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Research in political science has acknowledged the importance of ethno-nationalism as a constitutive element of radical-right politics, but it has typically reduced this phenomenon to its downstream correlates, like anti-immigrant or racist attitudes. Sociologists, on the other hand, have extensively studied nationalism as a feature of political culture, but have not weighed in on debates in the study of institutional politics, and of the radical-right in particular. In this paper we bring these literatures together by considering how multiple conceptions of American nationhood shaped respondents' voting preferences in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and how the election outcome built on long-term changes in the distribution of nationalist beliefs in the U.S. population. Our results suggest that competing definitions of nationhood constitute important cultural cleavages that have become politically mobilized in recent years. In particular, we show that exclusionary varieties of nationalism were strongly predictive of Trump support in the Republican primary and general election, while disengagement from the nation was predictive of Sanders support in the Democratic primary. Moreover, nationalism has become increasingly sorted by party: over the past twenty years, respondents identifying with the Republican Party have become increasingly ethno-nationalist, while those identifying with the Democratic Party have become increasingly civic nationalist. Based on this evidence, we conclude that nationalism has become an increasingly important ideological cleavage in the U.S. electorate, which has been reinforced by other forms of sociodemographic and attitudinal partisan sorting. Moreover, the 2016 presidential election can only be understood by taking nationalism seriously as a primary source of collective identification and political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines populist claims-making in U.S. electoral discourse. We define populism as a rhetorical strategy that juxtaposes the virtuous populace with a corrupt elite and views the former as the sole legitimate source of political power. In contrast to past literature, we argue that populism is not a stable ideological attribute of political actors but rather a gradational quality of political claims. This conceptualization allows us to systematically measure how the use of populism is affected by contextual factors. Our empirical case consists of 2,482 speeches given by American presidential candidates during general elections between 1952 and 1996. We offer an analytical strategy that uses automated text analysis to measure populism at the level of individual speech acts. Populism is shown to be a common feature of presidential politics among both Democrats and Republicans. Its prevalence, however, varies with candidates' relative positions in the political field. We show that the likelihood of a candidate's reliance on populist claims is directly proportional to his distance from the center of power (in this case, the presidency); in other words, populism is a strategic tool of political challengers and particularly those who have legitimate claims to outsider status. By examining the temporal fluctuation in populist rhetoric, its shifting use on the political left and right, its variation across geographic regions and field positions, and the changing content of populist categories, our paper contributes to the literature on the relational nature of political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines populist claims-making, a specific form of moral boundary work in political discourse. We define populism as a rhetorical strategy that juxtaposes the virtuous populace with a corrupt elite and views the former as the sole legitimate source of political power. We argue that populism has been neglected in the sociological study of politics, despite the field's longstanding interests in moral classification. While political scientists have been more receptive to populism research, they have been reluctant to generalize beyond specific geographic and historical contexts. In contrast, we posit that populism is an endemic feature of democratic politics. Our paper offers an analytical strategy that combines sociological theories of moral classification with cutting-edge computation text analysis methods to study the temporal fluctuation in populist rhetoric, its shifting prevalence on the political left and right, and the changing content of populist binary categories. Our empirical case consists of 2,482 speeches given by American presidential candidates during general elections between 1952 and 1996. Populism is shown to be a common feature of presidential politics, with both parties relying on binary moral classification. The degree to which each party relies on populist rhetoric, however, varies over time. We show that this temporal variation is a function of social, economic, and political conditions that impact the salience and credibility of populist claims. Furthermore, we demonstrate that each party tends to construct populist claims differently, with Democrats more likely to rely on economic populism and Republicans more likely to vilify federal bureaucrats. Our results provide an important corrective to the existing understanding of populism in political science, while demonstrating the utility of a sociological approach to the topic. Furthermore, we demonstrate that computational text analysis is a powerful method that holds much promise for political and cultural sociologists interested in the study of discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the national identity focused on collective schemata related to nation on various countries in the U.S. It mentions that the nationalism research is focused on elite ideologies and institutional processes. It presents information on popular nationalist attitudes that captured the attention of comparative sociologists.

