• 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.

Mandatory Registration. Thank You.

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, First Published (in press), 22 June
doi: 10.1016/j.joule.2023.05.023

This article written by Lucas Chancel (with Gregor Semieniuk, Eulalie Saïsset, Philip B. Holden, Jean-François Mercure and Neil R. Edwards) in Joule (a scientific journal on renewable energy issues), discusses the impact of an ambitious climate policy involving the closure of fossil fuel production sites.

Beyond the decision to embark on a rapid energy transition, there is the question of the direct and induced cost of this measure. What would be the impact, on what type of population, and should governments provide compensation?

Stopping economic activities and devaluing profitable assets can have major financial and social repercussions, and not just for the owners of these industries. There will be an impact on jobs in the sector, but also on pension funds, which rely on the strength of the financial markets to guarantee pension payments.

The authors specify that they are studying the ownership of financial capital and its distribution in wealthy countries, with the question of the loss of labor income and other macroeconomic impacts to be analyzed in future work.

The modeling made possible by the use of international databases (national accounts, tax data, wealth, etc.) allows the authors to propose a range of scenarios, all of which point to the feasibility of the transition at a relatively modest cost to public finances.

The authors highlight the very high concentration of financial assets in general, and in this sector in particular, held by the richest. Thus, in the United States, out of the $350 billion of assets concerned, only 3.5% are held by the bottom half of the population, and one-third by 90% of the population, while the remaining two-thirds are evenly distributed among the richest 10%. Furthermore, these stranded assets represent only a small proportion of the assets owned by these actors. The worst-case scenario estimates potential losses at around 2% of total wealth.

The impact is greater as a proportion of wealth for low-income households, and varies depending on the country. Several savings- and retirement systems exist, and are sometimes highly exposed to financial market fluctuations.

The authors propose a number of scenarios to assess the compensation, more or less targeted, that governments could offer. They conclude that the effort would be sustainable for public budgets.

Compensating the 50% least well-off households for devalued assets would cost Europe $9 billion, compared with the $15 billion cost of bailing out the German electricity company UNIPER. Compensating all the losses suffered by the bottom 90% would cost between 0.1% and 1.2% of national income, and between 0.02% and 0.3% of the national wealth of the countries taken into account in this study.

The authors propose several means of financing the government compensation, including a tax on carbon emissions.

Finally, the authors argue that a modest progressive wealth tax applied to the wealthiest 0.005% of the population would offset all of the losses induced by fossil assets in just 2 to 3 years. Governments in high-income countries could thus take bold climate action despite strong lobbying from actors involved in the production and distribution of fossil fuels.

Link to the Paper (ScienceDirect) and additional materials
Link to figures and data code

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)

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.

• Abstract in English
• Page de Maël Ginsburger (publications)

The CRIS is pleased to organize, at Sciences Po in Paris, the 2023 Spring Meeting of the ISA Research Committee 28 "Social Stratification", on May 24-26th, 2023.

Following the Call for Papers, launched at the end of 2022, we received more than 600 proposals worldwide, dealing with the main themes of Education and Social Inequality across the Life Course. 

This meeting is organized in partnership with the Center for Research in Economics and Statistics (CREST), the Groupe d’Étude des Méthodes de l’Analyse Sociologique de la Sorbonne (GEMASS), the French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) and the Sciences Po - LIEPP.  

Keynote speakers:
- Aaron Reeves (Associate Professor of Evidence-Based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation, Department of Social Policy and Intervention (DSPI), University of Oxford).
The chosen few: Why the British elite are not like everyone else and how they try to convince people
otherwise.

- Prof. Dr. Jutta Allmendinger (President of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and Professor of Educational Sociology and Labor Market Research at the Humboldt University, Berlin), Change in Attitudes, Norms and the Perception of Others: A New Methodological Approach.

210 presentations were finally selected among speakers coming from 29 countries (Germans, Americans, French and British making up the leading quartet, but Japanese and Australians are also with us). We hope that the researchers will have fruitful exchanges, and that they enjoy their stay on the Sciences Po campus and their cruise dinner on the Seine.

Examples of sessions scheduled:

• Achievement and Educational inequality
• Educational Assortative Mating and Gender
• Education and Intergenerational Mobility
• Educational Attainment and Life Course Trajectories
• School Segregation and Inequality
• Education and Labor Market Inequality
• Educational Inequality, Policy, and Interventions
• Networks and Peer Effects in Education
• Motherhood and the labor market
• Employment insecurity and precarity
• Occupational mobility and wage inequality
• Labor Market Transitions and Career Trajectories
• Gender and Workplace Inequalities
• Income, Inequality, and Child Development
• Partnering, family formation
• Wealth and wealth transfers
• Social Determinants of Health and Well-Being
• Covid-19
• Dynamics of life-course and ageing
• Intergenerational social mobility
• Poverty and Inequality across the Life Course
• Wealth and Social Stratification
• Intergenerational Mobility in Immigrant Families
• Regional and Ethnic Differences in Intergenerational Mobility
• Elites
• Cultural consumption
• Spatial inequality
• Methods and measures

The conference program is available here (pdf, 20 May 2023).

Members of the Scientific Commitee

List of participants

CRIS Scientific Seminar 2022-2023
Joint Seminar with AxPo

Friday, May 5th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po (1, place Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin) - Room K008

Shifts in Work Orientation during the COVID-19 Pandemic 

Sigal Alon

Professor of Sociology
Weinberg Chair in Sociology of Stratification and Inequality
Head of The B.I. Cohen Inst. for Public Opinion Research
Tel Aviv University

Discussant: Ettore Recchi (Sciences Po - CRIS)

The world of work has been severely afflicted by COVID-19. To deal with the immense employment crisis, unemployment benefits were extended in many countries. This raised the classical question of whether this support would decrease the motivation of the unemployed to search for work. The answer to this conundrum is deeply rooted in sociological thought about work centrality and the meaning of work in our life.

Is the motivation to work limited to the quest to ensure livelihood, or is work a primary source of dignity, self-image, fulfillment, and self-realization? How has these factors been affected by the pandemic?

This study takes advantage of the COVID-19 disruption to assess shifts in work centrality and work values during the extended coverage of unemployment benefits.
The investigation consolidates pre-COVID-19 surveys of work orientations in Israel with a COVID-19-era assessment.

The results demonstrate that this shock has been powerful enough to put individuals’ work orientation to the test and made them reconsider the meaning of work in their life. Overall, the surge in work centrality during the pandemic and the gravitation of values toward job security reflect the universal trauma caused by the sharp decrease in employment certainty.

There will also be a Zoom option to enable a hybrid seminar.

Mandatory Registration. Thank You.

To find out more:

Sigal Alon is The Weinberg Chair in Sociology of Stratification and Inequality and the Head of The B. I. Cohen Inst. for Public Opinion Research at Tel-Aviv University.
Her main research interests include social stratification and mobility, with an emphasis on the sociology of work and organizations and sociology of education.
Her work focuses on unveiling the dynamics and historical processes underlying inequalities in the labor market and educational attainment, and the extent to which public policy does narrow these inequalities. Alon’s perspective is interdisciplinary and comparative, taking into account employment and educational processes and outcomes, institutional arrangements and social structures, psychological biases, as well as demographic and economic trends. https://www.sigalalon.sites.tau.ac.il/

En 1992, Marie Duru-Bellat propose à Agnès van Zanten une collaboration pour dresser une sociologie de l'école. 30 ans plus tard, l'éditeur Armand Colin propose le 6ème opus du manuel, fort de près de 400 pages, aux lecteurs désireux d'appréhender sous de multiples facettes le système scolaire français.

Les deux sociologues, aidées ici par Géraldine Farges, proposent de nombreux angles pour analyser ce « champ de recherche vivant » : celui des politiques publiques (politiques scolaires, laïcité), de la démocratisation de l'enseignement (inégalités, méritocratie), des enjeux sociétaux (emploi, ascension sociale, valeur des diplômes), du fonctionnement des établissements (décentralisation, autonomie), des contenus des programmes, des pratiques ou des évaluations de performance, sans oublier les acteurs, via le métier d'enseignant, les élèves (rapports au savoir) et les milieux familiaux (valeurs, choix).  

Cette nouvelle publication est l'occasion de faire un rapide bilan avec Agnès van Zanten, autour de 3 questions clés :    
- le point de départ et les choix faits par les auteures,
- les changements les plus significatifs observés dans l'école au fil des éditions,
- le positionnement de la sociologue au centre d'une problématique très (trop ?) sensible dans l'opinion publique, une caractéristique française. 

Marie Duru-Bellat, Géraldine Farges, Agnès van Zanten, Sociologie de l'école, 6ème édition, Armand Colin, collection U. ISBN 978-2-200-63057-7. Présentation de l'éditeur

Plusieurs éditions de l'ouvrage sont également consultables sur le portail CAIRN.

The CRIS is pleased to welcome Professor Merlin Schaeffer, for a scholar visiting, between 5th - 26th April. 

What is your field of study and what is your home institution?

I study ethnic diversity and inequality stemming from immigration, including the resulting processes of inclusion and political contestation. My home institution is University of Copenhagen.

What brought you to CRIS, and why were you interested in being a visiting researcher here?

At CRIS, several scholars are very proficient in using field experiments, and many work on similar topics as me. I therefore wanted to build contacts and would like to collaborate with colleagues at CRIS.

What has been the most unexpected or surprising aspect of your stay in Paris or Sciences Po so far?

The prices on the housing market and the huge range of luxury apartments available are quite unbelievable.

What would you most like to bring back with you once you leave?

Some new friends who I look forward to seeing during future conference visits.

Merlin Schaeffer led a presentation at the CRIS Scientific Seminar, Friday April 7th: 
Correcting Misperceptions about Ethnic Discrimination: The Limits of Awareness Raising to Promote Support for Equal Treatment Policies.

Selected publications

• (with Jonas Wiedner), "The refugee mobility puzzle: Why do refugees move to cities with high unemployment rates once residence restrictions are lifted?", SocArXiv, January 2023.
  
• (with J. Wiedner & S. Carol), "Ethno-religious neighbourhood infrastructures and the life satisfaction of immigrants and their descendants in Germany", Urban Studies, vol. 59, issue 14, p. 2985-3004, 2022.
• (with Peter Thisted Dinesen & Kim Mannemar Sønderskov), "Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust: A Narrative and Meta-Analytical Review", Annual Review of Political Science, vol. 23, p. 441-465, 2020.

