Tag Archives: International

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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Reactionary Politics in South Korea: Historical Legacies, Far-Right Intellectuals, and Political Mobilization

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Yang, M. (2025). Reactionary Politics in South Korea: Historical Legacies, Far-Right Intellectuals, and Political Mobilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

In December 2024, South Korean president Yoon Seok-yeol stunned the world by declaring martial law. More puzzling was that Yoon’s insurrection unexpectedly gained substantial support from the ruling right-wing party and many citizens. Why do ordinary citizens support authoritarian leaders and martial law in a democratic country? What draws them to extreme actions and ideas? With the rise of illiberal, far-right politics across the globe, Reactionary Politics in South Korea provides an in-depth account of the ideas and practices of far-right groups and organizations threatening democratic systems. Drawing on eighteen months of field research and rich qualitative data, Myungji Yang helps explain the roots of current democratic regression. Yang provides vivid details of on-the-ground internal dynamics of far-right actors and their communities and worldviews, uncovering the organizational and popular foundations of far-right politics and movements.

White-Collar Blues: The Making of the Transnational Turkish Middle Class

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Yavaş, Mustafa. 2025. White-Collar Blues: The Making of the Transnational Turkish Middle Class: Columbia University Press. 

Consider the lucky few. They studied hard and aced high-stakes tests, survived demanding schooling and extracurriculars, graduated from top colleges and immediately landed high-pay, high-status corporate positions in tall buildings. What happens after this middle-class dream of fast-track careers comes true?

White-Collar Blues follows the Turkish members of the global elite workforce as they are selected into, survive within, and opt out of coveted employment at transnational corporations. State-employed doctors, lawyers, and engineers were long seen as role models until Turkey followed the global tide of neoliberalism and began to embrace freer circulation of capital. As world-renowned corporations transformed Istanbul into a global city, Turkey’s best and brightest have increasingly sought employment at brand-name firms. Despite achieving upward mobility within and beyond Turkey, however, many Turkish professionals end up feeling disappointed, burned out, and trapped in their corporate careers.

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Bringing War Back In: Victory, Defeat, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

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Schenoni, L. 2024. Bringing War Back In: Victory, Defeat, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: Cambridge University Press.

Bringing War Back In provides a fresh theory connecting war and state formation that incorporates the contingency of warfare and the effects of war outcomes in the long run. The book demonstrates that international wars in nineteenth-century Latin America triggered state-building, that the outcomes of those wars affected the legitimacy and continuity of such efforts, and that the relative capacity of states in this region today continues to reflect those distant processes. Combining comparative historical analysis with cutting edge social science methods, the book provides a comprehensive picture of state formation in nineteenth-century Latin America that is compelling for readers across disciplines, breathes new life into bellicist approaches to state formation, and offers a novel framework to explain variation in state capacity across Latin America and the world.