Abortion is a polarizing political issue across the American continent, yet US-focused scholars seldom interrogate the consequences of abortion politics for democratic institutions. Latin America scholarship has done better. Moving beyond the typical academic focus of explaining abortion liberalization or abortion politicization, this regional scholarship investigates how conservative actors strategically isolate and amplify the antiabortion position as a means of consolidating alliances and deepening elite control over legislative and judicial institutions. More provocatively, this scholarship also suggests that elites use the unique liminal legality of the fetus to blur, and ultimately weaken, national commitments to legal and judicial equality, thus facilitating democratic backsliding. Legal access to safe abortion is critical for the life, health, and human rights of women and girls around the world, but the Latin America scholarship suggests that gaining and maintaining abortion rights is also critical for healthy democracies.

A growing demographic literature outlines how war exposure has long‐lasting and far‐reaching impacts on individuals. Yet the nascent literature leaves questions of whether and how the war exposures of key relatives, such as spouses, affect individuals. We use Demographic and Health Survey data ( N = 2,085 couples) to study the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970), extending insights into the link between women's childhood exposure to war and their elevated risk of intimate partner violence by considering the relevance of their spouse's war exposure. Hazard models demonstrate that the association between wives’ childhood war exposure and their risk of intimate partner violence is attributable to war‐exposed women marrying war‐exposed men. Mediation analyses examine pathways linking husbands’ war exposure to their risk of perpetrating violence. Together, the results underscore the value of efforts to understand how war continues to haunt both those who experience it, as well as those with whom their lives are intertwined.

In the following essay, I make the case that sociology is long overdue for an affective “turn,” or a full-scale embrace of emotional dynamics. For most of its history, sociology has had a tenuous relationship with emotions and affect. Sometimes ignored, more often examined as a dependent variable caused by structure, culture, and cognition, a diverse array of research on motivation and action demonstrates affect is a causal force of thinking and doing. I begin by drawing from this research and some corners of sociology already embracing affectivism to make the case for an affective sociology. Once outlined, I point to some possible directions for a systematic, vibrant research agenda.

This article proposes the Latin American Baroque as an interpretative matrix for analyzing digital modernity. Drawing on Echeverría’s modernidad barroca and Latin American theories of dependency and historical-structural heterogeneity, we argue that capitalism in the periphery functions as a heterogeneous assemblage of overlapping temporalities, logics, labor regimes, and infrastructures. Using this baroque lens, we examine the subsumption of baroque economies by platform capitalism, focusing on the sphere of informality and the real capture of popular viração . Finally, we show how the baroque ethos operates as a subjective grammar of digital labor in which self-entrepreneurship, compliant misbehavior, algorithmic management, popular economies, and “making do” practices are entangled within platforms’ operations. The Baroque thus becomes an operative matrix for analyzing platform labor and theorizing digital capitalism from the Global South.

Closer distance between parents and their children facilitates intergenerational contact and exchanges of support in later life. There are mixed narratives and evidence regarding the divergence—or convergence—of intergenerational proximity in aging societies. In this study, we examine trends and structural drivers of intergenerational distance and coresidence in a rapidly aging high-income society. We analyze register data from Finland, a country commonly characterized by weak family ties and a strong social welfare system. Using fine-scale geographic units and real-world navigation data to compute travel times, we examine the proximity of parents aged 60–69 to their children aged 18+ from 2003 to 2023, specifically analyzing trends in distance and coresidence between fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, and mothers and daughters. We then decompose the contribution of the population’s changing sociodemographic composition to changes in these outcomes. We find that while coresidence is low (10 percent with sons and 5 percent with daughters in 2023), more than half of Finnish parents live within 30 minutes by car to their nearest, non-coresident child, with parents living 5 minutes farther from their daughters than from their sons. From 2003 to 2023, the average distance to the nearest, non-coresident child increased by 10 percent to 19 percent or 3–4 minutes, with father-daughter distance showing the greatest increase. While this suggests that aging parents and adult children are living farther apart, we find that compositional changes—including the decline in the number of grandchildren, educational expansion, increased divorce rates among parents, as well as declining coresidence with sons—underlie this geographic divergence.