To find out more

Google Scholar

Webpage host by the University of Copenhagen, Department of Sociology

CRIS Scientific Seminar 2022-2023

Friday, March 31th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po (1, place Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin) - Room K008

Fragile rights : Disability, public policy and social change

Anne Revillard

Associate Professor, Sciences Po - CRIS
Director of the Laboratory for the interdisciplinary evaluation of public policies (LIEPP)

Over the years, many disability-related rights have been legally recognized, but how has this changed the everyday lives of disabled people?

This book offers an original perspective on disability rights by addressing the question of their (non-)realization at the individual level, taking the experiences of ordinary disabled people as a starting point.

Drawing on biographical interviews collected from individuals with either mobility or visual impairments in France, the book analyses the reception of disability policies in the fields of education, employment, social rights and accessibility.

It examines to what extent these policies contribute to the realization of the associated rights among disabled people. In all the domains under study, the rights associated with disability suffer from major implementation flaws. In this context, disabled citizens play a very active role in the realization of their rights: they protest, negotiate, tinker, use or circumvent policies in order to make their rights real, but also to assert themselves as subjects of rights. This seminar will demonstrate these conclusions based on the case of accessibility.

Fragile Rights. Disability, Public Policy, and Social Change. Published on March 29th by Bristol University Press. ISBN 978-1529231007. 

Mandatory Registration. Thank You.

To find out more:

• Webpage (CRIS)
• Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Evaluation of Public Policies

Maël Ginsburger termine son parcours de doctorant au CRIS. Dans 3 mois viendra la soutenance finale, alors que plusieurs articles et un ouvrage co-écrit garnissent déjà son portefeuille de publications.
Il décide à l’automne dernier de candidater au Prix Jeune chercheur de la Fondation des Treilles, créé par Anne Gruner-Schlumberger pour « nourrir le dialogue entre les sciences et les arts, afin de faire progresser la création et la recherche ». Le printemps venu, Maël découvre qu’il fait partie des lauréats distingués par le Conseil scientifique de la fondation. C’est l’occasion de présenter plus en détail ses travaux entamés au CRIS en 2018.

Titre de la thèse : Pratiques environnementales, inégalités sociales et styles de consommation en France depuis 1985, sous la direction de Philippe Coulangeon (Sciences Po - CRIS, CNRS).

Pourquoi présenter sa candidature au Prix Jeune chercheur ?
Plusieurs raisons en fait ! La dotation financière proposée par la Fondation qui constitue, comme les postes d’ATER, une source de financement pour terminer sereinement sa thèse. Un précédent, Mathieu Ferry, doctorant de l’OSC qui a obtenu ce prix en 2017 (1). C’est un prix pluridisciplinaire, orienté vers les jeunes chercheurs. Enfin, il y a eu un effort à fournir pour expliciter à des non spécialistes les enjeux et les méthodes mises en œuvre dans ma thèse.

Présentation du cadre scientifique
Ma thèse s’inscrit dans le domaine scientifique de la sociologie quantitative, l’étude de la stratification sociale, dans la lignée des travaux de Pierre Bourdieu sur la distinction.

Problématique et singularité de la démarche
- Pierre Bourdieu a principalement étudié les goûts et les pratiques culturelles, la culture revêtant une dimension symbolique structurant l’appartenance à différentes classes sociales. J’ai décidé, ce qui fait l’originalité de mon travail, d’étudier la stratification par le prisme très contemporain de la transition écologique, via des aspects matériels : les pratiques de consommation ordinaires, qui s’inscrivent dans des styles de vie. Cette approche permet une grande profondeur historique pour observer l’entrée dans la transition, le cheminement (ou pas) vers l’éco-citoyenneté prônée aujourd’hui. 
- Le fait d’avoir des appareils électro-ménagers nombreux et récents, d’utiliser une automobile ou le train, de trier ses déchets ou de fréquenter des magasins bio sont autant de marqueurs qui sont interprétables pour le sociologue. On a longtemps considéré que le développement de la société de consommation des années 70 à 2000 a amené à masquer les différences de classe. L’étude des pratiques quotidiennes ordinaires dans un contexte de prescriptions et d’injonctions environnementales me permet d’identifier les facteurs de différenciation.

Rien ne change vraiment
L’un des résultats remarquables de mes travaux c’est de noter la stabilité de la stratification sociale depuis 1985, entre les consommateurs exclus (contraints par les conditions matérielles d’existence) et ceux qui sont intégrés. Autre clivage pérenne, celui qui distingue les connectés (consommateurs de biens technologiques, très mobiles sur de longue distance, usagers des transports collectifs urbains), des  autonomes (pratiquant l’autoconsommation, peu de déplacements, un faible renouvellement des objets).

Des discours et des actes
On peut observer que les membres d’un groupe social peuvent se distinguer en érigeant une “frontière morale”, par exemple par le biais d’un discours supérieur prônant une éthique et des comportements environnementaux vertueux, alors qu’ils sont, de par leurs style de vie, et proportionnellement à d’autres groupes, de gros consommateurs.

________

1. Observatoire sociologique du changement, ancienne appellation  du laboratoire.
Titre de la thèse de Mathieu Ferry : What goes around meat eating, comes around: Vegetarianism as a status marker in contemporary India

Let's meet our current guests, in Spring 2023:

_________  Abdie Kazemipur (Canada)

Where are you from?
I work at Department of Sociology, University of Calgary, Canada, as a professor and the Research Chair in Ethnic Studies. I am also the Academic Director of the University’s Research Data Centre. Originally, I am from Iran, where I finished my BA and MA in sociology at University of Tehran. I then moved to Canada to finish my doctoral studies at University of Manitoba, after which worked at universities of Lethbridge, Memorial, and now Calgary.

What is currently your main research questions?
I am currently working on three new projects:
- a quantitative study of the socio-economic experiences of Muslim immigrants in Canada, which utilizes a range of secondary data generated by Statistics Canada, as well as a nationwide survey of Muslim and non-Muslim Canadians to be conducted later in 2023;
- a mixed-methods study of the culture of migration in Iran and its consequences for the lives of migrants, non-migrants, and what I have called ‘subjective migrants’;
- a study of the broad societal changes in Iran over the past half a century, and their implications for the future of the country, with a focus on ways to (re)build the communal spirit.

What do you expect from this stay?
As a believer in the value of comparative research, I hope to benefit from brainstorming with, and feedback from, colleagues with shared research interests who are working in different countries. I also hope to build a foundation for future collaborative comparative work in any/all of the above-mentioned areas. I believe in the motto once mentioned by the American sociologist, Martin Lipset: “A person who knows only one country basically knows no country well”.

What has been the most unexpected or surprising aspect of your stay in Paris or Sciences Po so far?
As a first impression of Paris by a sociologist of religion, I have been amazed about the number of large and magnificent churches that exist throughout the city and in close proximity to each other. I am also impressed that despite the secularity of the population and the state policy of laïcité, which have defined the French society for so long, these churches have remained relatively intact and functional throughout the years.

What would you most like to bring back with you once you leave?
A better understanding of the French society and its intellectual history; more familiarity with the French sociologists and their works; and some basic understanding of the French language. 

University of Calgary Webpage - Personal website

Nubin Ciziri (Sweden)  ______________

Where are you from?
Uppsala University, Sweden.

Could you present your scientific field?
Sociology of migration and education with interests in ethnic studies and family sociology.

What is currently your main research question?
I explore how the process of migration characterises refugee families’ structures, practices and resources. I work with the case of Kurds who fled the Syrian war and reside in Sweden.

What do you expect from this stay?
I hope to write my empirical chapters and present them to the group at CRIS, as well as engaging in the seminars and doctoral events with colleagues.

Uppsala University Webpage  - Twitter

 _________ Olof Östergren (Sweden)

Where are you from?
I am Swedish and my academic home is the Department of Public Health Sciences at Stockholm University.

Could you present your scientific field?
Currently I am working on inequalites in social and health outcomes and health heavior during the coronavirus pandemic, mortality from behavioral risk factors for Finnish migrants in Sweden and the reflexive relationships between social and pysiological processes in relation to addictive substances and behaviors. I am also a program coordinator for SWECOV, a national transdisciplinary research program on the coronavirus pandemic. I work primarily with quantitative methods and with administrative register data.

What brought you to CRIS, and why were you interested in being a visiting researcher here?
My research interests combine social sciences and health sciences and I try to learn as much as I can from specialists from different fields. After defending my thesis in Sociology I was a postdoc in the social gerontology unit at Karolinska Instiutet. After that I worked with scientists and civil servants from several different fields at the Swedish govenrment offices, in a inquiry evaluating the political response to the coronavirus pandemic. I recently ended a year long research stay with demographers at INED. I came to CRIS to gain a better understanding of social inequalites.

What would you most like to bring back with you once you leave?
I'd like to develop as a researcher, both in terms of substnative knowledge and in terms of new perspectives on the topics I am working with.

Stockholm University Webpage

What is your topic of study and what is your home institution?

UNC The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

CRIS Scientific Seminar 2022-2023

Friday, 17th March 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po (1, place Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin) - Room K008

Early and intensive music education in disadvantaged neighbourhoods:
what impacts, for whom? Evidence from a quasi-experiment

Julie Pereira

PhD Student, Sciences Po - CRIS

This presentation explores the impact of a music education program on the development of cognitive abilities of young students aged 4-7 years.
This program, implemented in a set of 40 pre-elementary schools located in disadvantaged areas of Val d'Oise, relies on regular violin training during standard school hours.
The main rationale for this project is based on the widespread belief — though unequally backed by the scientific literature — that learning a musical instrument improves general cognitive skills.

Based on a quasi-experimental research design combining entropy balancing and multilevel mixed effects models, two main results already emerge midway into the program.

- First, the program has a substantial impact on some specific skills related to fine motricity and reading, as well as perceived conscientiousness ; while displaying no significant impact on other outcomes.
- Second, the magnitude of this impact varies according to students' social background: maximum for students from low SES backgrounds, and minimal for students from higher SES backgrounds.

