien économique et la vaccination. Elles ont ouvert la voie à de nouveaux instruments de gouvernance comme le confinement, le port du masque obligatoire, les aides financières directes aux plus pauvres, le passeport sanitaire... Bien que nombre de ces politiques aient effectivement permis de réduire le nombre de cas et de décès, la plupart d'entre elles se sont avérées difficiles à mettre en oeuvre, notamment sur le long terme.
En se concentrant sur les pays européennes et nord-américaines, ce projet cherche à répondre à plusieurs questions comme le niveau d'adhésion à ces mesures tout au long de la crise en fonction de leur type (coercition, incitations et vaccinations) ou l'identification de facteurs ayant modéré l'efficacité des politiques mises en oeuvre.
La liste complète des lauréats est disponible sur le site du LIEPP.
Les conséquences raisonnables d'une politique de réduction des énergies fossiles
- IIlustration Vector Contributor (via Shutterstock)
Potential pension fund losses should not deter high-income countries from bold climate action
Gregor Semieniuk, Lucas Chancel, Eulalie Saïsset, Philip B. Holden, Jean-François Mercure and Neil R. Edwards
Joule, pré-publication (en ligne), 22 juin
doi: 10.1016/j.joule.2023.05.023
Cet article signé par Lucas Chancel (avec Gregor Semieniuk, Eulalie Saïsset, Philip B. Holden, Jean-François Mercure and Neil R. Edwards) dans la revue Joule (revue scientifique sur les enjeux des énergies renouvelables), traite de l’impact qu’aurait une politique climatique ambitieuse passant par la fermeture de sites de production de combustibles fossiles.
Au-delà de la décision d’engager une rapide transition énergétique, il y a la question du coût direct et induit de cette mesure. Quel serait l’impact, sur quel type de population, et faut-il prévoir des compensations par les États ?
En effet, stopper des activités économiques, dévaluer des actifs rentables peut entraîner des répercutions financières et sociales importantes, et pas seulement pour les propriétaires de ces industries. Il y aura un impact sur les emplois du secteur, mais aussi les fonds de pension qui comptent sur la bonne tenue des marchés financiers pour garantir le paiement des retraites.
Les auteurs précisent qu’ils étudient ici la propriété du capital financier et sa répartition dans les pays riches, la question de la perte de revenus du travail ainsi que celle des autres impacts macroéconomiques demandant à être analysés dans des travaux futurs.
La modélisation permise par l’exploitation de bases de données internationales (comptes nationaux, données fiscales, richesse…) permet aux auteurs de proposer une gamme de scénarios qui vont tous dans le sens d’une faisabilité de la transition avec un coût relativement modeste pour les finances publiques.
Les auteurs soulignent la concentration très élevée des actifs financiers en général et dans ce secteur en particulier, détenus par les plus riches. Ainsi aux États-Unis, sur 350 milliards de dollars d’actifs concernés, seuls 3,5 % concernent la moitié la plus pauvre de la population et un tiers les 90 % les plus pauvres, alors que les deux tiers restants se répartissent également entre les 10 % les plus riches. De plus, ces actifs dévalués ne représentent qu’une faible partie des patrimoines possédés par ces acteurs. Le pire des scénarios évalue les pertes potentielles à 2% de la richesse totale.
L’impact est plus fort, en proportion de la richesse, pour des ménages modestes, et variable selon les pays. Plusieurs systèmes d’épargne et de retraite existent et sont parfois très exposés aux fluctuations des marchés financiers.
Les auteurs proposent plusieurs scénarios pour évaluer les indemnisations, plus ou moins ciblées, que les gouvernements pourraient être amenés à proposer. Ils concluent que l’effort serait supportable pour les budgets publics.
Compenser les actifs dévalués pour les 50% des ménages les moins aisés coûterait 9 milliards de dollars à l’Europe, quand le renflouement de l’électricien allemand UNIPER a coûté 15 milliards. La compensation de toutes les pertes subies par les 90 % les moins aisés coûterait entre 0,1 % et 1,2 % du revenu national et 0,02 % et 0,3 % de la richesse nationale des pays pris en compte dans l’étude.
