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Item The consequences of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act for police arrests(2021-05-05) Simes, JessicaBACKGROUND & METHODS: National protests in the summer of 2020 drew attention to the significant presence of police in marginalized communities. Recent social movements have called for substantial police reforms, including “defunding the police,” a phrase originating from a larger, historical abolition movement advocating that public investments be redirected away from the criminal justice system and into social services and health care. Although research has demonstrated the expansive role of police to respond a broad range of social problems and health emergencies, existing research has yet to fully explore the capacity for health insurance policy to influence rates of arrest in the population. To fill this gap, we examine the potential effect of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on arrests in 3,035 U.S. counties. We compare county-level arrests using FBI Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program Data before and after Medicaid expansion in 2014–2016, relative to counties in non-expansion states. We use difference-in-differences (DID) models to estimate the change in arrests following Medicaid expansion for overall arrests, and violent, drug, and low-level arrests. RESULTS: Police arrests significantly declined following the expansion of Medicaid under the ACA. Medicaid expansion produced a 20–32% negative difference in overall arrests rates in the first three years. We observe the largest negative differences for drug arrests: we find a 25–41% negative difference in drug arrests in the three years following Medicaid expansion, compared to non-expansion counties. We observe a 19–29% negative difference in arrests for violence in the three years after Medicaid expansion, and a decrease in low-level arrests between 24–28% in expansion counties compared to non-expansion counties. Our main results for drug arrests are robust to multiple sensitivity analyses, including a state-level model. CONCLUSIONS: Evidence in this paper suggests that expanded Medicaid insurance reduced police arrests, particularly drug-related arrests. Combined with research showing the harmful health consequences of chronic policing in disadvantaged communities, greater insurance coverage creates new avenues for individuals to seek care, receive treatment, and avoid criminalization. As police reform is high on the agenda at the local, state, and federal level, our paper supports the perspective that broad health policy reforms can meaningfully reduce contact with the criminal justice system under historic conditions of mass criminalization.Item Prenatal healthcare after sentencing reform: heterogeneous effects for prenatal healthcare access and equity(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2022-12) Jahn, Jaquelyn L.; Simes, Jessica T.BACKGROUND: High rates of imprisonment in the U.S. have significant health, social, and economic consequences, particularly for marginalized communities. This study examines imprisonment as a contextual driver of receiving prenatal care by evaluating whether early and adequate prenatal care improved after Pennsylvania’s criminal sentencing reform reduced prison admissions. METHODS: We linked individual-level birth certificate microdata on births (n = 999,503) in Pennsylvania (2009–2015), to monthly county-level rates of prison admissions. We apply an interrupted time series approach that contrasts post-policy changes in early and adequate prenatal care across counties where prison admissions were effectively reduced or continued to rise. We then tested whether prenatal care improvements were stronger among Black birthing people and those with lower levels of educational attainment. RESULTS: In counties where prison admissions declined the most after the policy, early prenatal care increased from 69.0% to 73.2%, and inadequate prenatal care decreased from 18.1% to 15.9%. By comparison, improvements in early prenatal care were smaller in counties where prison admissions increased the most post-policy (73.5 to 76.4%) and there was no change to prenatal care inadequacy (14.4% pre and post). We find this pattern of improvements to be particularly strong among Black birthing people and those with lower levels of educational attainment. CONCLUSIONS: Pennsylvania’s sentencing reforms were associated with small advancements in racial and socioeconomic equity in prenatal care.Item Correction to: deliberating inequality: a blueprint for studying the social formation of beliefs about economic inequality(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2022-12) Summers, Kate; Accominotti, Fabien; Burchardt, Tania; Hecht, Katharina; Mann, Elizabeth; Mijs, JonathanItem The burden of acting wise: sanctioned success and ambivalence about hard work at an elite school in the Netherlands(Informa UK Limited, 2016-01-02) Mijs, Jonathan J.B.; Paulle, BowenSam and his classmates despise ‘nerds’: they say working hard in school makes a student unpopular, and that they purposefully do only the minimum to pass. Research suggests that such ‘oppositional’ attitudes are prevalent among working class students and/or ethnoracial minorities. Like most of his classmates, however, Sam is white, hails from a privileged background, and attends a selective school in the Netherlands. Deeply ambivalent about working hard and ‘acting wise’, Sam and the others constituting his adolescent society are thoroughly caught up in peer dynamics which sanction success and promote mediocrity. We link these anti-school peer dynamics to the institutional configuration of education in the Netherlands, characterized by rigid tracking at the end of primary school and non-selective universities: state structures and policies contribute to these privileged students’ rationale for ‘taking it easy’ and doing poorly in school.Item The