Evidence gathered from this study show mixed results regarding the impact of arts education in general, and instrumental musical training in particular, on educational inequalities. On one hand, cognitive near transfer has been demonstrated, especially for the most socially disadvantaged students, which tend to confirm DiMaggio’s cultural mobility theory. However, on the other hand, our research does not show any evidence of far transfer, to numeracy or logic for example.
These results thus suggest that benefits from such arts education programs could be limited to a set of skills closely related to the specific skills being trained.

Registration is mandatory. Thank you.

CRIS Scientific Seminar 2022-2023

Friday, February 24th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po (1, place Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin) - Room K008

Can Markets be Morally Performative?
Henry Ford and the U.S. Quest for Standard Hospital Prices

Roi Livne

Associate Professor, University of Michigan

Scholars of economic performativity have largely focused on the constitutive effect of economic designs, models, formulae, and tools of calculation on markets (Callon, 1998). Yet the theoretical notion of capitalist markets provides far more than material designs for market exchange. Since Adam Smith, markets have also been moral constructs that generate categorizations of social and moral worth.

In this talk, I draw on the sociology of critical capacity (Boltanski and Thevenot, 1999; Boltanski, 2011) to interrogate critiques that have been directed toward how U.S. hospitals price care. Principle among those critiques is the fact that, unlike in the perfect market model, U.S. hospitals exercise radical price discrimination, charging virtually arbitrary amounts to different people for similar treatments. I analyze the case of the historic Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan as a paradigmatic case in which a hospital attempted to institute standard prices, arguing that this attempt illustrates moral performativity, as it was tightly linked to a moralistic view of the capitalist society, which Ford sought to promote through his hospital.

Registration is mandatory. Thank you.

To find out more: https://lsa.umich.edu/soc/people/faculty/roi-livne.html

CRIS Scientific Seminar 2022-2023

Friday, February 10th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po (1, place Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin) - Room K008

In or Out? Xenophobic Violence and Immigrant Integration.
Evidence from 19th century France

Mathilde Emeriau

Assistant Professor in Empirical Political Economy, LSE (London)

How do immigrants respond to xenophobic violence? We study the responses of Italian immigrants in 19th century France to a wave of xenophobic violence triggered by the assassination of the French president by an Italian anarchist in 1894.
By linking nominative census records between 1886, 1891 and 1896, we study the decision of Italian immigrants to either leave their host communities or stay and naturalize using a difference in differences design, comparing the change in exit and naturalization rate of Italians before and after the assassination to that of other foreigners in the same period.
While some Italians left, other stayed and naturalized.

Descriptively, our data is consistent with three different mechanisms: (1) Exposure to or fear of violence drove Italians out, (2) anticipating discrimination from consumers, business owners naturalized to avoid boycott by natives, (3) pressured by French workers, employers fired Italians workers who had to leave to find employment elsewhere.

Registration is mandatory. Thank you.

To find out more: Home page (LSE) - Website

Is ‘diversity’ a liability or an asset in elite labour markets?
The case of graduates who have benefited from a French positive discrimination scheme

Agnès van Zanten, Senior Researcher CNRS, Sciences Po - CRIS

Journal of Education and Work
Volume 36, 2023 - Issue 1: Positionality and social inequality in graduate careers

Available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/13639080.2022.2162016

This article analyses the obstacles faced by graduates who benefited from an ambitious positive discrimination scheme called conventions éducation prioritaire (acronym CEP) which was launched by Sciences Po in 2001 and which had involved 2,262 young people by 2020. The scheme (which operated from 2001–2020) represented a radical departure from the main admissions procedure at the time, which was based on a competitive written exam including several essays on traditional academic subjects.

It adopts a Bourdieusian perspective enriched by research on the barriers encountered by socially mobile individuals from disadvantaged and stigmatised categories and studies the experiences of graduates who lack the economic, cultural, and social capital necessary to compete with traditional holders of elite positions and who, due to their ascribed characteristics and/or the positive discrimination label itself, are prone to self-eliminate from elite positions or be subjected to discriminatory practices.

Using data collected through interviews with 42 beneficiaries of this scheme still in the early stages of their professional careers, the article shows that the graduates’ disadvantages and ways of coping with them, as well their chances of being stigmatised and reactions to this process, vary considerably.
This variation can be explained by different family backgrounds and ethnoracial characteristics but also by axiological positions towards employability and social mobility, with ‘purists’ more likely to invest in increasing their technical cultural capital to make up for ‘handicaps’ and ‘players’ more likely to put forward ‘soft skills’ including, in some cases, those associated with their ‘diversity’.

CRIS Scientific Seminar 2022-2023

Friday, January 20th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po (1, place Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin) - Room K008

Housing and school choices in the unequal city:
current findings and a future research agenda

Quentin Ramond

Assistant Professor, Center for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies
& The Institute of Urban and Territorial Studies
(Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago)
 

In many cities, rising housing prices make access to advantaged neighbourhoods served by desirable schools highly challenging for large segments of the population. How, then, do families with children articulate housing and school choices?

This presentation examines the complex trade-offs households consider between housing and school to deal with growing housing affordability constraints and the unequal geography of education.

First, I present recent results regarding the relationship between access to homeownership and inequalities of educational opportunity in Paris. Drawing on exhaustive and geocoded data on property transactions and buyers, I show that the upper-middle classes have consolidated their access to the property market in the most desirable school catchment areas, thereby widening the gap with the rest of the population who is increasingly excluded from neighbourhoods served by high-quality schools.

Based on these findings, I outline an ambitious research agenda that structures my ERC Starting Grant proposal, which is currently under evaluation. Drawing on national, geocoded and individual-level longitudinal data, the aim of this project is to analyse how housing tenure – that is, being a homeowner or living in a privately rented dwelling or in social housing – shapes residential sorting processes and, subsequently, local educational opportunity and school choice in large French metropolitan areas."

Registration is mandatory. Thank you.

La conversion écologique des français
Contradictions et clivages

Philippe Coulangeon, Yoann Demoli, Maël Ginsburger, Ivaylo Petev

PUF, collection Le lien social, 220 p., ISBN 978-2-13-083258-4

Au début des années 90, deux jeunes chercheurs en planification urbaine de l'Université de Colombie-Britanique proposaient un nouvel outil de mesure, l'empreinte écologique, pour mieux quantifier la soutenabilité de notre environnement face aux comportements et à la pression humaine. De multiples politiques publiques affichent, à la suite des accords de Paris en 2015 ou des rapports du GIEC, la préoccupation de réduire cette empreinte, mettant sobriété et réduction des pollutions au coeur de dispositifs incitatifs ou coercitifs. Même si les innovations technologiques ou l'amélioration du cadre de vie atténuera le coût social de la transition, l'impact sur nos modes de vie et de consommation sera réel.
Cet ouvrage entend montrer que pour apprécier une telle transformation, il est nécessaire de prendre en compte les habitudes et pratiques polluantes des français dans leurs rapports inégalitaires à l'espace résidentiel ainsi que les clivages de classe sociale, d'âge ou de genre qui divisent la population.

Ce livre étudie les logiques sociales de la conversion écologique en questionnant les représentations, les attitudes et les pratiques à partir de plusieurs sources, du Panel ELIPSS comprenant un échantillon représentatif de la population française aux grandes enquêtes nationales de la statistique publique.      

La première partie de l'ouvrage, analyse sur une longue période la diffusion des préoccupations environnementales à l'échelle mondiale. Une série de modèles interprétatifs sont proposés, selon le rôle prêté à l'évolution des conditions matérielles d'existence, la diffusion des valeurs pro-environnementales ou les changements culturels. Ces préoccupations sont en France très inégalement partagées. Dans la seconde partie, une analyse systématique des mutations de la consommation et des styles de vie est proposée. Mutation des régimes de consommation alimentaire (chapitre 3), contraintes matérielles et résidentielles encadrant les consommations vestimentaires ou d'équipement domestique (chap. 4), rationalité ambivalente des pratiques de tri et de sobriété énergétique qui découle de motivations concurrentes de préservation des ressources et d'adaptation aux contraintes budgétaires (chap. 5), articulation des contraintes sociales et spatiales de déplacement et dimension statutaire des mobilités (chap. 6). Dans la dernière partie, les auteurs proposent une analyse des clivages qui traversent la société française contemporaine en matière de pratiques environnementales. Les auteurs révèlent alors une possible contradiction des attitudes et des pratiques. La conversion se trouve entravée par le poids des fractures sociales et spatiales qui traversent la société.

Dans le chapitre 8, les auteurs dressent une typologie des mode de vie permettant de distinguer 4 styles d'empreinte environnementale. Ces idéaux-types sont formés par le lien entre la sobriété et la conscience environnementale :
- le consumérisme assumé (-/-)
- l'écoconsumérisme (-/+)
- l'écocosmopolitisme (+/+)
- la frugalité sans intention (+/-).

En conclusion les auteurs soulignent que le souci environnemental s'est généralisé en France comme au niveau international, mais tardivement, et de manière partielle et non homogène. Deux logiques sont à l'oeuvre : un sentiment d'inquiétude environnementale et une forme de défiance vis-à-vis du progrès technique et humain. Les variations sociales sont notables. L'articulation entre préoccupation environnementale et évolution des habitudes de consommation est complexe et ambivalente. Ces dernières années restent marquées par une intensification des pratiques de consommation, de l'usage de la voiture et de l'avion. Autour de la conversion écologique se jouent des logiques économiques, de classe, de type et lieu d'habitat, de genre, rendant complexes les politiques de transition devant prendre en compte les coûts économiques et sociaux des réformes et leur acceptabilité sociale.  

• Présentation du contenu de l'ouvrage par 3 des auteurs [vidéo, 6']
• Table des matières (pdf, 232 Ko)
• Données annexes (tableaux)

•  Lien éditeur (PUF)
• Lien vers les données de l'enquête SVEN
• Recension par Jean Haëntjens, Futurible
• Recension par Blandine Doazan, Marianne
• Podcast France Inter (La Terre au carré), La conversion écologique des Français : qui sont les Français sensibles à l'environnement en France ?
• Podcast de l'émission La tête dans l'étagère de Radio Escapades (St Hippolyte-du-Fort) animée par Vlad, avec Maël Ginsburger. [MP3, 61 min.]
• Recension dans Le Monde, Débats, par Claire Legros [abonnés]
• Article de Mathieu Giroux dans Usbek & Rica, Portrait-robot de l'écocitoyen français

CRIS Scientific Seminar 2022-2023

Friday, January 6th 2023, 11:30 am
Sciences Po (1, place Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin) - Room K008

High hopes and broken promises:
Young adult life courses and political protest in West Africa

Anette Fasang
Professor of Microsociology, Berlin Social Science Center (WZB),
Humboldt-University

Failing to attain an aspired social position can be a profoundly painful experience. Across the global South, the combination of educational expansion and a stagnant labour market prevents vast numbers of young people from finding a job commensurate with their level of education.