Les auteurs proposent plusieurs pistes pour financer les indemnisations, dont une taxation des émissions de carbone.
Enfin, les auteurs soutiennent qu’ un modeste impôt progressif sur la fortune appliqué aux 0,005 % les plus riches de la population permettrait de compenser la totalité des pertes induites par les actifs fossiles en 2 à 3 ans seulement. Les gouvernements des pays à revenu élevé pourraient ainsi prendre des mesures audacieuses pour le climat en dépit d’un lobbying certain des acteurs impliqués dans la production et la distribution des combustibles fossiles.
Accès à l'article en anglais (ScienceDirect)
L'article propose une annexe (PDF) et un lien vers le code et les données utilisées dans les figures.
Anne-Cécile Ott : une postdoctorante entre monde d'avant et le monde d'après
- Anne-Cécile Ott (Image Bernard Corminboeuf)
Anne-Cécile Ott est chercheure postdoctorante au CRIS depuis le mois de février 2023. Elle collabore au projet MaMa - Du Monde d’Avant au Monde d’Après - porté par le CNRS.
Anne-Cécile, quel est votre champ de recherche ?
J’ai mené mes travaux de thèse au laboratoire Géographie-cités, en géographie sociale et culturelle, dans une perspective assez sociologique et pluri-méthodologique. Mon sujet portait sur la sociogénèse des manières de représenter le monde. J’ai interrogé 248 enfants de primaire, de profil social varié, pour étudier leurs représentations de l’espace mondial. Au travers de discussions individuelles ou collectives, de dessins ou de jeux, cette approche m’a permis d’appréhender la diversité des manières enfantines de penser le monde mais aussi la construction de stéréotypes ou d’enjeux éthiques et moraux - comme le rapport à l’altérité ou à l’environnement - à des échelles très éloignées du quotidien de la maison ou de l’école.
J’ai observé de fortes différenciations entre les représentations des enfants, qui sont parfois imputables à l’âge où à l’influence de l’Ecole mais aussi à leur socialisation familiale, par les médias ou entre pairs. Les représentations du monde ont fonctionné comme un laboratoire permettant d’observer la socialisation en train de se faire et de montrer que la socialisation des enfants au monde et par le monde crée et renforce des rapports de domination structurant le monde social
Mon arsenal méthodologique est assez varié : enquête qualitative par entretien, statistiques descriptives, analyse textuelle… L’ancrage sociologique est évident ; c’est ce qui guide mes recherches.
Je suis qualifiée dans deux disciplines : en géographie et en sociologie.
En quelques mots, qu'étudient les chercheurs du projet MaMa ?
C’est un projet que l’on peut qualifier de multidimensionnel. Lancé par le CNRS et l’InSHS, il associe 6 laboratoires de recherche, avec plusieurs équipes par laboratoire, pour étudier les dynamiques, les processus et les reconfigurations sociales provoquées par la crise du Covid-19. Il intègre des chercheurs en santé, éducation, travail, ou culture, qui doivent apporter des éléments permettant de mesurer ce qui a changé ou pas avec la pandémie.
Le volet culture est pris en charge au CRIS et à Géographie-cités, sous la direction de Philippe Coulangeon (DR CNRS) et de Thomas Louail (CR CNRS).
Quelle est pour vous la question centrale ?
Au cœur de ce volet culturel, il y a la différenciation sociale des pratiques culturelles et numériques, notamment musicales, la formation des goûts et leur évolution dans le temps, avec une attention sur les périodes de confinement. Un des premiers enseignements est d’ailleurs que les gens semblent avoir de plus en plus de mal à se souvenir de cette période.
Quelles sont les données utilisées ?