Part of the rise in US wage inequality comes from a widening gap between professional/managerial (PM) and other occupations (NPM). We examine the role of education in the trend in this gap from 1980 to 2019. Prior research typically combined all college graduates in one category, but we highlight the distinctive role of graduate degrees. Since 1980, NPM occupations have never had as many as five percent with a graduate degree, but by 2019, thirty-six percent of individuals in PM occupations had a graduate degree. Using a decomposition-of-change technique, we show that the increased gap between NPM and PM in the proportion of their workers with graduate degrees explains nineteen percent of the growth in the gap. A two-way fixed-effects analysis shows that those occupations that increased their proportion of workers with a graduate degree more had steeper wage growth. Wage returns rose modestly for BA/BS degrees and dramatically for having a graduate degree. However, a BA/BS degree was less likely to get one a PM job in 2019 than in 1980, whereas a graduate degree was just as likely to get one PM job in 2019 as in 1980. We discuss how our findings fit predictions from three theoretical perspectives emphasizing skill-biased technological change, the expanding knowledge economy, and increased credentialism.

Immigrants have been shown to have higher self-employment rates than the native-born. However, unlike socioeconomic outcomes such as education and earnings, for which a narrowing gap with natives signals a positive outcome, immigrants’ high self-employment rates have a more ambivalent meaning. Self-employment may reflect problems in the economic assimilation process if it is used as a strategy by immigrants who are underpaid in the wage/salary labor market or if self-employment leads to lower earnings growth in the long run. We use a restricted dataset in which respondents of the Current Population Survey have been linked with their tax records to examine the self-employment trajectories of immigrant men who arrived as adults over their first 20 years since arrival. The longitudinal information allows us to test whether immigrants who transition to self-employment are those who are underperforming in the wage/salary labor market. We are also able to assess the long-term impact of self-employment by comparing the earnings growth of immigrants before and after becoming self-employed. Our findings indicate that immigrants who turn to self-employment are underpaid in the wage/salary labor market. Self-employment also often leads to lower long-term earnings growth although there are important differences among immigrants by race and ethnicity and level of education.

There is ongoing debate as to whether gender specialization, historically considered to be the most efficient family arrangement, or gender egalitarianism, now typically seen as more economically and ideologically desirable, is more negatively associated with divorce in the contemporary United States. In the context of a stalled gender revolution, I draw upon gender equity theory to explore whether differential levels of institutional support for gender equality in the home, operationalized as state-level work-family policy supports, help explain why traditional gender arrangements are still often associated with marital stability among different gender couples. I use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1995–2019) merged with state policy information to test the hypothesis that gender specialization primarily reduces the risk of divorce when institutional support for balancing work and family life is low, using an indicator I term structural support for working families, especially among married parents. Findings support this hypothesis: male-breadwinning and gender specialization reduce divorce risk when structural support for working families is low, but there are no differences across work-family arrangements when support is high. By integrating micro- and macro-level views on gender, public policy, and family life, this study helps us understand how gendered institutional structures have shaped the progression of the gender revolution in the United States.

Sweden has recorded the highest number of refugees per capita in Europe in recent decades, while its major cities maintain high levels of ethnic segregation. This paper investigates the long-term impact of refugees’ initial neighborhood placement on long-term neighborhood integration. Using full population register data since 1990, the paper applies a fine-grained k-nearest-neighbor approach and accounts for refugee's potential self-selection into neighborhoods by using a Swedish refugee placement policy as exogenous treatment. Our results indicate that the higher the shares of natives, highly educated and employed in the refugees’ initial neighborhood, the higher also the respective shares in their future neighborhood along these dimensions. This locational-attainment result holds robustly and is not driven by stayers. We argue that neighborhood socialization on a small geographic scale can be an important channel in explaining the path-dependent pattern of residential integration. The result encourages the use of placement policies to reduce rigid ethnic segregation patterns.