In this study, we combine quantitative and qualitative data analysis to document adverse generational change in young adult life courses, the rise of unfulfilled occupational aspirations, and ensuing political protest in West Africa with a special focus on Senegal.

Based on an original data collection of 80 autobiographical interviews we show how Senegalese youth cope with unfulfilled occupational aspirations, and which coping strategies are most associated with political protest. Findings reveal four dominant coping strategies and corresponding narrative frames (Resignation, Internalization, Contestation, and Escape).

The ‘resignation’ frame involves an acceptance of and adjustment to  performing low-status irregular work, often seeking fulfilment in other life domains, such as religion or family. The most common frame, ‘internalization’, relies on neoliberal tropes about individual responsibility and self-reliance. The ‘contestation’ frame critiques the global and local structural conditions that hamper local employment opportunities and is most associated with political activism. Finally, ‘escape’ frames clandestine migration as a risky alternative route to success. We discuss the socio-political ramifications of our findings and the applicability of our typology of coping strategies to other social settings.

Registration is mandatory. Thanks.

CRIS Scientific Seminar 2022-2023

Monday, December 12th 2022, 2:15- 3:45 pm
Sciences Po (1, place Saint-Thomas) - Room H101

Does Schooling Affect Socioeconomic Inequalities in Educational Attainment? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Germany

Michael GRÄTZ
Associate Professor, Stockholm Univeristy & University of Lausanne

Critical theories of education and the dynamics of skill formation model predict that the education system reproduces socioeconomic inequalities in educational attainment. Previous empirical studies comparing changes in socioeconomic inequalities in academic performance over the summer to changes in these inequalities during the school year argue, however, that schooling reduces inequalities in educational performance.

The present study sheds light on the question of whether schooling affects socioeconomic inequalities in educational attainment by analyzing a natural experiment that induces exogenous variation in the length of schooling and allows me to investigate the causal, long-term effects of the length of schooling on inequalities in educational attainment.

Some German states moved the school start from spring to summer in 1966/ 1967 and introduced two short school years, each of which was three months shorter than a regular school year. I use variation in the short school years across cohorts and states to estimate the causal effects of the length of schooling on socioeconomic inequalities in educational attainment based on two German panel surveys.

Less schooling due to the short school years did not affect inequalities in educational attainment. This finding runs counter to the results from the summer learning literature and to the predictions of the dynamics of skill formation model and critical theories of education.

I conclude by discussing the implications of this finding for our understanding of socioeconomic inequalities in educational attainment.

Paper can be downloaded here - To find out about Michael Grätz

Registration is mandatory. Thank you. [Virtual access available via Zoom]

CRIS Scientific Seminar 2022-2023

Friday, December 9th 2022, 11:30 am
Sciences Po (13, rue de l'Université) - Room J208

Inequalities in time use, risk and enjoyment
across the UK pandemic

 Oriel Sullivan
Professor of Sociology of Gender
University College London (UCL)

Using a unique series of time use diary surveys, collected during all the main phases of the COVID19 pandemic in the UK, we present changes in activities (done in and out of doors) and their social context during 3 lockdowns, one period of relaxation of restrictions between lockdowns, and one after the end of all restrictions. We investigate differences in risk-related activities according to sex and age, and the relative enjoyment of those activities that increased during the pandemic (such as child care for parents).

Registration is mandatory. Thank you.

Oriel Sullivan is Professor of Sociology of Gender in the Social Research Institute and Co-Director of the Center for Time Use Research (CTUR), University College London  (UCL). Publications (Google Scholar)

CRIS Scientific Seminar 2022-2023

Friday, December 2nd 2022, 11:30 am
Sciences Po (1, Place Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin) - Room K008

Governing through Dis-orientation.
The Spatial Management of Asylum Seekers in France

Maxime Christophe
(PhD Student, Sciences Po - CRIS)

Since 2015 and the appearance of the first urban camps, Paris has been perceived by public authorities as "strained" due to the excess presence of asylum seekers and the lack of public accommodation.
A policy of "orientating" these asylum seekers away from the city has taken shape in the form of a network of transit centres. This management of the flow of individuals reinforces a logic of constraint of the mobility already present in the accomodation system.
Through a multi-sited ethnography, interviewing and archival work, this presentation aims to document the implementation and implications of this governing of bodies. 

Registration is mandatory. Thank you.

Maxime Christophe is, since 2020, PhD Student at the CRIS, under the supervision of Ettore Recchi (Thesis Director).

Labour Market Protection and Family Policy in High-Income Countries.
Continuity and Change (1990-2020)

Federico Danilo Filetti
Sciences Po - CRIS & LIEPP

Thesis defense, Thursday 17 November 2022, 3pm, at Sciences Po, room K.011.

Jury: Rossella Ciccia, Associate Professor of Social Policy, University of Oxford (reviewer)
Emanuele Ferragina, Associate Professor of Sociology, Sciences Po (supervisor)
Olivier Giraud, Senior Researcher, CNRS-Cnam-Lise
Angela Greulich,Full Professor of Sociologie, Sciences Po
Martin Seeleib-Kaiser, Professor of Comparative Public Policy, University of Tübingen (reviewer)

This dissertation employs a mix-methods research design to investigate processes of welfare state change through the prism of labour market protection and family policy, the two social policy areas that underwent the most noticeable transformations over the last three decades (1990-2020).
This investigation builds on the insights developed in the regime varieties literature (i.e., Worlds of Welfare, Varieties of Capitalism and École de la Régulation) and the debate bridging regime varieties and accounts of welfare state change (i.e., Varieties of Liberalization).

Our measure of labour market protection and family policy makes it possible to overcome the increasingly unrealistic Average Production Worker assumption, simultaneously accounting for dimensions of protection related to both ‘old’ and ‘new’ social risks. Labour market protection and family policy continuity and change are analysed quantitatively by employing Principal Component Analysis and two multidimensional scores to gather a holistic perspective on policy similarities and differences across countries and over time, and on the relationships between institutional arrangements and labour market outcomes.
The historical process-tracing of labour market protection and family policy reforms in Italy and France complements this investigation, and helps to observe details on policy and welfare state change that are invisible to quantitative descriptive methods.

This work contributes to the literature in five ways, by:
 1) providing new typologies of labour market protection (Central/Northern European, Southern European and liberal) and family policy (social democratic, commodified and residual) varieties resulting from three decades of institutional change;
 2) developing a series of country-specific taxonomies of labour market protection (liberalization, dualization, flexibility, de-dualization and higher protection) and family policy (de-Scandinization, partial de-Scandinization, partial Scandinization and Scandinization) trajectories of change;
 3) showing that the path-dependency hypothesis developed in the welfare state change literature is partially rejected for labour market protection, while it mostly holds for family policy;
 4) specifying, through historical process-tracing, that the labour market and family policy trajectories of change identified in previous contributions and in the quantitative analysis do not capture the full spectrum of the changes occurring in Italy and France; and
 5) showing that trajectories of change can be dynamic – in other words, a country can move from one trajectory to another over-time.

Ettore Recchi, Alessandro Ferrara, Alejandra Rodriguez Sanchez, Emanuel Deutschmann, Lorenzo Gabrielli, Stefano Lacus, Luca Bastiani, Spyridon Spyratos and Michele Vespe

The impact of air travel on the precocity and severity of COVID-19 deaths
in sub-national areas across 45 countries

Scientific Reports 12, 16522 (2022) [open access]

Airports: gateways to Covid-19?

Human travel fed the worldwide spread of COVID-19, but it remains unclear whether the volume of incoming air passengers and the centrality of airports in the global airline network made some regions more vulnerable to earlier and higher mortality.
We assess whether the precocity and severity of COVID-19 deaths were contingent on these measures of air travel intensity, adjusting for differences in local non-pharmaceutical interventions and pre-pandemic structural characteristics of 502 sub-national areas on five continents in April–October 2020.

Our ordinary least squares (OLS) models of precocity (i.e., the timing of the 1st and 10th death outbreaks) reveal that neither airport centrality nor the volume of incoming passengers are impactful once we consider pre-pandemic demographic characteristics of the areas.

We assess severity (i.e., the weekly death incidence of COVID-19) through the estimation of a generalized linear mixed model, employing a negative binomial link function.

Variable effects over time

Results suggest that COVID-19 death incidence was insensitive to airport centrality, with no substantial changes over time. Higher air passenger volume tends to coincide with more COVID-19 deaths, but this relation weakened as the pandemic proceeded.
Different models prove that either the lack of airports in a region or total travel bans did reduce mortality significantly.

We conclude that COVID-19 importation through air travel followed a ‘travel as spark’ principle, whereby the absence of air travel reduced epidemic risk drastically. However, once some travel occurred, its impact on the severity of the pandemic was only in part associated with the number of incoming passengers, and not at all with the position of airports in the global network of airline connections.

Figure 3 - The impact of air passenger traffic on the severity of COVID-19 deaths (number of deaths in the first week of April–October 2020), controlling for population mixing (NPI), structural predispositions and recursive effects. Negative binomial regressions with continent fixed effects. Risk ratios and confidence intervals.

CRIS Scientific Seminar 2022-2023

Friday, October 28th 2022, 11:30 am
Sciences Po (1, Place Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin) - Room K031

Are mixed ability classes bad for school performance and educational choice?
Or for social and ethnic inequality?

Jan O. Jonsson (Professor, Nuffield College, Oxford university)
Joan E. Madia (DPhil student, Nuffield College, Oxford university)

A longstanding question in the organisation of education has been how to handle pupil groups with differing ability. At the centre of this political discussion and academic theorizing is the question of teaching and learning in ability-homogenous groups. Previous research has suggested that tracking or ability grouping, attempting to make the pupil body homogeneous, does not improve learning on average, in some instances ability grouping leads to increasing inequality. However, lack of suitable data and methodological difficulties have made results inconclusive.