L’étude des pratiques culturelles avant et après Covid utilise 3 types de données :
- une enquête par questionnaire que nous menons auprès des membres du panel ELIPSS (Sciences Po – CDSP, il s’agit d’un échantillon représentatif de la population française qui existe depuis 2012 et permet ainsi de disposer de données longitudinales),
- des données d’écoutes musicales venant d’un partenariat avec la plateforme Deezer que je vais utiliser sur le terrain. Ce partenariat était déjà effectif pour le projet RECORDS qui arrive bientôt à son terme et impliquait des chercheurs du CRIS et de Géographie-cité.
- deux séries d’entretiens approfondis, de 1h30 en moyenne, qui sont de ma responsabilité, du design à l’exploitation des récits. Ces entretiens avec les abonnés DEEZER contiennent des moments d’écoute de morceaux sélectionnés pour susciter des réactions, des impressions. Les commentaires recueillis alors peuvent être très différents des réponses spontanées ou par questionnaire. C’est toute la richesse que permet l’exploitation de la mixité des matériaux collectés dans le projet
Qu’est-ce qui vous apparait le plus motivant dans ce projet ?
La diversité des données que nous récoltons et qui entrent en synergie pour répondre aux objectifs de recherche. Je mène 48 entretiens auprès de parents et adolescents abonnés à Deezer pour comprendre les logiques de socialisation familiales aux pratiques culturelles et aux styles musicaux : la construction du goût... et du dégoût. Chaque individu est échantillonné en fonction des plusieurs variables comme le niveau de diplôme, le genre, l’âge, et la composition du foyer (adelphie). Dans tous les cas, nous disposons des données d’usage de Deezer, non seulement individuelles, mais aussi de l’abonnement « famille ». Je peux ici interroger les représentations et les pratiques, mais aussi mesurer l’écart entre le déclaratif et les pratiques réelles des abonnés, via les statistiques de stream enregistrées par la plateforme. Peu de chercheurs disposent de cette richesse et diversité de données… qui ouvrent d’autres angles d’étude.
N’est-ce pas une situation un peu violente de confronter discours et usage dans un face à face ?
Nous avons des techniques pour susciter des commentaires sur les pratiques des volontaires ayant accepté l’entretien. Un petit outil développé par un chercheur (Robin Cura) permet de visualiser les données d’historique d’écoute. On confronte les gens à leur pratique sous forme ludique : des devinettes sur leurs morceaux favoris, les temps d’écoute, le Top 10 des artistes…
Avez-vous déjà des éléments sur cette transmission des goûts ? Peut-on penser qu’on idéalise ou sanctuarise souvent les musiques écoutées par nos parents ?
Moi j’avais un parti pris un peu inverse en m’attendant à des réactions critiques, de rejet. Mais en effet, j’ai été un peu surprise par la manière très positive dont les répondants, à l’âge adulte, parlent des goûts musicaux de leurs parents. D’où notre envie d’enquêter également auprès d’adolescents, à une période où les relations parents-enfants sont potentiellement plus conflictuelles. En fait, il ne faut pas considérer de manière trop verticale la socialisation. Elle émane de plusieurs sources : l’école, les média, les copines, les cousines… On perçoit parfois des traumatismes vécus pendant l’enfance qui se manifestent par un puissant rejet des pratiques familiales et qui serviront de guide pour la transmission à ses propres enfants.
Ces questions ne sont-elles pas redevables d’autres disciplines, comme la psychologie ?
Nous ne prenons pas les mêmes angles. Par exemple, les études sur les représentations spatiales des enfants, ont longtemps été l’apanage des psychologues. Pour Jean Piaget, dans les années 20, ces représentations évoluent par stades successifs de développement. D’abord la maison, puis le quartier… Mes travaux centrés sur les dynamiques sociales montrent des éléments allant dans un autre sens : les enfants ont des représentations de l’espace mondial dès leur prime jeunesse, et le milieu social à une influence primordiale sur la construction des représentations. Je me positionne donc différemment. D’autres chercheurs peuvent choisir des angles complémentaires.
Comment ce travail va-t-il être valorisé ? Cela vous incite-t-il à réorienter vos travaux de recherche ?
