RSF Review

In the latest Public Opinion Quarterly, Christopher Faricy reviews RSF volume Who Gets Represented?, which investigates whether and how differences in group opinion matter with regard to political representation. Faricy writes:

This book presents an excellent collection of scholarship on public opinion and equal representation that I would recommend for upperlevel undergraduate and graduate courses in public opinion, public policy, or sociology.[...]This volume makes an important contribution to understanding who gets what from government and the politics of income inequality in America.

Between 2007 and 2010, sociologists Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks conducted three nationally representative surveys to systematically examine Americans' attitudes toward counterterrorism policies. Their data, published in our new book, Whose Rights? Counterterrorism and the Dark Side of American Public Opinion, offer an interesting empirical perspective on American attitudes at a time when the debate over the use of drones, extrajudicial killings and extraordinary rendition has re-emerged. Here is an excerpt from the volume:

Figure 3.1 presents our analysis of these data, and symbols indicate the mean level of support for a specific counterterrorism policy or practice. [The survey's] counterterrorism items have a range of 0 through 1, higher scores indicating greater support. Of the ten policies and practices at hand, it is NSA surveillance of American citizens and suspected terrorists that elicits the highest level of support. With a score of 0.76, the NSA surveillance item’s score is well above levels of support for the next three counterterrorism items, all of which cluster together: airport security (0.67), the Patriot Act (0.66), and the Military Commissions Act (0.65). Next is assassination, where the targeting of “individuals suspected of being al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders” receives a score of 0.60.

These first five counterterrorism items show what amounts to a fair amount of support. All scores are well above the 0.50 scale midpoint. The right panel of figure 3.1 presents data for the remaining five items. The rights violation item leads the way, 0.57 indicating that respondents’ average opinion is shaded toward agreement with the position of taking “all steps necessary to prevent additional acts of terrorism.” Not far behind are opinions on detention, the mean for which is 0.54. In the 2010 SAPA survey, the detention and ethnic profiling items have the same item score of 0.54. The waterboarding item is next with a score of 0.45. With an even lower score of 0.34, the practice of torture easily elicits the highest level of public opposition. Given that waterboarding is best understood as a subset of torture, the contrast between opinions on these two counterterrorism practices merits a note in passing because it anticipates the cognitively induced framing effects we probe more systematically in chapters 4 through 6.

The Russell Sage Foundation, the principal American foundation devoted exclusively to research in the social sciences, announced today the appointment of Sheldon H. Danziger, the Henry J. Meyer Distinguished University Professor of Public Policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, as the tenth president of the Foundation. Professor Danziger will join the Foundation on September 1, 2013. He will succeed Eric Wanner, who has led the Foundation since 1986.

In making the announcement today, Robert E. Denham, Esq., partner at Munger, Tolles & Olson, LLP, and Chairman of the Russell Sage Foundation Board of Trustees, said “Professor Danziger’s appointment will continue the Russell Sage Foundation’s great tradition of distinguished and groundbreaking social science research that addresses important policy issues and contributes to improving the human condition. The Foundation has benefitted from 26 years of strong leadership by its current president, Eric Wanner. When Professor Danziger becomes president upon Eric’s retirement, we are assured of continued strong leadership in setting and executing our research agenda.”

Professor Danziger is a nationally recognized expert on the effects of economic, demographic, and public policy changes on trends in poverty and economic inequality, and on social welfare policies in the United States. He has published widely on the effectiveness of federal anti-poverty programs and did important early work on the rise in inequality in the United States, long before it was recognized as a national problem. In addition to his professorship at the University of Michigan, Danziger is Director of the National Poverty Center, Director of the Research and Training Program on Poverty and Public Policy, Research Professor at the Population Studies Center, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received his B.A. from Columbia University and his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Commenting on the appointment of Professor Danziger as his successor, RSF president Eric Wanner said, “I’m delighted that Sheldon Danziger has agreed to take over the reins at Russell Sage. Sheldon’s strong commitment to rigorous social science research and its implications for policy will make him an excellent steward of the Foundation’s long tradition of working to strengthen social science and apply it more effectively to the analysis of social problems and the design of social policy.”

In accepting the appointment, Danziger said, “I am honored to have the opportunity to lead the Russell Sage Foundation. My goal is to advance the Foundation’s stellar accomplishments in the social sciences and continue to focus on the key economic, political, and social challenges facing the nation. I look forward to working with the trustees, the staff, and the many scholars whose research is the basis for the Foundation’s success.”

Firedoglake's Book Salon hosted an online conversation earlier this week with Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, a co-author of the RSF book Documenting Desegregation. Using data that analyzes over 5 million private sector workplaces between 1966 and 2005, the volume shows the American private-sector workplace remains highly segregated. The Firedoglake forum compiled some of the book's main findings:

• The legal changes prohibiting employment discrimination have certainly had an impact, with the biggest declines in racial segregation coming in the sixties before enforcement of the new civil rights laws but during the period of maximum political struggle and corporate uncertainty over what equal opportunity would mean;
• Black women, far from benefiting from their “two-fer” status, have benefited less than black men and white women from more integrated workforces;
• As firms hire a lower proportion of white men, white men’s access to the best jobs, such as higher level managerial positions, increases;
• The pace of racial desegregation has slowed considerably with lesser enforcement after 1980, and since 1990, considerable resegregation has occurred, particularly in high-wage industries, with a third of all industries showing greater resegregation between white men and black men during the 2001-2005 period.