College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations..
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Item DOES WOMEN'S CONTINUATION IN THE LABOR FORCE MATTER FOR UNION FORMATION? AN ASSESSMENT OF EVIDENCE FROM THE UNITED STATES AND LATIN AMERICA.(2024) Hurtado, Constanza; Sayer, Liana C.; Caudillo, Mónica L.; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Social scientists have long been interested in the interplay between women’s roles as paid employees, partners and mothers. One of the first puzzles they intended to solve was about the consequences of women’s participation in the labor force for marriage. Currently, evidence about high-income Western countries overwhelming supports that women’s employment does not hinder union formation generally or marriage specifically. This conclusion is consistent when looking at multiple dimensions of employment, including earnings, employment status, economic potential, and job quality. Women’s employment engagement during the transition to adulthood have received scarce attention as a determinant of whether and when women move in with a romantic partner for the first time. In particular, and despite its relevance to understanding family-work dynamics across life, the relationship between continuous employment, the number of years employed without breaks/interruptions, and union formation has been overlooked. Additionally, despite increasing rates of women’s participation in the labor force and drastic sociodemographic changes in the last decades, the association between women’s employment and union formation in Latin American countries has been scarcely examined. To address these two gaps in the existing literature, this dissertation analyzes whether—and how—employment engagement influences women’s transitions into their first unions. Specifically, I measure and compare two dimensions of employment during the transition to adulthood: 1) the number of cumulative years/months of employment, and 2) the number of years/months of continuous employment. For this purpose, I analyze three nationally representative longitudinal and retrospective datasets, and focus on the experiences of women born in the 1970s or later in Mexico, Chile, and the U.S. The results confirm the relevance of women’s employment engagement on decisions toward moving in with a romantic partner for the first time, highlighting differences between the two employment dimensions, as well as between contexts. By contrasting cumulative and continuous employment, the dissertation contributes to our understanding of why and how women’s employment shapes union formation. It also invites us to expand theories about the interplay between women’s economic position and family from a comparative perspective. Given the increasing uncertainty of labor markets, it also motivates further exploration about the role of expectations and experiences of continuous employment on family transitions.Item Support Is Not Enough: The Role of Meritocracy and Sexism in Equal Pay(2020) Gomez Vidal, Analia; Calvo, Ernesto; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since 2015, Argentina has witnessed an unprecedented increase in women’s mobilization around gender issues such as violence against women and reproductive rights. In this context, presidential support for equal pay policy was not enough to bring the issue upfront. This project addresses the determinants of support for equal pay. While support for this policy is high at first, meritocracy and sexism play a key role in our understanding of what is fair and who is deserving in the labor market. I argue that the labor market structure relies on gender biases that make it a misogynistic environment, even if participants do not individually align with sexist views. In such an environment, meritocratic views as aspirational can increase support for equal pay, but this effect is conditional on sexism. Alternatively, meritocracy serves as a hierarchy-legitimizing ideology, which in combination with modern sexism, reduces support for corrective policies like equal pay. Contrary to theoretical expectations, and popular agreement among respondents, stripping equal pay policy from its gender perspective does not increase support for this initiative. Instead, it reduces it. I present evidence for this theoretical framework using two original online studies administered in Argentina in 2018 and 2019. These studies are the first ones to combine micro-level data on labor market participation and political preferences with survey experiments. Overall, this dissertation represents an empirical and theoretical first step in unpacking attitudes about merit and gender equality and understanding the challenges in promoting gendered economic issues and garnering support around them in the public arena.Item DO ECONOMIC SHOCKS MATTER? THE EFFECT OF THE ECONOMY ON PRESIDENTIAL SUPPORT(2018) Cabezas Navarro, Jose Miguel; Calvo, Ernesto; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)For decades researchers argued that individual’s political attitudes, perceptions and evaluations were explained by early political socialization principles or, on the other hand, they react to different stimuli from the environment. Party identification or changes in the state of the national economy turned into the biggest predictors or explanatory independent variables when analyzing individual’s political behavior. Campbell et al (1960) coined the term ``perceptual screen” when describing the effect that party identification had over the individuals. 60 years later, different authors argued in the same fashion. ``Partisans ignore or deflect information that is inconsistent with their party” (Green et al (2002)) or ``Political party is a crucial mediating force” (Lewis-Beck et al 2008). I use mediation analysis to introduce for the first time a systematic measurement of whether this mediation effect exists and how important is it. Bringing together individual’s responses to nationally representative surveys and national macroeconomic performance indicators, I start analyzing the US from 1980 to 2016. I expand the scope of my dissertation findings incorporating 17 Latin American countries from 2006 to 2016 and I finalize analyzing Chile from 1900 to 2017. My dissertation put together a multilevel regressions approach analyzing more than 235,000 cases across different political, economic and cultural institutions. I found that changes and shocks in the economy affect directly how individuals evaluate the state of the economy, not being mediated significantly by party identification. Party identification mediates economic perceptions on what I defined as the ``Responsibility attribution stage”, or when individuals reward or punish the incumbent due to their economic management. Almost 30% of the presidential support is mediated by party identification when attributing responsibility to the incumbent in the US. Only 15% of the attribution is mediated by party identification in Latin America and 9% in the Chilean case. I also found important differences respect to the effect of party identification once one considers if the party is in office or in the opposition. I argue that this is explained by different political institutions but also because individuals evaluate variables different than macroeconomic performances.Item Defying Expectations: Associational Participation and Democratization in Poor Communities in Argentina(2008-08-19) Sacouman, Natasha; Korzeniewicz, Roberto P.; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Alexis de Tocqueville noted that the key to democracy is "knowledge of how to combine." This dissertation focuses on the following question: Can participation in associations facilitate democracy within the communities in which they exist even if such associations are not democratically organized - i.e., vertical, hierarchical organizations. To consider this question, this dissertation explores a poor community's transition from a sparse to a highly developed associational space, and examines the impact of this process of democratization on social relations at both the associational and the personal levels (between leaders, participants, and non-participants). Specifically, I compare three different associational settings in a barrio in Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina -- i.e., a non-governmental organization, a religious network, and a political party network -- to assess whether democratization can occur with the construction and communication of symbolic meaning and objective practices by vertically structured, hierarchical organizations. I analyze the interplays between inclusion and exclusion; solidarity and generalized distrust; and inequality and protagonism. Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates how the configuration of social relations serves to legitimate and reproduce civic life in poor communities. This dissertation is based upon extensive ethnographic observations in three different associations and the community itself, as well as upon qualitative interviews with community leaders, participants, nonparticipants, politicians and academics.Item Civil Society, Popular Protest, and Democracy in Latin America(2006-10-21) Frajman, Eduardo Ohav; Alford, C. Fred; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation addresses the relationship between mobilized coalitions of movements and organizations emerging from civil society and the promotion of democracy. It offers a critique of major works in political theory that see in civil society the potential to transform democratic politics, primarily through the protection of civil society from the state in order to allow for the development of new identities and forms of sociability. The three main theoretical objections to these works involve their focus on state-civil society relations at the expense of economic factors, the presupposition that consensus is present in civil society, and the assumption that mobilized civil societies are fueled from the grassroots. Four recent cases of civil society mobilizations from Latin America, in Argentina, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Bolivia, are presented to illustrate the deficiencies of current theoretical approaches to civil society. The case studies show the importance of material conditions and the framing of specific grievances in the formation of popular movements grounded in civil society.