We contribute to the literature with a comparative study between the English school system (with institutionalized ability grouping) and Sweden (with occasional use). We study the effect of (a) homogeneity in ability in instructional groups on grade point averages (GPA), (b) the effect of ability grouping within subjects on grades in these subjects, and we extend our analyses to include educational choice of upper secondary education.
We use the harmonised CILS4EU data (around 9,000 pupils, 200 schools and 400 classrooms), containing rich information on students' ability at individual, class and school levels. We fit school fixed effects and selection models to reduce risks of selection into schools and ability groups.

We find little evidence for any efficiency gain in homogeneous instruction groups or ability grouping, but also little evidence that such grouping has any effects on inequality between students of different socioeconomic or immigrant background. In addition, we find few differences between England and Sweden.

Registration is mandatory. Thank you.

Jan O Jonsson's homepage: https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/people/profiles/jan-o-jonsson/
Joan Madia's homepage: https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/people/profiles/joan-madia/

CRIS Scientific Seminar 2022-2023

Vendredi14 octobre 2022, 11h30
Sciences Po (1, Place Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin) - Salle A201

La mise en œuvre des réformes structurelles en éducation : analyse de cas d’une politique qui visait la suppression d’un système de filières

Kilian Winz

Assistant, docteur, Groupe genevois d'analyse des politiques éducatives (Université de Genève)

Cette présentation, qui mobilise tant des concepts de sciences politiques que de la sociologie de l'action publique, proposera une réflexion poursuivant l’objectif de mieux comprendre les dynamiques sociales à l'œuvre dans un contexte de réforme structurelle en éducation. Pour ce faire, nous mobiliserons une réforme du mode de répartition des élèves au secondaire 1 en Suisse.

Les résultats, fruits de 84 entretiens semi-directifs menés avec des politiques, des syndicats, membres de l'administration, directions d'établissement et enseignants, sont multiples. Ils mettent en exergue que les professionnels qui œuvrent au sein des établissements scolaires, de par leur marge de manœuvre, contribuent de façon significative à réinterpréter les directives règlementaires à l'aune de leurs expériences, de leurs idées, de leurs intérêts, mais aussi de leur motivation. Par ailleurs, si les propos portent ici sur les acteurs de l’éducation, des ponts sont sans doute envisageables avec d’autres corps de métier.

Merci de vous inscrire en suivant ce lien  -  En savoir plus sur le chercheur (UNIGE)

CRIS Scientific Seminar 2022-2023

Friday, October 7th 2022, 11:30 am
Sciences Po (1, Place Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin) - Room K008

The intersection of Family Income, Race and Academic Performance in Access to Higher Education in Brazil

Carlo Antonio Costa Ribeiro

Full Professor of Sociology, Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Políticos da Universidade do
Estado do Rio de Janeiro (IESP-UERJ)

This presentation investigates the intersection of income and race in structuring access to higher education among students that participate in a national high-stakes exam in Brazil.
Our objectives are:
- to estimate the probability of students coming from different income strata, racial groups, and performance levels to access higher education and
- to decompose income and racial effects into direct (net of educational performance) and indirect effects (through educational performance).

Our data comes from a panel of high school graduates tracked between 2012 and 2017 and allows us to describe the following findings.

Firstly, the probability of entering higher education is always higher among candidates from higher income strata. Second, there is a convergence in admission probabilities across the performance scale. Third, the admission curve across a performance scale is much steeper among applicants from low-income strata compared to richer students.

In all of these results, students self-identified as black, brown, or indigenous (BBI) are less likely to transition to higher education than whites, even though they are in the same income and performance strata.

We suggest that students from privileged socioeconomic backgrounds benefit from alternative entry strategies, such as paying tuition at less competitive private colleges. For students from low-income strata, the main alternative for entering higher education is through high academic performance. By decomposing racial effects, we show the cumulative effect of racial stratification; the gap between white and BBI students is both related to a higher propensity of transitioning to higher education and higher educational performance.

Registration is mandatory. Thank you.

CRIS Scientific Seminar 2022-2023

Friday, September 30th 2022, 11:45 am
Sciences Po (1, Place Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin) - Room A201 + Zoom

Left Behind Whom? Economic Status Loss and Populist Radical Right Voting

Giuseppe Ciccolini

PhD Student, European University Institute
Consultant for the OECD, Adjunct Professor at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

Citizens’ resentment at losing out to the rest of society is commonly thought to be the foundation of the demand for the populist radical right (PRR).
Yet whether PRR voters are objectively disadvantaged remains disputed, which raises doubts regarding the alleged economic basis behind PRR support.
Relying on European Social Survey (ESS) individual-level data from 23 elections across Western Europe, I demonstrate that the PRR polls better among social classes facing economic status loss. To do so, I leverage income data from Eurostat and develop a novel positional measure of income.
This approach allows me to gauge (objective) economic status decline as distinct from worsening financial circumstances. The pre-eminence of the former over the latter as regards PRR voting is further corroborated by evidence on cultural stances and redistributive preferences.
My study confirms the complementarity of cultural- and economic-based explanations of PRR voting and reveals one electoral consequence of rising economic inequalities.

Registration is mandatory. Thanks!

To find out more on Giuseppe Ciccolini

CRIS Scientific Seminar 2022-2023

Friday, September 16th 2022, 11:30 am
Sciences Po (1, Place Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin), room K008

Is there a "white upper class" privilege in educational achievement in France?
Insights from an intersectional empirical design

Philippe Coulangeon

Directeur de recherche CNRS, Sciences Po - CRIS

This presentation applies the intersectional analytical framework to the analysis of the impact of class, gender, and origin on educational outcomes in contemporary France, relying on data from the 2007 panel of the Ministry of national education matched with those of the first waves of the ongoing EVA (Entrée dans la vie active) survey of the INSEE. This longitudinal data set tracks the educational trajectories of young French people from the time they enter junior high school (classe de 6ème), around age 11, until age 25.

The intersectional approach of the intertwining effect of these variables is operationalized through the Multilevel Analysis of Individual Heterogeneity and Discriminatory Accuracy (MAIHDA) originally developed in social epidemiology (Merlo, 2018, Evans et al., 2018; Green, et al., 2017). This approach relies on the definition of strata based on the intersection of four variables: gender, class, origin, and cognitive abilities measured at 11. It differs from the usual approach by the interaction terms between these variables in that it allows the identification of specific combinations in which these effects interact more particularly, even in the presence of limited general interaction effects.

The most salient result relates to French native students of upper-class origin with low cognitive level at age 11 who, even when controlled for the additive effects of these characteristics, display a higher probability to reach an upper tertiary diploma than non-native students from lower social background but higher cognitive abilities measured at 11. On the other hand, non-native students from lower social backgrounds and low-cognitive abilities do not experience a specific “intersectional” penalty. This result suggests a kind of “white upper-class privilege” that may be partially interpreted in terms of compensatory advantage (Bernardi, 2014; Bernardi and Triventi, 2020).

Registration is mandatory. Thanks!

OSC Scientific Seminar 2022-2023

Friday, September 9th 2022, 11:30 am
Sciences Po (1, Place Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin), room K011

Inequalities, intersectionality and vulnerability to climate change impacts

Samuel Rufat

Maître de conférence - CY Cergy Paris University & Institut Universitaire de France

Social vulnerability is a measure of the sensitivity of a population to climate change impacts and its ability to respond to and recover from the impacts of environmental hazards. It is considered to mirror the geographies of inequality. As public agencies are increasingly seeking tools to understand inequity in exposure and decide distribution of prevention funds, aggregated indicators of vulnerability are being considered as equity measures. However, such indices rely on single-axis frameworks with the underlying assumptions that a deficit in one dimension of vulnerability can be offset (or compensated) by a surplus in another. More recently, the intersectionality perspective has been gaining traction to offer a more nuanced mapping of vulnerability and thereby overcome binary categorizations of vulnerable groups.

Registration is mandatory. Thanks!

Homepage (CY Université)

Bringing underprivileged middle-school students to the opera: cultural mobility or cultural compliance?

Philippe Coulangeon & Denis Fougère

British Journal of Sociology of Education

First published: 12 August 2022 - https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2022.2109593

This article assesses the impact of a two-year long project-based learning program conducted by the National Opera of Paris in a large number of middle schools located in underprivileged areas, aiming at preventing school dropout and tackling educational inequalities by providing disadvantaged students with the opportunity to discover the world of opera. This program is not exclusively concerned with democratizing access to the opera. Rather, it focuses on improving students’ self-confidence, motivation and school involvement.

Taking a counterfactual statistical approach (propensity score matching), we measure the impact of participation in the program on final exam and continuous assessment grades.
The analysis displays mixed results: a significant and positive impact for the students who participate in the program for its whole duration (two years), at least for continuous assessment scores, but a negative impact for those who leave the program after only one year.

The contrast between the effects of full and partial participation in the program suggests that these may be primarily due to a selection effect in favor of the most culturally and socially compliant students, in line with Bourdieu’s and Passeron’s reproduction theory rather than a mobility effect resulting from the transfer of cultural capital to disadvantaged students.

Failure at school has often been attributed to the cultural gap that may exist between the resources students inherit from their families and school culture. In this paper, we focus on two strategies aimed at reducing this cultural gap: arts and culture education, and project-based learning. Arts education includes all didactic action directed towards the dissemination of artistic and cultural knowledge. Project-based learning refers to a didactic approach based on interdisciplinary and collaborative educational activities. Advocates of this approach assume that it has a propensity to reduce the distance between students with working-class backgrounds and the school environment, as it involves real, practical objects. Project-based learning may interact with arts education to the extent that this pedagogical orientation often entails the production of artifacts such as creative writing, visual art, drawings, videos, photography, and on-stage performances.

In order to assess the impact of the National Opera of Paris' program on participating students’ educational achievements, we interpret the underlying mechanism of this impact in relation with the cultural capital theory. We show that the socially redistributive impact of the program is questionable depending on whether the program help students from disadvantaged background to compensate for their lack of cultural resources or favor their ability to conform to the middle-class cultural norms and repertoires.

We start this paper by linking the issues raised by the evaluation of the impact of this program with the broader question of the role of cultural capital in educational inequalities. Second, we review the existing literature on arts education and project-based learning. We then describe in more detail the program implemented at the National Opera of Paris since 1991. We finally present our data, our methods, our hypotheses and our results, followed by a discussion on their implications and significance.

