New publications by Jonathan Mijs
Professor Jonathan Mijs, with co-author Selcan Mutgan (Linköping University), published a new article in Sociological Science, titled “Income Inequality and Residential Segregation in “Egalitarian” Sweden: Lessons from a Least Likely Case”. Please click here to read and find the abstract below:
“Drawing on individual-level full-population data from Sweden, spanning four decades, we investigate the joint growth of income inequality and income segregation. We study Sweden as a “least likely” case comparison with the United States, given Sweden’s historically low levels of inequality and its comprehensive welfare state. Against the background of U.S.-based scholarship documenting a close link between inequality and segregation, our study provides an important insight into the universality of this relationship. Using entropy-based segregation measures, we analyze trends and patterns of income segregation between and within income groups along different sociodemographic dimensions—migration background and family type. Our findings reveal that growing income inequality in the last 30 years has been accompanied by a sharp uptake in income segregation, especially for the bottom quartile of the income distribution who are facing increasing isolation. Income segregation is most extensive for individuals with children in the household, among whom it has increased at a higher rate than those without children. Interestingly, income segregation is lower among non-Western minorities than among majority-group Swedes. We conclude that changes to the welfare state, liberalization of the housing market, and rapid demographic changes have led Sweden onto a path that is difficult to distinguish from that taken by the United States.”
Professor Mijs also published a new paper in Research in Stratification and Social Mobility titled “Learning About Inequality in Unequal America: How Heterogeneity in College Shapes Students’ Beliefs About Meritocracy and Racial Discrimination.” You can read the paper here and please find below the abstract:
“As Western nations are increasingly divided by socioeconomic fault lines, how do we learn about the lives of others? Scholarship documents correlates of inequality beliefs but lacks a theoretical framework for studying belief formation. This paper develops an “institutional inference” model describing how adolescents learn about inequality in racially and socioeconomically homogeneous or heterogeneous institutional contexts. The latter expose them to structural sources of inequality that they cannot see in the former. Testing theoretical expectations on ten panels of US college students (n = 141,597), I find that: (1) beliefs about meritocracy and racial inequality change substantially in college, (2) the direction of change is shaped by experiences with same-race or different-race roommates, (3) the impact of which is strongest on campuses that otherwise provide limited exposure to heterogeneity. The inferential process that links institutions to beliefs may help explain why Americans have not rallied against inequality: when growing inequality produces socioeconomically homogeneous settings, people cannot experience its full extent.”