missing organizational dimension of prisoner reentry: an ethnography of the road to reentry at a nonprofit service provider(Wiley, 2016-06) Mijs, Jonathan J.B.Prisoner reentry has received great interest in political sociology, criminology, and beyond. Research documents the struggles of individuals trying to find their way back into society. Less attention has been given to the organizational aspects of reentry. This is unfortunate given the rapid growth of nonprofit reentry organizations in the United States, which introduces a new set of questions about the context and challenges to prisoner reentry. Drawing on an ethnography of Safe, a nonprofit reentry organization in the Northeast, I describe the organization's pivotal role in institutionalizing the pathway to prisoner reentry: a road to reentry, which takes former prisoners through a process that reconfigures their morality, identity, and social relationships. The road-to-reentry concept helps bring together scholars of the welfare state and criminology by highlighting how the challenges of prisoner reentry rely on how this process is organized. The way in which prison reentry is organized, in turn, affects former prisoners’ agency and shapes the relationship between these men and women and their respective families and communities.Item Do changes in material circumstances drive support for populist radical parties? Panel data evidence from the Netherlands during the Great Recession, 2007–2015(Oxford University Press (OUP), 2019-10-01) Gidron, Noam; Mijs, Jonathan J.B.Political developments since the 2008 financial crisis have sparked renewed interest in the electoral implications of economic downturns. Research describes a correlation between adverse economic conditions and support for radical parties campaigning on the populist promise to retake the country from a corrupt elite. But does the success of radical parties following economic crises rely on people who are directly affected? To answer this question, we examine whether individual-level changes in economic circumstances drive support for radical parties across the ideological divide. Analysing eight waves of panel data collected in the Netherlands, before, during, and after the Great Recession (2007–2015), we demonstrate that people who experienced an income loss became more supportive of the radical left but not of the radical right. Looking at these parties’ core concerns, we find that income loss increased support for income redistribution championed by the radical left, but less so for the anti-immigration policies championed by the radical right. Our study establishes more directly than extant research the micro-foundations of support for radical parties across the ideological divide.Item Earning rent with your talent: modern-day inequality rests on the power to define, transfer and institutionalize talent(Informa UK Limited, 2021-07-03) Mijs, Jonathan J.B.In this article, I develop the point that whereas talent is the basis for desert, talent itself is not meritocratically deserved. It is produced by three processes, none of which are meritocratic: (1) talent is unequally distributed by the rigged lottery of birth, (2) talent is defined in ways that favor some traits over others, and (3) the market for talent is manipulated to maximally extract advantages by those who have more of it. To see how, we require a sociological perspective on economic rent. I argue that talent is a major means through which people seek rent in modern-day capitalism. Talent today is what inherited land was to feudal societies; an unchallenged source of symbolic and economic rewards. Whereas God sanctified the aristocracy’s wealth, contemporary privilege is legitimated by meritocracy. Drawing on the work of Gary Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jerome Karabel, I show how rent-seeking in modern societies has come to rely principally on rent-definition and creation. Inequality is produced by the ways in which talent is defined, institutionalized, and sustained by the moral deservingness we attribute to the accomplishments of talents. Consequently, today’s inequalities are as striking as ever, yet harder to challenge than ever before.Item The paradox of inequality: income inequality and belief in meritocracy go hand in hand(Oxford University Press (OUP), 2021-07-14) Mijs, Jonathan J.B.Inequality is on the rise: gains have been concentrated with a small elite, while most have seen their fortunes stagnate or fall. Despite what scholars and journalists consider a worrying trend, there is no evidence of growing popular concern about inequality. In fact, research suggests that citizens in unequal societies are less concerned than those in more egalitarian societies. How to make sense of this paradox? I argue that citizens’ consent to inequality is explained by their growing conviction that societal success is reflective of a meritocratic process. Drawing on 25 years of International Social Survey Program data, I show that rising inequality is legitimated by the popular belief that the income gap is meritocratically deserved: the more unequal a society, the more likely its citizens are to explain success in meritocratic terms, and the less important they deem nonmeritocratic factors such as a person’s family wealth and connections.Item Observing many researchers using the same data and hypothesis reveals a hidden universe of uncertainty(National Academy of Sciences, 2022) Breznau, Nate; Rinke, Eike Mark; Wuttke, Alexander; Mijs, JonathanItem Merit and ressentiment: how to tackle the tyranny of merit(SAGE Publications, 2022) Mijs, Jonathan J.B.My contribution to this special issue engages with Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Meritocracy and its significance to the academic conversation about meritocracy and its discontents. Specifically, I highlight Sandel’s diagnosis of the rise of populism and his proposed remedy for the ‘tyranny of merit’. First, building on Menno ter