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Comparative research on racial classification has often turned to Latin America, where race is thought to be particularly fluid. Using nationally representative data from the 2010 and 2012 America's Barometer survey, the authors examine patterns of self-identification in four countries. National differences in the relation between skin color, socioeconomic status, and race were found. Skin color predicts race closely in Panama but loosely in the Dominican Republic. Moreover, despite the dominant belief that money whitens, the authors discover that status polarizes (Brazil), mestizoizes (Colombia), darkens (Dominican Republic), or has no effect (Panama). The results show that race is both physical and cultural, with country variations in racial schema that reflect specific historical and political trajectories.

Objective. Cross-national research on the causes and consequences of income inequality has been hindered by the limitations of existing inequality data sets: greater coverage across countries and over time is available from these sources only at the cost of significantly reduced comparability across observations. The goal of the Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIID) is to overcome these limitations. Methods. A custom missing-data algorithm was used to standardize the U.N. University's World Income Inequality Database; data collected by the Luxembourg Income Study served as the standard. Results. The SWIID provides comparable Gini indices of gross and net income inequality for 153 countries for as many years as possible from 1960 to the present, along with estimates of uncertainty in these statistics. Conclusions. By maximizing comparability for the largest possible sample of countries and years, the SWIID is better suited to broad cross-national research on income inequality than previously available sources.

We use data from the Luxembourg Income Study to examine household market inequality, redistribution, and the relationship between market inequality and redistribution in affluent OECD countries in the 1980s and 1990s. We observe sizeable increases in market household inequality in most countries. This development appears to have been driven largely, though not exclusively, by changes in employment: in countries with better employment performance, low-earning households benefited relative to high-earning ones; in nations with poor employment performance, low-earning households fared worse. In contrast to widespread rhetoric about the decline of the welfare state, redistribution increased in most countries during this period, as existing social-welfare programs compensated for the rise in market inequality. They did so in proportion to the degree of increase in inequality, producing a very strong positive association between changes in market inequality and changes in redistribution. We discuss the relevance of median-voter theory and power resources theory for understanding differences across countries and changes over time in the extent of compensatory redistribution.Lane Kenworthy is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Arizona (lane.kenworthy@arizona.edu). Jonas Pontusson is a professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University (jpontuss@princeton.edu). Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Conference of Europeanists (March 2002), a workshop on the Comparative Political Economy of Inequality at Cornell University (April 2002), the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (June 2002), and a seminar at the Center for European Studies, Harvard University (December 2003). For criticisms and suggestions the authors thank Richard Freeman, Janet Gornick, Alex Hicks, Torben Iversen, Larry Kahn, Tomas Larsson, Jim Mosher, Nirmala Ravishankar, David Rueda, Tim Smeeding, John Stephens, Michael Wallerstein, Christopher Way, Erik Wright, and the Perspectives on Politics reviewers.

This paper examines the institutional logics of migration policy making at local city level, comparing four Danish municipal approaches. Using a theoretical framework on political opportunity structures, policy frames, and institutional logics, the paper argues that divergences between national and local level can be explained not only as an unsuccessful transposition of nationally formulated policies, but also as an outcome of divergence in alternative and competing policy frames, political rationales, and institutional logics. Investigating factors such as size, economy, and organizational structure, the paper offers three interrelated explanations for divergences between national and local level and between different local approaches. The paper argues that the difference in national and local level political opportunity structures makes a difference; that ideas diffused from outside the national context can inform local-level policy making; and that policies are situated within and adjusted to the broader cultural economy and city branding as part of competition between cities.

Studies of cultural differentiation have shown that social mechanisms that normally lead to cultural convergence—homophily and influence—can also explain how distinct cultural groups can form. However, this emergent cultural diversity has proven to be unstable in the face of cultural drift—small errors or innovations that allow cultures to change from within. The authors develop a model of cultural differentiation that combines the traditional mechanisms of homophily and influence with a third mechanism of network homophily, in which network structure co-evolves with cultural interaction. Results show that in certain regions of the parameter space, these co-evolutionary dynamics can lead to patterns of cultural diversity that are stable in the presence of cultural drift. The authors address the implications of these findings for understanding the stability of cultural diversity in the face of increasing technological trends toward globalization.

While most of the quantitative literature on quality of government has focused on national differences, subnational variation has been neglected, mainly due to the lack of data. This study explores subnational divergences in quality of government (understood as control of corruption, impartial treatment of citizens, and government effectiveness) using newly created subnational data including over 70 European regions. It addresses the institutional puzzle of why regions which share so many formal institutions (e.g., Northern and Southern Italy) do diverge so much in quality of government. Similar to recent political economy scholarship, our theory points to historical path dependencies. The study argues that a major factor explaining regional path dependencies is the consolidation of clientelistic networks in those regions where rulers have historically (seventeenth to nineteenth centuries) less constraints to their decisions.

This paper explores the conditions under which cultural cleavages become politically salient. It does so by taking advantage of the natural experiment afforded by the division of the Chewa and Tumbuka peoples by the border between Zambia and Malawi. I document that, while the objective cultural differences between Chewas and Tumbukas on both sides of the border are identical, the political salience of the division between these communities is altogether different. I argue that this difference stems from the different sizes of the Chewa and Tumbuka communities in each country relative to each country's national political arena. In Malawi, Chewas and Tumbukas are each large groups vis-à-vis the country as a whole and, thus, serve as viable bases for political coalition-building. In Zambia, Chewas and Tumbukas are small relative to the country as a whole and, thus, not useful to mobilize as bases of political support. The analysis suggests that the political salience of a cultural cleavage depends not on the nature of the cleavage itself (since it is identical in both countries) but on the sizes of the groups it defines and whether or not they will be useful vehicles for political competition.

How do national institutional contexts mediate the global? This article aims to answer this question by analyzing screen translation—the translation of audiovisual materials like movies and television programs—in four European countries: France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland. A cross-national, multi-method research project combining interviews, ethnography, and a small survey found considerable cross-national differences in translation norms and practices, sometimes leading to very different translated versions of the same product. The analysis shows how differences between national translation fields are produced and perpetuated by the interplay of institutional factors on four interdependent levels: technology, and the organizational, national, and transnational fields. On each level, various institutions are influential in shaping nationally specific translation norms and practices by producing institutional constraints or imposing specific meanings. I propose a model that explains the persistence of national translation systems—not only from the logics of specific institutions, fields, or levels—but by the feedback loops and interdependencies between institutions on various levels. This analysis has implications for the sociological understanding of globalization, the production of culture and media, cross-national comparative research, as well as institutional theory and the role of translation in sociological practice.

Mainstream political economy has tended to treat the family as a unit when examining the distributional consequences of labor market institutions and of public policy. In a world with high divorce rates, we argue that this simplification is more likely to obscure than to instruct. We find that labor market opportunities for women, which vary systematically with the position of countries in the international division of labor and with the structure of the welfare state, affect women's bargaining power within the family and as a result, can explain much of the cross country variation in the gender division of labor as well as the gender gap in political preferences.

In comparative welfare state analyses, cross-national differences have often been explained both by the specific profiles of welfare state institutions and the constellations of social actors. However, the way in which cultural differences also contribute to the explanation is often ignored, or at least treated as a more marginal issue. The aim of this article is to reflect on the relationship between culture and welfare state policies, and consider how it might be analysed in a comparative perspective. A theoretical framework for analysis is introduced in which the relationship of culture and welfare state policies is conceptualised as a complex, multi-level relationship which is embedded in the specific context of a particular society and can develop in contradictory ways.