Research

Using the 2000 Census, 2001–2023 American Community Survey (ACS), and Current Population Survey (CPS) from 2003 to 2024, this study traces how the racial classification of children in interracial families has evolved over the past two decades. The share of children whose reported race aligns with the combined identities of their parents — what we call congruent classification — rose by nearly 50% (22 percentage points) over this period. Parallel estimates from the CPS align with the Census/ACS series, suggesting that the shift is not an artifact of changes in questionnaire wording or data processing. As congruent reporting has increased, both hypodescent for part-Black children (the “one-drop” rule) and hyperdescent for part-White children have declined. Shifts in the sociodemographic profile of interracial families account for only a small portion of the rise in congruent reporting, suggesting that broader cultural and political currents are more potent drivers. These results demonstrate how the seemingly technical act of assigning race to children responds to the larger social climate, altering the statistical portrait of race in the United States and, potentially, offering an early glimpse of future mixed-race identifications.

Drawing on the 1994–2022 Current Population Survey Voting and Registration Supplements, this study documents four primary patterns of immigrant electoral incorporation in the United States. First, despite the steady decline of the non-Hispanic White share within the voting-age and voting-eligible populations, White voters maintain disproportionate electoral influence through consistently high turnout, particularly in midterm elections. Conversely, minority groups—and Hispanic communities in particular—face a “double penalty” of structural exclusion via non-citizenship and lower participation rates among the eligible that systematically constrains proportional representation. Second, although turnout among first-generation immigrants rises with duration of residence, broadly aligning with classical assimilation theory, the pace of this incorporation is racially stratified. Third, arrival-cohort effects follow a distinct U-shaped trajectory: pre-1965 arrivals exhibit high engagement, cohorts arriving between the 1970s and mid-1980s display a participation deficit, and cohorts arriving in the 2000s demonstrate a tentative rebound. Compositional adjustments attenuate but do not eliminate these cohort differentials. Fourth, despite the post-2016 turnout surge, substantial ethnoracial disparities persist into the third-and-higher generation. Collectively, these findings challenge linear narratives of automatic electoral assimilation, underscoring how citizenship barriers and racial stratification continue to shape the composition of the active American electorate.

Asymmetric fixed-effects models are increasingly used in sociological research to test whether an effect reverses when a time-varying predictor changes direction. Because these models rely on within-person change, directional asymmetry is often interpreted as evidence of within-person irreversibility. This study shows that this interpretation requires an additional cross-person homogeneity assumption. I reparameterize Allison’s (2019) cumulative asymmetric fixed-effects model exactly as a model of current state and total movement, revealing that the specification pools current-state responses across individuals. When those responses are heterogeneous and systematically related to who moves upward versus downward, pooled asymmetry can arise even when every individual’s response is perfectly reversible. I derive this mover-composition result and characterize what remains identifiable when individual state responses are unrestricted. A common path response—the additional response associated with accumulated movement conditional on current state—can then be identified only from within-person bidirectional movement, provided that the resulting variation is not absorbed by period effects. Monte Carlo simulations and a reanalysis of Allison’s wage example illustrate the resulting assumption–support–precision trade-off and show that relevant support depends on the structure of observed trajectories, not simply on the number of directional transitions.

Non-marital childbearing has long been exceptionally rare in South Korea, even amid delayed marriage, rapid fertility decline, and growing acceptance of non-traditional family forms. Recently, however, the share of births outside marriage has risen from less than 1 percent in the late 1990s to 5.8 percent in 2024. This increase raises the question of whether it signals a substantive weakening of the marriage-childbearing link or mainly reflects the arithmetic effect of declining marital births. Using vital birth records from 1997 to 2024, this study examines the scale and composition of non-marital childbearing in South Korea. We first distinguish changes in the share of births occurring outside marriage from changes in the underlying prevalence, comparing three complementary indicators that capture different demographic processes. We then examine compositional changes through two analyses: an age-by-education distribution analysis and a latent class analysis incorporating occupation and relational context. While earlier increases were partly driven by declining marital fertility, the post-2020 period marks a more substantive rise with notable increases among older and more highly educated women. The latent class analysis identifies a growing profile defined by socioeconomic resources, alongside profiles defined by relational resources that complicate the deficit-choice binary. These patterns suggest a shift in the profiles of those who bear children outside marriage, with possible implications for the social meaning of non-marital childbearing in South Korea.