L’Observatoire sociologique du changement (OSC), unité mixte de recherche n° 7049 du CNRS et de Sciences Po, devient le Centre de Recherche sur les Inégalités Sociales (CRIS) à partir du 1er juillet 2022.

Cette appellation incarne le projet scientifique du Centre : investir la thématique des inégalités sociales dans leur multidimensionnalité en mobilisant des données et des méthodes variées et des perspectives interdisciplinaires. 
Les travaux des membres du CRIS sont ancrés en France et tournés vers les sphères internationales de la recherche en sciences sociales.

Le CRIS est rattaché au Département de sociologie de Sciences Po. Il rassemble une équipe d'une soixantaine de personnes, dont 20 enseignants-chercheurs permanents qui développent une recherche de pointe sur la stratification et les inégalités sociales.

Son programme de recherche poursuit 3 objectifs :

• Mesurer et comparer l’évolution des inégalités sociales en France et dans les sociétés contemporaines
• Analyser les mécanismes des inégalités sociales à plusieurs niveaux
• Contribuer à l’analyse des politiques publiques.

Les travaux des membres du CRIS portent sur les inégalités socioéconomiques, éducatives, culturelles, urbaines, environnementales, numériques liées au genre, à l’origine sociale ou géographique, à l’orientation sexuelle, à l’état de santé, qui se développent dans la famille et s’accumulent tout au long du cycle de vie.

Les recherches sont également attentives aux politiques publiques dans le domaine des inégalités sociales : elles étudient leur mise en œuvre ainsi que leurs effets.
Le centre développe une approche comparatiste qui s’intéresse aux effets des contextes nationaux, urbains, scolaires, etc.  

Téléchargez le communiqué de presse - Download the Press Release

The Observatoire sociologique du changement (OSC), a joint CNRS-Sciences Po research centre #7049 becomes the Centre for Research on social InequalitieS (CRIS) starting from the 1rst of July, 2022.

This name illustrates the Centre's scientific project, which addresses the multidimensional issues of social inequality by mobilising a diversity of data, methods and interdisciplinary perspectives.  
The work of CRIS members is rooted in France and oriented towards the international field of social science research.

CRIS is affiliated to Sciences Po Department of Sociology. It includes a team of some 60 people, including 20 permanent researchers who develop cutting-edge research on stratification and social inequalities.

Its research program pursues 3 goals to:

• Measure and compare the evolution of social inequalities in France and in contemporary societies
• Analyze the mechanisms of social inequalities at several levels
• Contribute to the analysis of public policies

The work of CRIS members focuses on socio-economic, educational, cultural, urban, environmental and digital inequalities related to gender, social or geographical origin, sexual orientation and health status, which develop in the family and accumulate throughout the life cycle.

The research also pays attention to public policies in the field of social inequalities and studies their implementation and effects.
The Centre is furthermore developing a comparative approach that looks at the effects of national, urban, education and other contexts.  

Entretien avec Mirna Safi, directrice du CRIS (septembre 2022)

Sciences Po is recruiting an Associate / Full Professor at the OSC - Observatoire Sociologique du Changement. Position starting on October 1st, 2022.

This professorship position is designed to reinforce and complement our expertise in the study of environmental inequality. We welcome applications from candidates with an excellent publication record in leading social science journals capable of stimulating new expertise on environmental inequality within Sciences Po.
We particularly value candidates with an ambitious research agenda on global economic and environmental inequality using large-scale worldwide data.

This position is for a senior scholar (Rang A) and only candidates with an Habilitation or with a current position at least equivalent to associate professor are eligible.

The successful candidate will fully become a member of the Observatoire sociologique du changement. He.She is expected to play an active role in OSC’s collective activity: seminars, academic events, participation in research networks. He.She should also engage in responding to national and international calls to fund research projects. He.She is also supposed to supervise master and PhD students. The selected candidate will also be welcome to participate to AIRE, the Sciences Po Interdisciplinary Research Program on the Environment.

The successful candidate will teach a class on environmental approaches in the social sciences (undergraduate level) and may also teach on global and environmental inequality (graduate level).
Teaching load: 3 courses with 24 contact hours each per year, 56 hours per year of other academic duties.

Applications are due by [Extended deadline] July 10th.

Submissions must include:
● CV with a list of publications
● Motivation letter
● Research Statement (2 pages)
● Short Teaching statement (1 page)
● 2 significant publications chosen by the candidate
● The name of two academic referees

Please read the full Job description and the complete requirements (pdf, 172 ko).
Contact:  Carlo Barone carlo.barone@sciencespo.fr, Chair of the recruitment committee
or Administrative contact Marie Ferrazzini marie.ferrazzini@sciencespo.fr, Secrétaire générale de l’OSC.

OSC Scientific Seminar 2021-2022

Friday 10th June 2022, 11:30 am
OSC meeting room (1, Place Saint-Thomas)

From Diversity to Mixing?
Socioeconomic Homophily in French Desegregated Middle Schools

Timothée Chabot

PhD European University Institute, Post-doc INED (ELVIS Project)

À quel point l’origine sociale des élèves de collège structure-t-elle leurs relations les uns avec les autres ? Pour répondre à cette question, une cohorte d’environ 800 collégien·nes français·es a été suivie pendant trois ans, dans quatre établissements socialement mixtes. L’analyse de leurs réseaux de relations, notamment via les méthodes de la statistique de réseaux, permet de mieux comprendre les causes de l’homophilie sociale entre élèves, c’est-à-dire de la tendance à la ségrégation sociale des amitiés.

Socioeconomic mixing at school is often considered to be a desirable objective, as it would reduce academic inequalities and help pacify inter-group relations.
Does spatial diversity imply relational mixing, or do students keep interacting with socioeconomically similar peers even in formally desegregated contexts? This raises the question of homophily, the principle by which relationships occur at a higher rate among similar individuals.
I study socioeconomic homophily among a cohort of 800 middle school students in four schools in France, followed during three years.
Based on the statistical analysis of students’ friendship networks and on qualitative interviews, I examine the magnitude of this homophily, and try to disentangle the relational processes through which it emerges.

Registration is mandatory. Thanks! 

Who took care of what?
The gender division of unpaid work during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in France

Marta Pasqualini, Marta Dominguez-Folgueras, Emanuele Ferragina
Olivier Godechot, Ettore Recchi, Mirna Safi

Demographic Research, vol. 46, art. 34, p. 1007-1036
24 May 2022, doi 10.4054/DemRes.2022.46.34
This paper is available in open access

France was one of the first countries implementing lockdown measures to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Since families spent more time at home, household and care workloads increased significantly. However, existing findings are mixed in terms of whether this situation contributed to a more gender-egalitarian division of unpaid work.

This paper explores the division of domestic work within couples across two different COVID-19 lockdowns and compares them to the out-of-lockdown period in France. We use the theoretical lenses of time availability, relative resources, and ‘doing gender’ to make sense of these changes.

The longitudinal analyses rely on an original panel study we collected in France between April 2020 and April 2021.We employ the different types of restrictions to mobility and social life imposed during the first year of the pandemic as a contextual background, within which we measure the main drivers of change in the division of unpaid work within couples. We use individual fixed effect regression models to estimate changes in men’s share of unpaid work by time, changes in work conditions, partners’ educational gaps, and types of domestic tasks.

Another data and analysis are available within the CoCo Project (Coping with Covid-19: Social distancing, cohesion and inequality in 2020 France) - Data produced by the CDSP via the ELIPSS Panel (8 waves) are described in the Sciences Po data repository: https://data.sciencespo.fr/dataverse/elipss 

The Subjective Cost of Young Children: A European Comparison

Sonja Spitzer, Angela Greulich, Bernhard Hammer

Social Indicators Research, First Published 15 May 2022

Paper in open access via Springer Link - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-022-02942-5

The researchers have investigated how the birth of a child affects the objective and subjective economic situation of young parents in Europe. They mobilize longitudinal data from the European Union’s Statistics of Income and Living Conditions, covering the time period 2004 to 2019 for 30 European countries.

Does the work and income situation for young parents differ between European countries?
They study the career break: is it and to what extend primarily reserved for mothers?
Is it the case in every European country that parental leave massively harms women in their working life, while fathers have no losses?

Results show that newborns decrease subjective economic well-being in all regions, yet with economies of scale for the number of children. The substantial labour income losses of mothers explain only a small part of subjective child costs. The initial drop in subjective economic well-being observed shortly after childbirth is caused by increased expenses due to the birth of a child and other drivers such as stress.

The study finds that everywhere in Europe, mothers take longer breaks from work than fathers – particularly in the German-speaking countries.

The authors observe that despite a decline in labor market income for mothers after childbirth, the household income of many couples remains relatively constant across all regions in the short term. This is, firstly, because – on average – a lot is offset by public subsidies, such as lump-sum benefits and leave payments. Secondly, the labor incomes of many fathers are observed to increase slightly after the birth of a child in many European countries regions.

Sciences Po and the Observatoire Sociologique du Changement (OSC) will be hosting a workshop on the individual and societal consequences of widowhood, especially in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Despite spousal loss being one of the most devastating events in the lives of men and women, research on the consequences of bereavement is limited in the social sciences.
This workshop will highlight new findings and perspectives as well as pave the path for new research on how widowhood affects the wellbeing of bereaved spouses.
 
The workshop will take place in Sciences Po Paris, on June 9, in hybrid format. If you would like to participate in person or online, please complete the following form.

Confirmed participants and contributors:

• Zachary Van Winkle and Angela Greulich (Sciences Po), 
• Nicole Kapelle and Jose-Manuel Aburto (University of Oxford),
• Carole Bonnet, Julie Tréguier and Léa Cimelli (INED),
• Aart Jan Riekhoff (Finnish Centre for Pensions),
• Patrick Präg (ENSAE),
• Thomas Leopold (University of Cologne).

Download here the Schedule

This workshop takes place within the remit of the WIDOW19 project funded by the ANR Résilience Covid-19 programme.
The Covid-19 pandemic has left, and continues to leave, numerous men and women prematurely and unexpectedly widowed. Surviving spouses must not only cope with the psychological consequences of bereavement, but also deal with greater economic hardship following partner loss. Especially younger widows and widowers had less time on the labor market to finish financial preparations for old age and discuss post-bereavement financial planning.
The overarching aim of this project is to assess the consequences of increased rates of premature and unexpected widowhood due to the covid-19 pandemic in terms of individual economic wellbeing and societal economic costs.