Braak’s writings on the rise of fascism, I explore the sources of ressentiment in contemporary societies as stemming not from disillusionment with meritocracy but from the broken promise of liberalism and democracy more generally. Second, I consider Sandel’s proposals to reform elite university admissions and to ‘recognize work’, explore their wider applicability, and reflect on their limitations to meaningfully change how success and failure is socially experienced and morally understood.Item Deliberating inequality: a blueprint for studying the social formation of beliefs about economic inequality(2022-04-01) Summers, Kate; Accominotti, Fabien; Burchardt, Tania; Hecht, Katharina; Mann, Elizabeth; Mijs, JonathanIn most contemporary societies, people underestimate the extent of economic inequality, resulting in lower support for taxation and redistribution than might be expressed by better informed citizens. We still know little, however, about how understandings of inequality arise, and therefore about where perceptions and misperceptions of it might come from. This methodological article takes one step toward filling this gap by developing a research design-a blueprint-to study how people's understandings of wealth and income inequality develop through social interaction. Our approach combines insights from recent scholarship highlighting the socially situated character of inequality beliefs with those of survey experimental work testing how information about inequality changes people's understandings of it. Specifically, we propose to use deliberative focus groups to approximate the interactional contexts in which individuals process information and form beliefs in social life. Leveraging an experimental methodology, our design then varies the social makeup of deliberative groups, as well as the information about inequality we share with participants, to explore how different types of social environments and information shape people's understandings of economic inequality. This should let us test, in particular, whether the low socioeconomic diversity of people's discussion and interaction networks relates to their tendency to underestimate inequality, and whether beliefs about opportunity explain people's lack of appetite for redistributive policies. In this exploratory article we motivate our methodological apparatus and describe its key features, before reflecting on the findings from a proof-of-concept study conducted in London in the fall of 2019.Item Belief in meritocracy reexamined: scrutinizing the role of subjective social mobility(American Sociological Association, 2022) Mijs, Jonathan J.B.; de Koster, Willem; van der Waal, JeroenDespite decreasing intergenerational mobility, strengthening the ties between family background and children’s economic outcomes, Western citizens continue to believe in meritocracy. We study how meritocratic beliefs about success relate to individuals’ social mobility experiences: Is subjective upward mobility associated with meritocratic attributions of success and downward mobility with structuralist views? Whereas previous studies addressed the relevance of individuals’ current position or objective mobility, we leverage diagonal reference models to disentangle the role of subjective mobility, origin, and destination. Surveying a representative Dutch sample (n = 1,507), we find, echoing the Thomas theorem, that if people experience social mobility as real, it is real in its consequences: subjective upward mobility is associated with stronger meritocratic beliefs, and downward mobility is associated with stronger structuralist beliefs—but has no bearing on people’s meritocracy beliefs. This helps understand the muted political response to growing inequality: a small share of upwardly mobile individuals may suffice to uphold public faith in meritocracy.Item Adolescents’ future in the balance of family, school, and the neighborhood: a multidimensional application of two theoretical perspectives(Wiley, 2022-03-22) Mijs, Jonathan J. B.; Nieuwenhuis, JaapOBJECTIVE: Family, school, and neighborhood contexts provide cultural resources that may foster children's ambitions and bolster their academic performance. Reference group theory instead highlights how seemingly positive settings can depress educational aspirations, expectations, and performance. We test these competing claims. METHODS: We test these claims using the British Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (N = 4968). RESULTS: Results are broadly in line with the cultural resource perspective. However, important exceptions to this pattern point to reference group processes for children from low-educated parents, whose academic aspirations are especially low when they either attended an affluent school or lived in an affluent neighborhood—but not both, and for children from highly educated parents attending poor schools, whose realistic expectations of the future are higher than their peers in affluent schools. CONCLUSION: The resource perspective strongly predicts adolescents’ (ideas about) education, but reference group processes also play an important role in neighborhoods and schools.Item The population prevalence of solitary confinement(American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2021-11-26) Pullen-Blasnik, Hannah; Simes, Jessica T.; Western, BruceSolitary confinement is a severe form of incarceration closely associated with long-lasting psychological harm and poor post-release outcomes. Estimating the population prevalence, we find that 11% of all black men in Pennsylvania, born 1986 to 1989, were incarcerated in solitary confinement by age 32. Reflecting large racial disparities, the population prevalence is only 3.4% for Latinos and 1.4% for white men. About 9% of black men in the state cohort were held in solitary for more than 15 consecutive days, violating the United Nations standards for minimum treatment of incarcerated people. Nearly 1 in 100 black men experienced