The increase in multiracial Americans is a most defining feature of the emerging U.S. racial order. Its significance, however, is not simply demographic. Because multiracial individuals are situated across established ethnoracial boundaries, their classification provides a critical window into how racial boundaries are reproduced and transformed. This study asks whether the racial composition of childhood peer environments shapes how multiracial children are later classified as they enter adulthood. Using linked full-count Census microdata from 2000, 2010, and 2020, we examine children of Black–White, Asian–White, AIAN–White, and Hispanic/non-Hispanic parentage. Our design exploits grade-to-grade fluctuations in racial composition within school districts to distinguish peer exposure from family sorting across communities. Across all four boundaries, greater exposure to minoritized peers increases later classification with the minoritized ancestry, while greater exposure to peers recorded with the same multiracial classification increases multiracial classification. These changes occur largely away from the historically dominant classification at each boundary, and many remain evident in adulthood. The findings recast racial classification as a locally embedded process of racial formation, showing that childhood peer ecologies shape how children encounter racial boundaries and, ultimately, the categories through which American diversity and inequality are measured.

Recent research identifies gender disparities in adolescent occupational plans as a key contributor to women’s underrepresentation in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. Using nationally representative data from two South Korean birth cohorts, this study examines how gender gaps in STEM aspirations emerge in childhood and persist into late adolescence. By 3rd grade, boys are already six to eight times more likely than girls to express interest in STEM careers — a gap not explained by differences in our measures of parenting, math ability and interest, or life goals. Our estimates suggest that roughly 22 percent of the gender gap in STEM intentions by 11th grade stems from boys’ stronger 5th grade STEM aspirations and their greater persistence over time. These findings underscore childhood as a critical period in the formation of gendered career pathways.

This article uses the example of voter turnout in US presidential elections to compare two new methods for age, period, and cohort (APC) analysis: the APC interaction model and the APC bounding analysis. While discussing the formal, conceptual, and interpretive differences between the two methods, the analysis demonstrates how both methods can be used to generate distinct but complementary findings. Because the two methods take alternative positions on the appropriate cohort-effect estimands, the comparison underscores the importance of well-grounded conceptual foundations in APC analysis.

Background: Laws imposing criminal penalties for extramarital affairs stir intense debates in several countries, highlighted by recent repeals in countries like India, South Korea, and Taiwan. However, we currently lack empirical studies of their societal impacts.

Objective: This study examines the impact of decriminalizing extramarital affairs on women’s attitudes toward divorce in cases of potential spousal infidelity in South Korea.

Methods: We analyze the first five waves of the Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women and Families, which provides a nationally representative sample of adult women in South Korea. The fifth wave coincides with the public announcement of the adultery law’s repeal. For causal identification, we leverage the potentially exogenous timing of the Constitutional Court’s decision in a difference-in-differences analysis.

Results: Our findings reveal a notable shift in attitudes after the repeal: the decriminalization of extramarital affairs has led women to be less likely to consider a husband’s infidelity as justifying divorce on its own.

Conclusions: Decriminalizing adultery laws can affect societal views, shifting how women perceive spousal infidelity as a basis for divorce.

Contribution: While discussions about adultery laws frequently rely on empirical arguments, significant research gaps remain on their societal effects. This study provides what is, to our knowledge, the first empirical and potentially causal analysis of the consequences of decriminalizing adultery, an issue that sparks considerable debate in many countries. It establishes an empirical basis for further exploration, encouraging continued research and more informed public discussions. Future research directions are also briefly discussed.