Project members from six French and European universities and research institutes will collaborate to not only fill several gaps in social scientific knowledge on widowhood, but also provide French and European policy makers with evidence-based policy suggestions to counter and mitigate the individual and societal consequences of widowhood in the short and long-term following the pandemic.

OSC Scientific Seminar 2021-2022

Friday 29th April 2022, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, 1 St-Thomas, Room K008

Coordinated Markets, School-to-Work Linkages,
and Labor Market Outcomes in the European Union

Thomas A. DiPrete

 Giddings Professor of Sociology, Columbia University in the City of New York
and Director, Institute of Social and Economic Research and Policy

A large literature in both sociology and political science has theorized about the importance of country differences in skill formation systems for labor market outcomes.
Focusing on twenty-one European countries, my study establishes that countries differ in the strength of the pathways that connect educational credentials to the occupational structure, though there is considerable variability in the country rankings of the strength of individual pathways. Pathway strength matters for the quality of occupational matching, for employment and earnings, and for the earnings gap between well matched and less well-matched workers. In general, the total effects of local linkage strength are to raise earnings and to lower unemployment risk, though positive total effects of local linkage on earnings are concentrated at the lower tertiary and non-tertiary educational levels.
The results suggest that pathway effects are stronger in high-linkage countries for male and for older female workers, and the results also support the hypothesis that local linkage is more protective against unemployment in high linkage countries. However, the local linkage effect is not consistently higher in high-linkage countries when one analyzes the data one educational level at a time. Therefore, the most robust effect of high linkage countries appears to be the fact that – even taking internal heterogeneity into account – their pathways from educational credentials to occupations generally show tighter linkage along with its attendant advantage on labor market outcomes.

Registration is mandatory 

To find out more:

See the webpage of Thomas A. DiPrete

OSC Scientific Seminar 2021-2022

Friday 8th April 2022, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, 1 St-Thomas, Room A201 & Online via Zoom

A feel for the game?
A contribution to the analysis of social stratification through higher education

Yann Renisio & Emil Bertilsson

 Associate Scientist, CNRS, Sciences Po - OSC & Senior Lecturer, Uppsala University   

Higher education plays a major role in the social stratification of contemporary western societies. Studies of this influence, generally compare properties of upper secondary graduates who enter higher education with those who do not enter (binary stratification), or, among those who enter, between short term vs long term programs (vertical stratification) or, among those who enter programs with the same duration, between the fields of these programs (horizontal stratification).

We propose three improvements in this research design, using Swedish register-data. First, we recalculate the actual space of reachable programs for all upper-secondary graduates, meaning that we can predict with very high accuracy which programs a given individual could have, or could have not, entered into if she had applied to them. Second, we construct a continuous characterization of programs based on a synthetic measure of their social outcomes (conjunction of average level of study, median income, and rate of upper-class occupations among accepted students to these programs, 10 years after their entrance).

By doing so, rather than relying only on the level and field of programs, we get a better approximation of the relation between higher education stratification and social stratification.

Finally, we decompose the process of entering a program in higher education as a succession of constrained practices, that is, first, the possibility to enter higher education, second, the practice of applying to higher education given the objective chances of success, third, the fact that these applications are oriented towards at least one reachable program, fourth, the fact of registering to this program once accepted to it, and finally, the relative position of this program in terms of outcomes, compared with all the other reachable programs.

We focus on the respective and cumulative influence of gender and level of education of parents on each of these steps.

Registration is mandatory. Thanks! (Zoom users: the link for the videoconference will be sent one day before)

OSC Scientific Seminar 2021-2022

Friday 1st April 2022, 11:30 am
Sciences Po, 1 St-Thomas, Room K008

Downward mobility and radical right gender gap vote

Alexis Baudour

 PhD Student, Sciences Po - MaxPo/OSC

This talk explores the link between inter-generational status decline and right-wing populist vote. We found a strong association between subjective status decline and populist vote for men but not for women.
We consider three hypotheses to explain this disparity.
 First, status anxiety and feeling to not get their ”fair share” for men would be associated with bitterness against women and minorities.
 Second, downward mobile women would be more feminist and therefore less likely to support right-wing populism. 
 Lastly, downward mobile men have a higher perception of external locus of control, and this would impact their political inclinations. Our data supports only this last hypothesis.
These results shed some light on the puzzle of the gender gap vote.

Registration is mandatory 

To find out more:

See the webpage of Alexis Baudour http://www.maxpo.eu/center-staff-doctoralfellow-baudour.asp

OSC Scientific Seminar 2021-2022

Friday 18th March 2022, 11:30 am
Room K008 (1 St Thomas) and Online via Zoom

Partisan proximity and intention to vaccinate against COVID-19

Jeremy K. Ward & Sébastien Cortaredona

INSERM, CERMES 3 - IRD, Vitrome

For the past five years, increasing attention has been devoted to the relationship between political identities and attitudes to science and scientific issues. Vaccination has been one of the most studied cases. In the USA, most studies have found signitficant differences between Republicans and Democrats, the former being much more vaccine hesitant than the latter. In this litterature dominated by social and cognitive psychologists, the main explanation of these differences draws on the concepts of partisan cue and motivated reasoning.

Here, we will show the merits and limits of this form of explanation by analysing the political differences in intention to vaccinate against COVID-19 in France. We do so by drawing on a dataset of 34 crossectional online surveys conducted between march 2020 and june 2021 among representative samples of the French adult population (n=38 416).

Registration is mandatory (for Zoom users, the link for the videoconference will be sent one day before)

To find out more:
- Aurélie Bosquet et al., « L’hésitation vaccinale en France. Prévalence et variation selon le statut socio-économique des parents », Med Sci, vol. 36, n° 5, p. 461-464, 2020.
- Jeremy K. Ward et al., "The French public's attitudes to a future COVID-19 vaccine: The politicization of a public health issue", Soc Sci Med, 265:113414, 2020.
- Florian Cafiero, Paul Guille-Escuret, Jeremy K. Ward, “'I’m not an antivaxxer, but…': Spurious and authentic diversity among vaccine critical activists", Social Networks, 65, 2020.
- The Coconel Group, "A future vaccination campaign against COVID-19 at risk of vaccine hesitancy and politicisation", The Lancet Infectious Diseases, vol. 20, n° 7, p. 769-770, July 2020.

Family demographic processes and in-work poverty: A systematic review

Antonino Polizzia, Emanuela Struffolino, Zachary Van Winkle

Advances in Life Course Research, vol. 52, June 2022, 100462
Paper available on ScienceDirect portal
Paper also available in Preprint version (SocArXiv)

The presence of working poor individuals – employed individuals who live in households with incomes below the poverty threshold – represents a worrisome phenomenon in advanced democracies that can engender social exclusion.  Individuals in in-work poverty constitute a sizeable group in rich countries, with the share of employed people at risk of poverty in the EU approaching 10% before the COVID-19 pandemic.

A comprehensive and critical review on how family demographic processes shape in-work poverty risks is still missing.
In this systematic review, made with 84 analyses extracted from 30 studies, we first provide a quantitative review of results from analyses that estimated the association between in-work poverty and parental home leaving, union formation, marriage, parenthood, and dissolution of non-marital and marital unions. This allows us to formulate tentative conclusions about whether and in which direction family demographic processes are associated with in-work poverty. Second, we discuss in detail conceptual and methodological advances in in-work poverty research, such as longitudinal analytical designs or attempts to make in-work poverty research more sensitive to policy context, gender, and the life course. Our review highlights theoretical and methodological challenges for future studies linking in-work poverty and family demography.

Some findings: Roughly 80 percent of analyses reported the risk of in-work poverty increased with children. 60 percent of analyses indicated that being in a union decreased this risk. The majority of the few studies considering union dissolution indicated that it increased the in-work poverty risk.

Fig.2 - Total number of analyses selected for the quantitative review by family demographic process: direction and significance of associations

OSC Scientific Seminar 2021-2022

Vendredi 25 février 2022, 11:30
Conférence en ligne via Zoom

Expliquer les inégalités de classe et de genre
dans la prise en charge des accidents vasculaires cérébraux

Muriel Darmon

Directrice de recherche CNRS
Centre Européen de Sociologie et de Science Politique (EHESS)

Discutantes : Émilie Grisez et Rébecca Lévy-Guillain (Sciences Po - OSC et INED)

À propos de son ouvrage « Réparer les cerveaux. Sociologie des pertes et des récupérations post-AVC », Éditions La Découverte, 2021. Cet ouvrage est aussi consultable en ligne sur Cairn. 

Les suites des AVC et notamment les récupérations de compétences ou d’habiletés perdues semblent marquées par des inégalités de classe et de genre importantes, et ce même à gravité de la lésion ou type de prise en charge comparables.
Mon intervention présentera quelques explications qui peuvent en être données à partir d’une approche sociologique. J’examinerai notamment les valeurs socialement attribuées aux pertes et aux récupérations qui font suite à l’AVC, qui peuvent rendre compte des moins bonnes récupérations pour les femmes, ainsi que la « forme scolaire » de l’hôpital, qui permet de mettre en lumière l’existence de déterminismes sociaux de classe de la récupération neurologique.
Cette intervention visera également à montrer l’apport et la robustesse des approches qualitatives (et en particulier des ethnographies hospitalières) dans la recherche d’explications aux inégalités sociales de santé observées statistiquement.

Inscription obligatoire (le lien vers la conférence vous sera envoyé la veille)

Pour en savoir plus : Page au CESSP

Quand on demande à un neurologue si les séquelles d’un AVC sont les mêmes pour tout le monde, il peut répondre par exemple : "Tout dépend de la vitesse d’intervention (...) de l’état du cerveau (...) et de la qualité de la rééducation." Faire intervenir la sociologie consiste à se donner les moyens d’apporter encore d’autres réponses à cette même question, en soulignant que les séquelles, à gravité équivalente de la lésion, ne seront pas les mêmes si le patient est un homme ou une femme, un ouvrier ou un cadre supérieur, une personne dont les récupérations ont une grande ou une moindre valeur pour les professionnels, si la compétence perdue a une grande ou une moindre valeur pour le patient, si l’AVC a laissé intact chez lui un rapport aisé ou difficile aux modes scolaires d’apprentissage, et beaucoup d’autres éléments encore qui seront révélés au fil des chapitres de ce livre, qui cherche précisément à identifier les processus sociaux par lesquels les différences et inégalités dans les issues biologiques et neurologiques de l’AVC s’établissent. L’AVC et ses séquelles ne sont pas seulement une question de cerveau, ou plutôt, tout n’est pas neuronal dans le cerveau : ce qui s’y joue est déterminé, construit et reconstruit par les structures sociales qui lui sont extérieures.

