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"Economic Change and the Legitimation of Inequality: The Transition From Socialism to the Free Market in Poland and Hungary, 1987-1994." Jonathan Kelley and Krzysztof Zagorski. forthcoming. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility. (Vol. 22).
Abstract. This article takes advantage of a unique historical opportunity, the transformation of Central-East Europe with the collapse of Communism, to address a fundamental question in the social justice-equity-legitimation research tradition: how strong is the link between a nation's economy and its citizens' normative judgments concerning income inequality? We argue (1) that the transition from a socialist economy to a free market economy should increase normative support for income inequality; (2) that to the extent that people perceive differences in pay actually to be large, they will believe more inequality to be morally legitimate; and (3) that normative support for income inequality will be higher among better educated people and among those in higher status jobs. We find that normative support for inequality increased dramatically. In Communist times the Polish and Hungarian publics favored less inequality than citizens of Western nations thought right; but within a decade after the fall of Communism they favored much more inequality than Westerners think right. These normative changes did not arise from socioeconomic or demographic change in population structure but in large part from perceived changes in actual income inequality. Our data are from the World Inequality Study, which pools data from the International Social Survey Programme and other projects; there are 18 representative national samples in six Central-East Europe nations (N=23,260) and, for comparison, 32 in Western nations (N=39,956).
Full working paper (460k PDF)
"Varieties of Capitalism and Class Conflict: Public Perceptions in 22 Nations." M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley and Francis Castles. Presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, 2004. R & R, American Journal of Sociology.
Abstract. Institutional theories posit that different modes of coordinating capitalist economies have major implications for class conflict. We test these by comparing six European coordinated market economies (welfare states) to the US and four other largely free market economies, analyzing data from 18 surveys with over 24,000 respondents. We use ordinal multinomial logistic regression methods and multi-level models to assess the impact of institutional arrangements while controlling for individual-level differences in class and social structure. Our results suggest that market coordination reduces conflict between rich and poor by about 20 percentage points, reduces conflict between management and workers by 10 percentage points, and also reduces class conflict by 10 percentage points, leaving conflict at roughly two-thirds of US levels.
"Family Background and Education: China in Comparative Perspective". Jonathan Kelley, M.D.R. Evans, and Juhua Yang. Presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, 2004.
Abstract. This paper investigates the effects of family background on education in China (using data from the Life Histories and Social Change in Contemporary China survey), in comparison to other Communist countries and to Western nations (using data from the World Inequality Study). Together, N=141,438. Since World War II, the mean number of years of education in China paralleled the rises in other Communist countries and in Western market economies, albeit at a lower level. Despite Herculean efforts at reform, the level of education in China is not significantly different from what would be predicted on the basis of worldwide patterns linking education to GNP and family background. Moreover, the main causes of educational attainment are much the same: multivariate analysis shows that the worldwide pattern linking education to GNP and family background is correlated r = .96 with the Chinese pattern. Analysis of changes over time reveals only one small but important difference: in China the educational attainments of children from well educated professional families fell spectacularly from those coming of age in the late 1940s (before the revolution) to those coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s, and drifted yet further down after that, a pattern starkly different both from Eastern Europe and from the Wes. But in other ways, changes over time in China were very similar to those elsewhere in the world. For children of poor families, educational attainments climbed slowly over time in China, as throughout the world, Communist and non-communist alike, with a slight fall among the most recent cohorts. Both the level and trends in education for children of poor Chinese families are indistinguishable from those in Eastern Europe and very close to those in the West. This suggests that the massive upheavals in Chinese education have not yielded better results for the poor masses than does economic growth alone. In all, educational outcomes in China seem to have followed the patterns typical of poor nations throughout the world, except for a brief but vehement prejudice against children from well educated professional families.
"The Role of Scholarly Resources in Educational Attainment: Data from 26 Nations" M.D.R Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikora, and Donald J. Treiman. Revised and extended version of a paper presented to the World Congress of Sociology, Brisbane.
Abstract. Worldwide, parents' attainments in the social hierarchy affect their offspring's success (e.g. Ganzeboom and Treiman etc), with the correlation between parents' and children's years of education being around .3, in Australia for example. Prior research suggests that families immersed in literature inculcate scholarly tastes in their children, getting them to perform better in schools and universities, and to persist further in education (Crook 1997; P. De Graaf 1986, 1987; Evans and Kelley 2000). Our purpose here is a relatively straightforward one. We here explore book ownership in international context, and focus on the effect of book ownership in the family of origin on respondent's education. Book ownership is, of course, only one aspect of scholarly culture: conceivably, one could own books without reading them in order to make status claims, or one could haunt the library, voraciously devouring books one does not own. In practice, however, these things tend to go together. Data are from the International Social Survey Programme's 1999-2000 "Ideology of Inequality-3" round of surveys. Data on books in the home are available for 24 nations. A later version of this paper will add data from large national samples of China and South Africa.
"Social Mobility in India: Comparison with 28 Other Nations." Jonathan Kelley
Abstract. Particularly because of its caste system, social stratification in India raises important questions, of interest to sociology since Max Weber. But the answers are still obscure. Analyzing individual level data from a large representative national sample, this paper provides rigorous estimates of the amount of inherited privilege and the impact of the caste system, and a reliable cross-national comparison between India and other nations. Resource inequality theory predicts that inherited privilege is a consequence of inequality in the distribution of human and material resources among parents. In India such inequality is great and, as predicted, so is inherited privilege. But inherited privilege in India is even greater than in societies with comparable levels of inequality in human capital. This is because caste provides an extended kinship network, offering help to its members. In particular, the socioeconomic status of other members of a caste determines just how much help they can offer, just as the socioeconomic status of one's parents determines how much help they have to offer. A caste's ritual status matters little. These results also have implications for economic discrimination in other societies.
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