The linear dependence of age, period, and birth cohort is a challenge for the analysis of social change. With either repeated cross-sectional data or conventional panel data, raw change cannot be decomposed into over-time differences that are attributable to the effects of common experiences of alternative birth cohorts, features of the periods under observation, and the cumulation of lifecourse aging. This article proposes a rolling panel model for cohort, period, and aging effects, suggested by and tuned to the treble panel data collected for the General Social Survey from 2006 through 2014. While the model does not offer a general solution for the identification of the classical age-period-cohort accounting model, it yields warranted interpretations under plausible assumptions that are reasonable for many outcomes of interest. In particular, if aging effects can be assumed to be invariant over the course of an observation interval, and if separate panel samples of the full age distribution overlap within the same observation interval, then period and aging effects can be parameterized and interpreted separately, adjusted for cohort differences that pulse through the same observation interval. The estimated cohort effects during the observation interval are then interpretable as effects during the observation interval of entangled period and cumulated aging differences from before the observation interval.

Capitalizing on the newly available and consistent coding of detailed occupations for the General Social Surveys (GSS), this article examines the link between class origins and public support for redistribution in the United States from 1977 through 2018. The findings reveal significant net associations between class origins and preferences for redistribution. Individuals with farming-class or working-class origins are more supportive of government action to reduce inequality than individuals with salariat-class origins. These class-origin differences are associated with individuals’ current socioeconomic characteristics but are not fully accounted for by these factors. In addition, individuals in more privileged class positions have increased their support for redistribution over time. Attitudes toward federal income taxes are also analyzed as an additional measure of redistribution preferences. Overall, the findings suggest a continuing role of class origin in determining support for redistribution.

Through an analysis of validated voters in the 2016 American National Election Study, this article considers the voters who supported Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016. More than 5.7 million in total, Obama-to-Trump voters were crucial to Trump’s victory in the Electoral College. They were more likely to be white, working class, and resident in the Midwest. They had lower levels of political interest, were centrist in both party affiliation and ideology, and were late deciders for the 2016 election. On economic interests, they were centrists, except for trade policy, which they viewed, on average, as a greater threat than other voters. They claimed to have more experience with economic vulnerability than Democratic loyalists of comparable social standing. On racial attitudes, including the racialized economic topic of immigration, they had a profile similar to Republican loyalists. While their support of Trump may be attributable to surging white nativism, this article argues for an alternative explanation. Voters who were attracted by Trump’s economic populism only joined his coalition if they could accept his racialized rhetoric. As a result, the Trump bandwagon predominantly attracted generically bigoted voters with racial attitudes similar to Republican loyalists.

To evaluate the claim that white working-class voters were a crucial block of support for Trump in the 2016 presidential election, this article offers two sets of results. First, self-reports of presidential votes in 2012 and 2016 from the American National Election Studies show that Obama-to-Trump voters and 2012 eligible nonvoters composed a substantial share of Trump’s 2016 voters and were disproportionately likely to be members of the white working class. Second, when county vote tallies in 2012 and 2016 are merged with the public-use microdata samples of the 2012-to-2016 American Community Surveys, areal variations across 1,142 geographic units that sensibly partition the United States show that Trump’s gains in 2016 above Romney’s performance in 2012 are strongly related to the proportion of the voting population in each area that was white and working class. Taken together, these results support the claim that Trump’s appeal to the white working class was crucial for his victory.

Through an analysis of the 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 Current Population Surveys as well as the 2004 through 2016 General Social Surveys, this article investigates class differences and patterns of voter turnout for the last four U.S. presidential elections. After developing some support for the claim that a surge of white, working-class voters emerged in competitive states in 2016, a portrait of class differences on political matters among white, non-Hispanic, eligible voters between 2004 and 2016 is offered to assess the electoral consequences of this surge. These latter results are consistent with the claim that racial prejudice, anti-immigrant sentiment, concerns about economic security, and frustration with government responsiveness may have led many white, working-class voters to support an outsider candidate who campaigned on these themes. However, these same results give no support to the related claim that the white working class changed its positions on these matters in response to the 2016 primary election campaign or in the months just before the general election.

Through an analysis of the 1994 through 2016 General Social Surveys, this article demonstrates that a substantial proportion of eligible voters within the working class turned away from solid identification with either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party during the Obama presidency. Even before the 2016 election cycle commenced, conditions were uncharacteristically propitious for a Republican candidate who could appeal to prospective voters in the working class, especially those who had not voted in recent presidential elections but could be mobilized to vote. These findings support the contested position that variation in party identification is a genuine leading indicator of electoral outcomes and perhaps also, in this case, of party realignment.