Cases of measles and other highly contagious diseases are rising in the United States. Public health experts blame the rise partly on the spatial concentration of parents declining to vaccinate their children, but researchers have given little attention to theorizing why this clustering occurs in particular communities. We argue that residential and school selection processes create “pockets of homogeneity” attracting parents inclined to opt out of vaccines. Structural features of these enclaves reduce the likelihood of harsh criticism for vaccine refusal and foster a false sense of protection from disease, making the choice to opt out seem both safe and socially acceptable. Examination of quantitative data on personal belief exemptions (PBEs) from school-based vaccination requirements in California schools and districts, as well as findings from parent interviews, provide empirical support for the theory. We discuss substantive implications for lawmakers and public health officials, as well as broader sociological contributions concerning neighborhood effects and residential sorting.

The authors offer a theoretical framework that resolves conflicting ideas found in extant theory pertaining to moral reform movements. The framework focuses on how community attributes, particularly the relative size of populations affiliated with supportive belief systems, shape moral reform activism by affecting both the convictions and motivations of potential supporters. The theory is applied in an analysis of county-level variation in the presence of antiabortion pregnancy centers (PCs). The authors find that the proportion of individuals affiliated with Roman Catholicism or evangelical denominations has a curvilinear relationship with PC establishment, reflecting the way in which group size can affirm convictions that are the lifeblood of moral reform but can also reduce motivation to act when the size of the group surpasses majority status. The authors also find that PCs are more likely to be found in communities where gender roles are relatively egalitarian. While some scholars have bemoaned the decline in social capital reflected in "bowling alone" imagery (Putnam 2000), others have proclaimed that we now 1 We are grateful to the Guttmacher Institute for providing us with data on abortion clinics. Some of the data utilized in this study were made available by the American Religion Data

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Opposition to immigrant inclusion is often grounded in a "Latino threat" narrative that portrays Latino immigrants and their descendants as incapable of assimilation and "undeserving" of the benefits of citizenship. Are nativist reactions to this narrative strongest where immigrants are lagging behind in cultural assimilation, or where they are actually making the greatest gains? Two competing logics of status threat are tested through an analysis of county-level voting returns on California's Proposition 227. Status politics theories predict higher antibilingual support where immigrants are failing to learn English. In contrast, the status devaluation argument leads to the counterintuitive prediction that support should be highest where language assimilation rates are high. Although we might expect that the claims of the Latino threat narrative would be least appealing where objective circumstances refute them, findings suggest that the resonance of such claims can be amplified in settings where they are furthest from the truth. The theoretical argument advanced helps explain why nativist policies continue to generate broad appeal at a time when immigrants are rapidly assimilating.