Il y a bien entendu le rapport final remis à l’INSHS qui reprendra mes conclusions, mais aussi, dans un planning très serré, la co-rédaction d’un article scientifique dans une revue anglo-saxonne à la fin de mon contrat. Nous avons choisi une revue reconnue en sciences sociales, compatible avec le sujet et les méthodes déployées. Le budget pour externaliser les retranscriptions a permis de se concentrer sur le design et le traitement des questionnaires.
Je considère que ce postdoctorat enrichit ma problématique de socialisation familiale et transmission de dispositions éthiques et morales, déployée depuis le Master.
Êtes-vous satisfaite des conditions d’accueil et d'intégration au CRIS ?
Les lieux sont magnifiques, il y a des postes de travail en open space mais on peut demander un bureau, je peux participer à tous les séminaires du laboratoire et j’ai petit à petit partagé des moments de convivialité avec les doctorants. L'environnement de travail est très stimulant.
Louis-Adolphe Bertillon
- Ecrits sur la mortalité - INED Editions, 2023
Louis-Adolphe Bertillon
Écrits sur la mortalité (1855-1877)
INED éditions, Collection : Classiques de l’Économie et de la Population, juin 2023, 696 pages. ISBN 9782733208140
Alain Chenu, professeur émérite au CRIS a rassemblé et commenté une vingtaine de textes et un atlas (Démographie figurée de la France, 1874) permettant de mieux situer le rôle majeur du docteur Louis-Adolphe Bertillon (1821-1877) dans l'émergence en France de la démographie moderne.
Si dans la famille Bertillon son fils Alphonse, inventeur de l'anthropométrie, est plus connu, les archives, parfois inédites, utilisées par Alain Chenu nous permettent de découvrir un homme engagé (républicain laïque) évoluant dans un espace intermédiaire entre la science et la politique, poursuivant sans relache pendant 20 ans son projet : caractériser et documenter le phénomène de mort prématurée, "évitable".
Choléra, apoplexies, amanites, accidents... L'oeuvre de L.A. Bertillon (qui recouvre aussi la médecine, la mycologie, la craniologie, l'épistémologie et la philosophie des sciences) apporte des données statistiques sur les causes de décès prématurés, et permet d'éprouver des méthodes et des outils statistiques (usage de la notion de moyenne, tables de survie annuelles...).
Dans son atlas, il fait preuve d'un spectaculaire effort sémiologique pour représenter sous forme de graphiques et de cartes les phénomènes étudiés. Un travail "fait main" à l'époque qui demande aujourd'hui beaucoup de soin pour être reproduit avec nos outils modernes.
Pourquoi qualifier Louis-Adolphe de "grand démographe" ? 3 arguments sont développés par Alain Chenu :
- il a joué un rôle décisif dans la diffusion du nom "démographie" lancé par son beau-père Achille Guillard,
- il a lui ajouté des travaux novateurs sur les mortalités différentielles,
- il a animé de multiples réseaux de coordination et d'organisation statistique faisant émerger une institutionnalisation de la discipline, entre univers savants et administratifs.
Avec lui la France devient en 1870-1880 l'épicentre de la démographie naissante, et la revue Les annales de démographie internationale à laquelle il contribue, la première revue de démographie au monde.
- Table des matières
- Pièces numérisés (annexes) déposées sur Nakala
- Atlas La démographie figurée de la France - Document numérisé (accessible en ligne sur Archive.org)
Not all Gangs are Created Equal: Criminal Governance in London
- Image Sandor Szmutko (via Shutterstock)
CRIS Scientific Seminar 2022-2023
Friday, June 30th 2023, 10:00 am
Sciences Po (13, rue de l'Université) - Salle du Conseil
Not all Gangs are Created Equal: Criminal Governance in London
Federico Varese
Professor of Sociology, Sciences Po - CEE
The paper explores the criminal governance dimension of gang activity by introducing a novel survey instrument, the Crim-Gov questionnaire, and applying it to identify governance-type gangs in London.