solitary for a year or longer by age 32. Racial disparities are similar for women, but rates are lower. A decomposition shows that black men’s high risk of solitary confinement stems primarily from their high imprisonment rate. Findings suggest that harsh conditions of U.S. incarceration have population-level effects on black men’s well-being.Item Allyship in the time of aggrievement: the case of Black Feminism and the New Black masculinities(Routledge, 2021) Oeur, Freeden Blume; Grundy, Saida; Luna, Z.; Laster Pirtle, W.N.In 2019, Vox reporter Jane Coaston announced that intersectionality—or the idea of mutually reinforcing systems of oppression—might be most hated word in American conservatism. Even self-identified liberals have made their contempt for feminist theory and intersectionality known in their attacks on “grievance studies”. Black male aggrievement, and antagonism between black feminism and New Black Masculinities (NBM), has been nurtured by a neoliberal academy that delegitimizes critical scholarship and takes delight in conflict between progressive movements. While NBM is new in name, it relies on an old formula: a progressive anti-racist agenda anchored in an anti-feminist, conservative gender politics—Black male aggrievement. The legal roots of “aggrievement” help emphasize how NBM advocates make a claim to injury at hands of black feminism and black women scholars. Neoliberal ideologies built on divisiveness, competition over scarce resources, and a post-race and post-feminist worldview have fed gender conservative, cis-normative and zero-sum politics of Black male aggrievement. NBM, therefore, has been seduced by neoliberal project.Item Neoliberalism and symbolic boundaries in Europe(SAGE Publications, 2016-01-01) Mijs, Jonathan J.B.; Bakhtiari, Elyas; Lamont, MicheleStudies suggest that the rise of neoliberalism accompanies a foregrounding of individual responsibility and a weakening of community. The authors provide a theoretical agenda for studying the interactions between the global diffusion of neoliberal policies and ideologies, on the one side, and cultural repertoires and boundary configurations, on the other, in the context of local, national, and regional variation. Exploiting variation in the rate of adoption of neoliberal policies across European societies, the authors show how levels of neoliberal penetration covary with the way citizens draw symbolic boundaries along the lines of ethnoreligious otherness and moral deservingness.Item Inequality Is a problem of inference: how people solve the social puzzle of unequal outcomes(MDPI AG, 2018-08-07) Mijs, Jonathan J. B.A new wave of scholarship recognizes the importance of people’s understanding of inequality that underlies their political convictions, civic values, and policy views. Much less is known, however, about the sources of people’s different beliefs. I argue that scholarship is hampered by a lack of consensus regarding the conceptualization and measurement of inequality beliefs, in the absence of an organizing theory. To fill this gap, in this paper, I develop a framework for studying the social basis of people’s explanations for inequality. I propose that people observe unequal outcomes and must infer the invisible forces that brought these about, be they meritocratic or structural in nature. In making inferences about the causes of inequality, people draw on lessons from past experience and information about the world, both of which are biased and limited by their background, social networks, and the environments they have been exposed to. Looking at inequality beliefs through this lens allows for an investigation into the kinds of experiences and environments that are particularly salient in shaping people’s inferential accounts of inequality. Specifically, I make a case for investigating how socializing institutions such as schools and neighborhoods are “inferential spaces” that shape how children and young adults come to learn about their unequal society and their own place in it. I conclude by proposing testable hypotheses and implication for research.Item Visualizing belief in meritocracy, 1930–2010(SAGE Publications, 2018-01) Mijs, Jonathan J.B.In this figure I describe the long trend in popular belief in meritocracy across the Western world between 1930 and 2010. Studying trends in attitudes is limited by the paucity of survey data that can be compared across countries and over time. Here, I show how to complement survey waves with cohort-level data. Repeated surveys draw on a representative sample of the population to describe the typical beliefs held by citizens in a given country and period. Leveraging the fact that citizens surveyed in a given year were born in different time-periods allows for a comparison of beliefs across birth cohorts. The latter overlaps with the former, but considerably extends the time period covered by the data. Taken together, the two measures give a “triangulated” longitudinal record of popular belief in meritocracy. I find that in most countries, popular belief in meritocracy is (much) stronger for more recent periods and cohorts.Item Meritocracy, elitism and inequality(Wiley, 2020-04) Mijs, Jonathan J.B.; Savage, MikeThe appeal of meritocracy is plain to see, because it appears to promote equality of opportunity. However, in this paper we argue that meritocracy is also a deeply elitist project. Firstly, we place Michael Young in context to show how his critique of meritocracy should be understood as a socialist vision to ameliorate class divides. Secondly, we show how economic inequality in the UK has not generated systematic resistance: in fact, inequality and belief in meritocracy have gone hand in hand. Thirdly, we argue that people see their own lives as meritocratic rather than ascribed, and that such values are deeply embedded in popular life. We offer two explanations for how such views have come about, and show how they have helped construct a more unequal society.