Explore the vast range of titles available.

Stephen Morgan provides a comprehensive analysis of China's unprecedented economic transformation and the specifics of its development, including issues such as well-being and human capital, inequality, ageing, urbanization and sustainability, consumerism, health, education and the environment.

To evaluate the claim that white working-class voters were a crucial block of support for Trump in the 2016 presidential election, this article offers two sets of results. First, self-reports of presidential votes in 2012 and 2016 from the American National Election Studies show that Obama-to-Trump voters and 2012 eligible nonvoters composed a substantial share of Trump’s 2016 voters and were disproportionately likely to be members of the white working class. Second, when county vote tallies in 2012 and 2016 are merged with the public-use microdata samples of the 2012-to-2016 American Community Surveys, areal variations across 1,142 geographic units that sensibly partition the United States show that Trump’s gains in 2016 above Romney’s performance in 2012 are strongly related to the proportion of the voting population in each area that was white and working class. Taken together, these results support the claim that Trump’s appeal to the white working class was crucial for his victory.

China’s transformation over the past four decades has been unprecedented. The vision of its leaders for the next three decades is unprecedented too, as China seeks to fashion an advanced economy without significant political and social liberalization. Stephen Morgan provides a wide-ranging examination of China’s remarkable economic history from the time of the great divergence to the present day. Alongside the familiar story of GDP growth, he considers a comprehensive range of issues, including business management, energy use, foreign direct investment, government, innovation and consumerism as well as social and demographic factors such as social networks, health, education and migration and their interlinked challenges for the Chinese state. The specifics of development are examined – capitalism from above and below and its regional variances – as well as notable consequences, including growing inequality and severe pollution. The book also assesses the challenges to China’s continued growth, including its ageing and shrinking workforce (and rising dependency ratio), the constraints on innovation and raising productivity, as well as its ambitious international plans. The book provides an accessible and authoritative survey of China’s recent economic history and the workings of its unique political economy suitable for courses in Asian business and economy, Chinese history and East Asian studies.

Through an analysis of the 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 Current Population Surveys as well as the 2004 through 2016 General Social Surveys, this article investigates class differences and patterns of voter turnout for the last four U.S. presidential elections. After developing some support for the claim that a surge of white, working-class voters emerged in competitive states in 2016, a portrait of class differences on political matters among white, non-Hispanic, eligible voters between 2004 and 2016 is offered to assess the electoral consequences of this surge. These latter results are consistent with the claim that racial prejudice, anti-immigrant sentiment, concerns about economic security, and frustration with government responsiveness may have led many white, working-class voters to support an outsider candidate who campaigned on these themes. However, these same results give no support to the related claim that the white working class changed its positions on these matters in response to the 2016 primary election campaign or in the months just before the general election.

In the United States, women are more likely than men to enter and complete college, but they remain underrepresented among baccalaureates in science-related majors. We show that in a cohort of college entrants who graduated from high school in 2004, men were more than twice as likely as women to complete baccalaureate degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, including premed fields, and more likely to persist in STEM/biomed after entering these majors by sophomore year. Conversely, women were more than twice as likely as men to earn baccalaureates in a health field, although persistence in health was low for both genders. We show that gender gaps in high school academic achievement, self-assessed math ability, and family-work orientation are only weakly associated with gender gaps in STEM completion and persistence. Gender differences in occupational plans, by contrast, are strongly associated with gender gaps in STEM outcomes, even in models that assume plans are endogenous to academic achievement, self-assessed math ability, and family-work orientation. These results can inform efforts to mitigate gender gaps in STEM attainment.

When experimental designs are infeasible, researchers must resort to the use of observational data from surveys, censuses, and administrative records. Because assignment to the independent variables of observational data is usually nonrandom, the challenge of estimating causal effects with observational data can be formidable. In this chapter, we review the large literature produced primarily by statisticians and econometricians in the past two decades on the estimation of causal effects from observational data. We first review the now widely accepted counterfactual framework for the modeling of causal effects. After examining estimators, both old and new, that can be used to estimate causal effects from cross-sectional data, we present estimators that exploit the additional information furnished by longitudinal data. Because of the size and technical nature of the literature, we cannot offer a fully detailed and comprehensive presentation. Instead, we present only the main features of methods that are accessible and potentially of use to quantitatively oriented sociologists.

Through an analysis of the 1994 through 2016 General Social Surveys, this article demonstrates that a substantial proportion of eligible voters within the working class turned away from solid identification with either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party during the Obama presidency. Even before the 2016 election cycle commenced, conditions were uncharacteristically propitious for a Republican candidate who could appeal to prospective voters in the working class, especially those who had not voted in recent presidential elections but could be mobilized to vote. These findings support the contested position that variation in party identification is a genuine leading indicator of electoral outcomes and perhaps also, in this case, of party realignment.

Through an analysis of the U.S. Department of Education’s High School Longitudinal Study, this article offers models of educational attainment that assess the explanatory value of four complementary measures. On the 11th grade survey instrument, questions are offered on both educational aspirations and expectations, which is the first time since 1972 that both questions have been asked on a comparable longitudinal survey in the United States. The instrument then poses two questions that elicit probabilistic forecasts of future educational attainment, which have never been asked of high school students on such surveys. The empirical analysis in this article shows that the first two questions affirm the continuing relevance of the status socialization theory of educational attainment, and related empirical modeling that has been shaped by it, but the two new questions provide support for embracing more recent models that focus on belief formation and uncertainty.

This article reexamines the conjecture of James S. Coleman that intergenerational social closure promotes student achievement in high schools, analyzing the best national data on academic achievement and social networks: the 2002 and 2004 waves of the Education Longitudinal Study. The results show that within the Catholic school sector, schools that are characterized by dense parental networks have substantially higher average student achievement. This association can be reduced but not eliminated by conditioning on available measures of student network structure and standard measures of family background. In contrast, in the public school sector, a similarly strong bivariate association between dense parental networks and student achievement can be attributed almost entirely to these basic conditioning variables. These results represent, at best, a mixed verdict for Coleman's predictions. Intergenerational closure in its currently observed form does not increase achievement in public schools, suggesting that parental monitoring of discipline does not outweigh some of the costs of parental closure. However, intergenerational closure may increase achievement in Catholic schools to a modest degree because Catholic schools are affiliated with religious communities that have appropriable norms.