Criminal governance is a complex task that not all gangs are able to perform. We find a U-shaped relationship between deprivation and gangs: communities with no gangs are much better off than the rest of the city, yet governance-type criminal groups nest in areas that are not the most deprived and with the weakest social fabric.
Criminal governance is more likely to emerge in communities characterised by greater difficulties in accessing housing and local services, where the legal provision of services is potentially of lesser quality, and with lower residential mobility.
L'écologie en pratiques. Consommation ordinaire et inégalités en France depuis les années 1980
- Illustration Lexi Claus (via Shutterstock)
L'écologie en pratiques.
Consommation ordinaire et inégalités en France depuis les années 1980
Practicing being green. Ordinary consumption and inequalities in France since the 1980s
Maël Ginsburger
Soutenance le jeudi 15 juin à Sciences Po Paris, salle 900, à 14h30.
Composition du Jury : Philippe Coulangeon (Directeur de recherche, Sciences Po - CRIS, CNRS), Sophie Dubuisson-Quellier (Sciences Po - CSO, CNRS), Tally Katz-Gerro (University of Haïfa) , Frédéric Lebaron (UVSQ-Printemps), Ivaylo Petev (Directeur de recherche, CREST, CNRS), Marie Plessz (ENS, INRAE, Centre Maurice Halbwachs).
L’injonction à la réforme écologique des modes de vie, dont l’espace public est saturé depuis le début des années 1990, induit un questionnement sociologique sur l’hétérogénéité des styles de consommation des ménages français et l’évolution des inégalités sociales. Les différences dans les manières de consommer, de polluer et de se conformer aux injonctions au verdissement des modes de vie reproduisent-elles ou renouvellent-elles des mécanismes de stratification et de différenciation sociale plus anciens ? Comment les inégalités relatives à la classe sociale et au revenu, mais aussi à l’âge, au genre et aux conditions résidentielles affectent-elles les styles de consommation ordinaire et de facto, l’observance d’une norme émergente d’écocitoyenneté ? Les conditions matérielles vécues par les individus sous le sceau de la ressource ou de la contrainte supplantent-elles les dispositions acquises dès l’enfance (goûts, valeurs et habitudes) dans la compréhension de tels clivages ? Des réponses sont apportées à ces trois interrogations.
En se focalisant sur les pratiques de consommation ordinaire — liées à l’alimentation, à l’énergie, aux déplacements, à l’équipement et à l’habillement — cette thèse explore les dynamiques de changement social générationnelles et au cours de la vie. Elle met ainsi en lumière la manière dont de telles pratiques se sont renouvelées ou pérennisées depuis 30 ans en lien avec le développement des préoccupations pour la préservation de l’environnement.
Cette thèse montre que les nouvelles significations éthiques et environnementales de certaines pratiques de consommation ne remettent pas en cause les clivages qui structurent les styles de consommation ordinaire des ménages depuis les années 1980. Ceux-ci restent parcourus d’oppositions étonnamment stables, qui traduisent, dans le domaine de la consommation, les positions inégales occupées dans l’espace social et résidentiel : ces oppositions distinguent les ménages intégrés et exclus de la consommation ordinaire, et les consommateurs ancrés localement des consommateurs connectés.
Les inégalités dans les styles de vie dépendent d’abord de conditions matérielles d’existence (budgétaires, résidentielles, familiales, professionnelles) inégales. Les styles de vie dépendent secondairement de dispositions acquises et transmises lors des expériences de socialisation, et seulement marginalement des variations dans l’inquiétude environnementale et du souci de conformité à la norme d’écocitoyenneté.
Les injonctions normatives ainsi que les nouveaux registres de distinction sociale qui naissent de la valorisation de formes d’anti-consumérisme doivent composer avec des formes rigides d’inégalités dans les styles de vie, qui, depuis longtemps, font des ménages socialement exclus — pauvres, plutôt jeunes et urbains — les champions de la frugalité et des agriculteurs et de leurs enfants les principaux tenants d’une consommation ancrée localement.