OSC Scientific Seminar 2021-2022

Friday 18th February 2022, 11:30 am
Online conference via Zoom

Gendered contexts?
The effect of neighbourhood socioeconomic deprivation
on girls' and boys' cognitive and non-cognitive development

Laura Silva

PhD Student, Sciences Po
CREST Affiliated Member

Does socio-economic deprivation of adolescents' residential neighbourhoods affect their cognitive and non-cognitive development? Leveraging data from the National Child Development Study (NCDS) in the UK, this study investigates this question focusing on gender differences.
By exploiting the quasi-exogenous social housing allocation procedures in the UK, I aim to limit issues related to the endogeneity of neighbourhood selection.

Results show that living in more deprived areas has overall a negative effect on cognitive and non-cognitive development. However, neighbourhood deprivation negatively affects girls’, as compared to boys’, cognitive skills, academic motivation and employability skills, while no significant gender difference is detected for problem behaviour. On the one hand, these findings highlight the importance of taking gender into account in neighbourhood studies and, on the other hand, they suggest that the availability of support within the local area and the quality of institutions should be considered as relevant theoretical mechanisms to understand the role of neighbourhoods on different spheres of adolescents development.

Registration is mandatory (the link for the videoconference will be sent one day before)

To find out more: Profile Page (OSC)

OSC Scientific Seminar 2021-2022

Friday 4th February 2022, 11:30 am
Online conference via Zoom

What do fathers use their leave for?
Exploring the diversity of uses and non-uses of paternity leave in France

Alix Sponton

PhD Student, Sciences Po - OSC & INED

Between 2002 and 2021, French fathers could take up to 14 days of paid leave until the baby turns four month old. From the institutional perspective, the main aim of this public policy was to guarantee a more balanced division of childcare between parents. But from fathers’ point of view, what is the purpose of paternity leave? And how to understand that some eligible fathers make no use of it?

Based on longitudinal interviews with fathers before and after the birth, I adopt an approach of reception to explore the diverse uses and non-uses fathers can make of French paternity leave. The presentation gives particular attention to when and why fathers decided to use their leave (just after the birth to help their partner recovering, during a holiday period so they can visit family, etc.) Results highlight how paternity leave is articulated with alternative options available to fathers (for instance, informally “extended” by regular leave or “replaced” by a business interruption in the case of self-employed workers).

This presentation encourages to consider not only the leave take-up but also the myriad of usages that can be made of the same public policy. Better understanding what the leave can do to fathers thus necessitate to first look at what fathers do to the leave.

Registration is mandatory (the link for the videoconference will be sent one day before)

To find out more: Profile Page (OSC)

Labour market protection across space and time:
A revised typology and a taxonomy of countries’ trajectories of change

Emanuele Ferragina & Federico Danilo Filetti (Sciences Po - OSC & LIEPP)

Journal of European Social Policy
First Published 2022, January 11

https://doi.org/10.1177/09589287211056222

We measure and interpret the evolution of labour market protection across 21 high-income countries over three decades, employing as conceptual foundations the ‘regime varieties’ and ‘trajectories of change’ developed by Esping-Andersen, Estevez-Abe, Hall and Soskice, and Thelen.

We measure labour market protection considering four institutional dimensions – employment protection, unemployment protection, income maintenance and activation – and the evolution of the workforce composition.

This measurement accounts for the joint evolution of labour market institutions, their complementarities and their relation to outcomes, and mitigate the unrealistic Average Production Worker assumption.

We handle the multi-dimensional nature of labour market protection with Principal Component Analysis and capture the characteristics of countries’ trajectories of change with a composite score. We contribute to the literature in three ways.
(1) We portray a revised typology that accounts for processes of change between 1990 and 2015, and that clusters regime varieties on the basis of coordination and solidarity levels, that is, Central/Northern European, Southern European, liberal.
(2) We illustrate that, despite a persistent gap, a large majority of Coordinated Market Economies experiencing a decline in the level of labour market protection became more similar to Liberal Market Economies.
(3) We develop a fivefold taxonomy of countries’ trajectories of change (liberalization, dualization, flexibility, de-dualization and higher protection), showing that these trajectories are not always path-dependent and consistent with regime varieties previously developed in the literature.

Fig 1 - Varieties of labour market protection (1990–2015)

OSC Scientific Seminar 2021-2022

Friday 28th January 2022, 2:30 pm / 4 pm
Online conference via Zoom

Toxic Neighborhoods: The Effects of Concentrated Poverty and Environmental Lead Contamination on Early Childhood Development

Geoffrey Wodtke

Associate professor, The University of Chicago, Departement of Sociology

Although socioeconomic disparities in cognitive ability emerge early in the life course, most research on the consequences of living in a disadvantaged neighborhood focuses on school-age children or adolescents.

In this study, we outline and test a theoretical model of neighborhood effects on cognitive development during early childhood that highlights the mediating role of environmental health hazards, and in particular, exposure to neurotoxic lead.

To evaluate this model, we follow 1,266 children in Chicago from birth through the time of school entry, tracking their areal risk of lead exposure and the socioeconomic composition of their neighborhoods over time.
We then estimate the joint effects of neighborhood poverty and environmental lead contamination on receptive vocabulary ability.

We find that sustained exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods reduces vocabulary skills during early childhood and that this effect operates through a causal mechanism involving lead contamination.

Registration is mandatory (the link for the videoconference will be sent one day before)

To find out more: Profile Page - CV

OSC Scientific Seminar 2021-2022

Friday 14th January 2022, 2:30 pm / 4 pm
Online conference via Zoom

 Education and social mobility: Rethinking old work in light of new results

Michael Hout

Professor of Sociology, University of New York

Education mediates much of the association between class origins and destinations — more so for people from lower classes than upper classes. Florencia Torche famously call the pattern “the great equalizer.” It is a special case of heterogenous returns to education.

I will summarize recently published results on negative selection (Cheng et al. 2021), forthcoming results on college graduation (Voss, Hout, and George 2022), and unpublished results on heterogeneity by occupation (Hout and Martin-Caughey 2022) and discuss their implications for how we understand other findings about heterogeneity. I conclude that university admissions are too uniform in their criteria for admission and limit mobility relative to their potential due to their lack of variation.

PAPERS

• 2021, Siwei Cheng, Jennie E. Brand, Xiang Zhou, Yu Xie and Michael Hout, “Heterogenous returns to college over the life course”, Science Advances, 7 (51): abg7641.
• 2022 (Forthcoming), Kim Voss, Michael Hout and Kristen George, "Persistent inequalities in college completion, 1980–2010”,  Social Problems, n° 69.
• 2022, Michael Hout and Ananda Martin-Caughey, “Returns to education by occupation” [To be presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America, April 2022].

Registration is mandatory (the link for the videoconference will be sent one day before)

To find out more: Website mikehout.com or Homepage at NYU

OSC Scientific Seminar 2021-2022

Friday 10th December 2021, 11:30 am / 1 pm
On-site (Percheron room) – Also in hybrid format via Zoom (for external audience)

 Neighborhood and community effects in East and Southeast Asia, a systematic review and meta-analytical exploration of publication bias

Jaap Nieuwenhuis

Assistant professor, University of Groningen, Department of Sociology

Neighborhood and community effects have been studied at an increasing rate in the Western literature since three decades and have informed urban policies such as housing voucher and neighborhood regeneration programs.
Since about ten years, this line of study is seen more and more in the East and Southeast Asian region as well. As an emerging field in this part of the world, the literature has yet to be critically reviewed and its body of literature provides a unique opportunity to study the effects different research communities might have on the development of neighborhood and community effects.
This systematic review brings together 165 studies about neighborhood and community effects in East and Southeast Asia and first gives an overview of this literature, followed by a critical appraisal of this literature, with a specific focus on publication bias.

The results show that due to publication bias, the “true” neighborhood effect might be overestimated in this literature. Health research shows greater publication bias than human geography and general social science. Studies by only local scholars are more prone to bias than studies from collaborative teams or only nonlocal scholars. This suggests that this field is either relatively early in its life-cycle, where proving the neighborhood effects thesis is still attractive, or that publication pressure is much higher in Asia compared to the West.
In sum, the current state of this literature makes broad generalizations difficult, but the ongoing maturation makes this field an interesting one to follow.

Registration is mandatory (the link for the videoconference will be sent one day before)

TO FIND OUT MORE

• Last papers: Google Scholar page

OSC Scientific Seminar 2021-2022

Friday 3rd December 2021, 11:30 am / 1 pm
Available on Zoom Videoconference

Do Neighborhoods Empower or Disenfranchise?
Coethnic concentration, spatial disadvantage, and voter registration in France

Haley McAvay & Pavlos Vasilopoulos

Lecturers (sociology & politics), University of York

 
Ethnoracial inequalities in political participation are a key feature of many advanced democracies. Prior research suggests that the socioeconomic and ethnoracial composition of citizens’ local communities could be driving these disparities.
This talk draws on longitudinal data linking individual- and neighborhood-level variables to explore the role of neighborhoods in shaping disparities in voter registration in France.
We make a novel contribution by focusing on both coethnic concentration and spatial disadvantage, controlling for individual heterogeneity to account for residential self-selection. Findings show a robust negative effect of living in a disadvantaged neighborhood on registration. However, proximity to coethnics increases registration among African origin citizens, yet depresses it among Europeans. These differential effects across groups shed new light on the underlying mechanisms of coethnic concentration: collective consciousness of discrimination is the likely mobilizing factor in African neighborhoods, whereas lower sociopolitical integration may hinder political participation in European neighborhoods.

Registration is mandatory (Zoom users: the link will be sent one day before)

• Haley McAvay's Website
• Pavlos Vasilopulos' Homepage