Monthly Archives: January 2026

Class, the welfare state, and redistributive attitudes: A methodological Intervention

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Melcher, C. R., van der Naald, J., Torres, C., & Lindsay, S. C. (2025). Class, the welfare state, and redistributive attitudes: A methodological Intervention. The Social Science Journal, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/03623319.2025.2582481

Prior research has found that measures of welfare state generosity and social class are, at best, unevenly related to individual redistributive attitudes. We suggest that these uneven relationships are at least partially due to a methodological misspecification prevalent in much of the existing literature, as well as a theoretical shortcoming of the rational choice assumptions undergirding the supposed link between economic self-interest and redistributive attitudes. Using a cross-national sample and multi-level modeling, we illustrate that the effect of income on subjective perceptions of economic well-being differs greatly depending on the generosity of the welfare state. Individuals perceive their class position differently depending on the welfare state context. Thus, we argue that the welfare state moderates the effect of class on redistributive attitudes, not just mediates it, as much of the existing literature assumes. We illustrate this moderating effect systematically using a battery of redistributive attitudes.

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Banal Radicalism: Free Spaces and the Routinization of Radical Practices in Far-Right Movements

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Marom, O. (2025), Banal Radicalism: Free Spaces and the Routinization of Radical Practices in Far-Right Movements. Br J Sociol, 76: 767-778. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.13213

How do free spaces become radicalizing spaces? Studies of far-right radicalism have highlighted the role of insulated movement spaces in radicalizing their members. In these spaces, participants can flaunt their radical ideas and infuse them into everyday practices, forming these ideas into comprehensive and resilient worldviews. However, the salience of radical ideas in free spaces has also been found to be inconsistent and rare. This contrast makes it unclear when and how exactly free spaces contribute to the spread and persistence of radical ideas. Drawing on a 4-year ethnographic study of a radical right-wing libertarian movement in the US, this study shows how activists both highlight and downplay radical ideas creatively to solve situationally emergent challenges of coordinating action. Thus, while the movement’s free spaces created circumstances that imbued some everyday mundane practices with radical political significance, they also facilitated an opposite process: they created conditions that obscured or even undermined the political meaning of otherwise radical practices. As I argue, rather than stifling the spread of radical ideas, this banalization of radical practices is a critical component of the radicalization process itself, allowing activists to coordinate radical action among a diverse group of people and across varying situations. In this way, free spaces contribute to the coordination of radical action, even among participants who do not necessarily express radical political motivations. Thus, the findings show how people’s motivations for radical action are often articulated in the moment, in response to specific situations and the challenges they present.

From Equality to Economic Development: Culture, Intersectionality, and Justifications for Women’s Entrepreneurship Policy in the United States, 1973–1988

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Gracia J Lee, From Equality to Economic Development: Culture, Intersectionality, and Justifications for Women’s Entrepreneurship Policy in the United States, 1973–1988, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 2025;, jxaf012, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxaf012

This article examines the discursive strategies underpinning advocacy for women’s entrepreneurship policy in the United States between 1973 and 1988. It demonstrates a shift in policy justifications from equality to economic development leading up to the passage of the Women’s Business Ownership Act in 1988. This discursive shift shows how women evoked the cultural ideas of gender sameness and equal opportunity, yet their claims were further shaped by the masculine logics of small business, policy changes, and pushback against affirmative action in the 1980s. Bridging ideas from the civil rights, anti-poverty, and women’s movements in the United States and abroad, advocates also addressed the problems and interests of intersectionally marginalized poor mothers and Black women, alongside middle-class White women. The case of women entrepreneurs thus highlights the need for attention to the interplay between cultural ideas, the sociopolitical context, and intersectional dynamics when analyzing gender as a political category.

The Way of Migrant Brokers: Power, Competition, and the Misconversion Capital

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Andrew Nova Le, The Way of Migrant Brokers: Power, Competition, and the Misconversion Capital, Social Problems, 2025;, spaf031, https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spaf031

Social scientists have recently written much concerning the role of migrant brokers in both facilitating and impeding international migration. A crucial missing piece in the literature is a discussion of the operational logic behind the brokers’ behaviors. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic observations and 224 interviews with state officials, brokers, and contract labor migrants across Vietnam, this article examines the micro-processes of migrant brokers’ behavioral response to the structural conditions they experience, and how their various behaviors adversely affect migrants. This paper analyzes how the unequal power relations between the state, brokers, and migrants lead to a competitive brokerage ecology comprising three structural conditions: brokers competing against one another in obtaining, fulfilling, and sustaining workorders from labor export companies. These structural conditions shape distinct forms of capital misconversion, which includes bundling money, delaying time, and distorting skills. This paper contributes to international migration, brokerage, and organization studies scholarship.

Contesting the State: Embodied Threat and the Emergence of Prisoner Mobilization

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Knight, D. J. (2025). Contesting the State: Embodied Threat and the Emergence of Prisoner Mobilization. American Sociological Review, 90(4), 658-689. https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224251340401 (Original work published 2025)

Prior studies cast U.S. imprisonment as politically demobilizing. This article complicates that proposition by exploring when, and how, threat under penal confinement leads people to mobilize. Using interviews with currently incarcerated and recently released men across three states, I show that although imprisonment generally fosters political inaction, collective mobilization does arise under certain conditions. First, people in prison mobilize in response to embodied threats—fundamental threats eliciting visceral reactions that signal future harm (i.e., premature death or permanent incapacitation). Second, to collectively mobilize, a subpopulation of similarly threatened prisoners must be present and see the threats as a shared problem. Collective prisoner mobilization is more likely when both conditions are present; mobilization is unlikely when neither condition is present; and individual political contention is more likely when conditions are partially present. This range of political responses among incarcerated people is more dynamic than previously reported. Imprisonment has selective political effects, mobilizing the most repressed individuals within prison to devise new strategies to contest their repression.

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