How do citizens react to authoritarian responsiveness? To investigate this question, we study how Chinese citizens reacted to a novel government initiative which enabled social media users to publicly post requests for COVID-related medical assistance. To understand the effect of this initiative on public perceptions of government effectiveness, we employ a two-part empirical strategy. First, we conduct a survey experiment in which we directly expose subjects to real help-seeking posts, in which we find that viewing posts did not improve subjects’ ratings of government effectiveness, and in some cases worsened them. Second, we analyze over 10,000 real-world Weibo posts to understand the political orientation of the discourse around help-seekers. We find that negative and politically critical posts far outweighed positive and laudatory posts, complementing our survey experiment results. To contextualize our results, we develop a theoretic framework to understand the effects of different types of responsiveness on citizens’ political attitudes. We suggest that citizens’ negative reactions in this case were primarily influenced by public demands for help, which illuminated existing problems and failures of governance.

Economic development in China in the recent decades features both striking between-region economic inequality and robust between-region migration flow. What happens when the largest internal migration in human history cooccurs with severe regional inequality? This article investigates how migration affects subjective outcomes with a particular focus on the influence of inequality and social comparison. Using a nationally representative longitudinal survey dataset that tracks migrants through the migration cycle, I found that migration has a negative causal effect on subjective social status, and a positive causal effect on perceived inequality. The effects on subjective social status and perceived inequality persist even after migrant workers return home. Employing a novel operationalization of reference group, I show that migration’s persisting negative effect on subjective social status is a result of its lasting effect on reference standard. In sum, migrants’ reference standards are changed by the migration experience, and the switch has lasting effects on subjective social status. I discuss the implications of the findings on the theories of subjective inequality, subjective social status, and reference group.

Scholars of social determinants of health have long been interested in how parents’ (origin) and adult children’s educational attainment (destination) influence health behaviors and outcomes. However, the heterogeneous effects of origin and destination on health—that is, for what socioeconomic group education conveys health benefits—are relatively less studied. Using multilevel marginal structural models, we analyze multigenerational longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to estimate the heterogeneous and dynamic effects of origin and destination education over the life course on multiple health outcomes. We find that the protective effects of college education against negative health outcomes are remarkably similar regardless of parent’s (origin) educational attainment. In contrast, parent’s education appears to have a larger effect when children’s education level is low. Our results also suggested distinct life-course patterns between the health variables. We conclude by discussing the implications of increasing education levels for the education-health relationship.  

The study of mobility effects is an important subject of study for sociologists. Empirical investigations of individual mobility effects, however, have been hindered by one fundamental limitation, the unidentifiability of mobility effects when origin and destination are held constant. Given this fundamental limitation, we propose to reconceptualize  mobility effects from the micro to the macro level. Instead of micro-level mobility effects, the primary focus of the past literature, we ask alternative research questions about macro-level mobility effects: what happens to the population distribution of an outcome if we manipulate the mobility regime, that is, if we alter the observed association between social origin and social destination? The proposed method bridges the macro and micro agendas in social stratification research, and has wider applications in social stratification beyond the study of mobility effects. We illustrate the method with two analyses that evaluate the impact of social mobility on average fertility and income inequality in the United States respectively.

To understand the patterns and trends of various forms of inequality, quantitative social science research has typically relied on statistical models linking the conditional mean of an outcome of interest to a range of explanatory factors. A prime example of this approach is the widely used Kitagawa-Oaxaca-Blinder (KOB) method. By fitting two linear models separately for an advantaged group and a disadvantaged group, the KOB method decomposes the between-group outcome disparity into two parts, a part explained by group differences in a set of background characteristics and an unexplained part often dubbed “residual inequality.” In this paper, we explicate and contrast two distinct approaches to studying group disparities, which we term the descriptive approach, as epitomized by the KOB method and its variants, and the prescriptive approach, which focuses on how a disparity of interest would change under a hypothetical intervention to one or more manipulable treatments. For the descriptive approach, we propose a generalized KOB decomposition that considers multiple (sets of) explanatory variables sequentially. For the prescriptive approach, we introduce a variety of stylized interventions, such as lottery-type and affirmative-action-type interventions that close between-group gaps in treatment. We illustrate the two approaches to disparity analysis by assessing the Black-White gap in college completion, how it is statistically explained by racial differences in demographic and socioeconomic background, family structure, academic preparation, and college selectivity, and the extent to which it would be reduced under hypothetical reallocations of college-goers from different racial/income backgrounds into different tiers of college --- reallocations that could be targeted by race- or class-conscious admissions policies.

In this study, we revist the relationship between objective social status (OSS) and subjective social status (SSS) within the Chinese context. Whereas earlier studies focus on the difference in conditional mean of SSS by OSS, we incorporate the difference in conditional variance of SSS by OSS as a key dimension of social stratification of SSS. Applying variance function regression to ten waves of the Chinese General Social Survey data from 2006 to 2021, we analyzed the two-dimensional stratification of SSS and yield critical findings. First and consistent with earlier studies, higher socioeconomic groups, including those with higher family income and education, consistently perceive themselves with higher SSS. Second, this paper finds that consensus over SSS is stronger within higher-class groups. Third and against earlier findings on the urban disadvantages in SSS, we find that the SSS gap between urban and rural residents diminishes by year and urban residents gradually develop stronger consensus over their status. This research offers a fresh perspective on the interplay between OSS and SSS, highlighting the role of consensus, and providing a framework that is useful for further investigations into the multifaceted nature of social stratification in China and beyond.