Tag Archives: Article

The wages of ethnic power: Socioeconomic status, group threat, and anti-immigrant attitudes in Western Europe

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Atac, I. E., Seguin, C., & Gorman, B. (2025). The wages of ethnic power: Socioeconomic status, group threat, and anti-immigrant attitudes in Western Europe. International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 0(0).

Group threat theories explain anti-immigrant attitudes as emerging from threats to the perceived or actual power of one’s ethnic group. Studies also show that individual-level socioeconomic status (SES) is negatively correlated with attitudes toward immigrants, where SES is often conceptualized as an individual-level variable which relates to an individual’s experience of economic competition or general political orientation. Here we argue that the effect of SES is conditional on an individual’s ethnic group’s power. Using data from the European Social Survey and Ethnic Power Relations datasets, we examine how interactions between ethnic group power and individual SES shape attitudes toward immigrants across 16 Western European countries. We find that majority group members generally exhibit more anti-immigrant attitudes than members of minority groups. SES is negatively correlated with anti-immigrant attitudes, generally, but especially for majority group members, where lower-SES individuals have the most anti-immigrant attitudes. At the highest levels of SES there are almost zero differences in anti-immigrant attitudes between majority and minority group members. Our results highlight the need to look to how the “psychological wages” of ethnic group power are influenced by individual SES.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Political Mobilization and Policy Reform in Québec

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Eidlin, B., & Guay, E. (2025). Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Political Mobilization and Policy Reform in Québec. Labour Le Travail, 96, 67–92. https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2025v96.006

Québec enacted major solidaristic family and housing policy reforms toward the end of the 1990s, precisely when other countries were moving toward more individualized policies. Against what existing theories would predict, these reforms took place at a moment when labour’s power had weakened, the ruling left party had scaled back its progressive commitments, and employers opposed the proposed reforms. Why did Québec expand its social policies in a broader context of retrenchment? We argue that this resulted from a shift in the context of contention that sparked a process of institutional conversion. First, labour-allied progressive movements in the province were able, through their own cycle of mobilization, to fill the gap left by unions’ retreat from direct action and mass mobilization from the 1980s onwards. Second, employers remained relatively weak and state-dependent, leading them to accept the government’s agenda as long as it did not differ significantly from their priorities of deficit and tax reduction. Third, the idea of the “social economy” served as a floating signifier in the province’s public policy debates of the 1990s, providing a framework within which unions, community groups, employers, and the government could operate while assigning it different definitions and aims. The ambiguity of the idea of the social economy helped to forge a disparate coalition of Québec social actors, resulting in solidaristic policy reforms. Our analysis aligns with recent literature calling for a renewed attention to the role played by contention in the development of social policies in Québec.

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Anti-leftism as an aesthetic in white power punk

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Katz, N. (2025). Anti-leftism as an aesthetic in white power punk. Social Movement Studies, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2025.2595346

White Power music scenes embrace both White Supremacy and the music cultures they situate themselves in. For White Power punk scenes, there is a reliance on the shaping and utilization of punk aesthetics to support their ideology. This paper examines how members of White Power punk bands in the United States and Germany utilize White Supremacist ideals and punk aesthetics to construct their scenes. The findings show that both the German and U.S. scenes emphasize an opposition to leftism as a core aesthetic. Opposing leftism serves as a driving aesthetic in three ways: it allows members to make sense of their music scenes, helps them create an ideological position that links music scenes together, and provides a discursive tool to connect their scenes with larger social issues.

The fortunes of radicalization: How the party environment determined the fate of radical movements in the late 20th-century United States

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Grumbach, M. (2026). The fortunes of radicalization: How the party environment determined the fate of radical movements in the late 20th-century United States. Critical Sociology, 0(0).

Radicalization during the 1960s and 1970s is often cited as a cause in the decline of American New Left movements, but right-wing movements also radicalized during this period and did not suffer the same consequences. This comparative-historical study traces the trajectories of four sectarian radicals who led conservative Christian and ultra-left movements that emerged in the United States in 1965. Bridging social movement literature with Gramscian theory, I argue that the variation in the fortunes of radicalization stems from the divergence between the formal party blocs. Radicalization on the left resulted in isolation and implosion because the Democratic Party bloc lacked resources and its interest-group configuration was inhospitable to radicalism. On the right, the Republican Party bloc was in an ascendant phase of organizational growth and fused the hitherto dispersed ideological currents of social conservatism and market fundamentalism. The availability of resources in tandem with the hegemonic configuration of the Republican Party bloc enabled Christian radicals to exert ideological influence. My findings demonstrate how parties shape the trajectories and outcomes of radicalization and underscore the importance of comparative analysis of left and right movements to explain their political legacies.

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General Social Theory or Resistant Knowledge Project?: The Public Life of Social Constructionism and Its Implications for Liberation Sociology

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Allen, S. E.2025. “General Social Theory or Resistant Knowledge Project?: The Public Life of Social Constructionism and Its Implications for Liberation Sociology.” Sociological Forum40, no. S1: S29–S37. https://doi.org/10.1111/socf.70015.

This paper explores contemporary conceptualizations of social constructionism. I specifically address three queries: (1) What is social constructionism? (2) How have understandings of social constructionism evolved as the concept has diffused into the public sphere? And, (3) In what ways does social constructionism’s public life impact liberation sociology in praxis? I ultimately argue that social constructionism, as a theory and framework, draws attention to the significant ways one’s standpoint epistemology influences knowledge construction and, as a result, has the radical potential to destabilize social systems and hierarchies by legitimizing socially situated viewpoints, especially those from oppressed and marginalized communities. Furthermore, I discuss how this framing shifts social constructionism from merely a general social theory to a resistant knowledge project to explain why it has faced challenges in the form of reductionism and repression. I conclude by acknowledging the continued utility of social constructionism moving forward, especially with regard to cultivating a liberation sociology.

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