The paper explores a novel approach to the study of popular nationalism by aggregating and comparing the manner in which survey respondents from 33 countries conceive of their nations. By focusing on the correlation structure of attitudinal measures of nationalism from the International Social Survey Program, rather than simply on the content of individual survey responses, the study explicitly examines the heterogeneity of meaning attached to particular measures by individual respondents. This analytic technique is based on the assumption that the same answer to a survey question can mean two different things to two different respondents and that this difference in meaning can be observed by examining how each respondent answered other questions on the survey. Once the individual response profiles are aggregated to the national level, the cross-national differences are represented graphically using multi-dimensional scaling (MDS). The variation in the nations' position in MDS space is explained in terms of their political, economic, and demographic attributes, as well as the historical trajectories of their nation- and state-building processes. Finally, the paper offers a four-fold inductive typology of popular nationalism (consolidated, fragmented, contested, and polarized nationalism) based on the relational structure of the national populations' attitudinal profiles, which represents a marked improvement over the ethnic-civic dichotomy that continues to dominate the nationalism literature. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much research of the "digital divide" has presumed that adults on the wrong side of the divide may be economically disadvantaged, yet little if any research has tested this premise. After discussing a range of mechanisms - both real and spurious - that could account for differences in income growth between workers who do and do not use the Internet, we use data from the CPS and from a special re-interview of respondents to the GSS to examine the impact of Internet use on change in income over periods of 12 to 18 months. Our analyses document strongly significant positive associations between web surfing and income growth, and we find some evidence that is inconsistent with the hypothesis that the association are spurious. It appears that skills and behaviors associated with certain kinds of Internet use were rewarded by the labor market at the beginning of the 21st century. Although there is not reason to believe that such differentials will persist indefinitely, our findings do indicate that technological divides, especially during periods in which new technologies are rapidly diffusing, are a valid concern for students of inequality, and that technological change can reproduce and, at times, challenge social inequality. These results suggest that research on inequality in access to and mastery of technology deserves more systematic attention from students of social stratification. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the heterogeneous distribution of cultural skills and preferences in society. Sociologists of culture have attempted to identify the mechanisms that allocate cultural practices to specific social groups. A number of cultural sociologists, over the last twenty years, have rejected the rigid dichotomy in favor of an intermediate position, treating agency, structure, and culture as mutually constitutive dimensions of social life. The results of the analysis provide strong support for the applicability of ecological theory to the macro-structural study of cultural forms.

Sociologists of educational stratification have traditionally focused their attention on the effect of inputs to the educational system (class, race, gender, income, etc.) on the outputs produced by it (achievement, attainment, labor market performance). Although this approach has contributed significantly to our understanding of the inequalities within American education, it has been limited by a failure to seriously address the contents of schooling. Within this tradition, the legitimacy of curricular practices has been largely taken for granted, if not ignored altogether. This paper calls for a re-examination of accepted sociological assumptions about the curriculum by emphasizing the curriculum as both a cause and outcome of specific cultural and institutional arrangements that have significant repercussion for equality, social justice, and democratic practice. It outlines the history and main postulates of the critical theory of curriculum to demonstrate the possibility of treating curricular practice as a worthy subject of critical research. It then discusses the often-tense relationship between mainstream sociology of stratification and critical curriculum studies and argues for a fruitful reconciliation of some of their competing claims. Finally, it suggests possible future directions for empirical research that incorporate conceptual and methodological strains of both paradigms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study develops a novel analytical approach for studying cross-national variation in popular conceptions of the nation, which takes seriously both within- and between-country heterogeneity and does not rely on reductive a priori assumptions about the national boundedness of attitudes. By using inductive quantitative methods to analyze pooled cross-national survey data from the International Social Survey Programme, I identify common patterns of nationalist attitudes among all respondents from thirty countries and only subsequently examine those respondents' national affiliations, along with a variety of other individual attributes. Having mapped the heterogeneity of popular conceptions of the nation within each country, I ask how those understandings and their cross-national distribution have changed between 1995 and 2003. Finally, in an attempt to explain these attitudinal shifts, I employ qualitative case analysis to examine the political, economic, and demographic changes that took place within the countries during this time period. The results of the study reveal four fundamental characteristics of contemporary popular nationalism in wealthy democratic countries: 1) Popular nationalism is far more heterogeneous than is suggested by existing theories; 2) All varieties of nationalism are present in all countries, though their relative prevalence varies across countries; 3) The content of shared representations of the nation is remarkably stable over time; and 4) The distribution of the shared representations across countries changes over time. The results of this paper make an important contribution to the nationalism literature and provide a blueprint for a more nuanced comparative approach to the study of political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]