Despite prominent and compelling theoretical arguments linking manufacturing imports from the global South to rising income inequality in the global North, the literature has produced decidedly mixed support for such arguments. We explain this mixed support by introducing intervening processes at the global and national levels. At the global level, evolving characteristics of global production networks (GPNs) amplify the effect of Southern imports. At the national level, wage-coordination and welfare state generosity counteract the mechanisms by which Southern imports increase inequality, and thereby mitigate their effects. We conduct a time-series cross-section regression analyses of income inequality among 18 advanced capitalist countries to these propositions. Our analysis addresses alternative explanations, as well as validity threats related to model specification, sample composition and measurement. We find substantial variation in the effect of Southern imports across global and national contexts. Southern imports have no systematic effect on income inequality until the magnitude of GPN activity surpasses its world-historical average, or in states with above average levels of wagecoordination and welfare state generosity. With counterfactual analyses, we show that Southern imports would have led to much different inequality trajectories in the North if there were fewer GPNs, and the prevailing degrees of wage-coordination and welfare state generosity were higher. The countervailing effects of GPNs and institutional context call for theories of inequality at the intersection of the global and the national, and raise important questions about distributional politics in the years to come.

In this article, we examine the impact of multicultural immigration policy on the degree to which immigration reduces support for redistributive social policy among natives. Arguments linking immigration to support for redistributive social policy are hotly contested. Some suggest that immigration reduces support for social policy, while others suggest that it increases such support. To make matters worse, the empirical evidence is equally mixed. We take this confluence as a puzzle in need of explanation. Our point of departure is to introduce institutional context and multicultural immigration policy, in particular, as a key intervening factor. From the growing literature on multiculturalism, we derive three unique hypotheses by which immigration has different effects on native support for redistributive social policy across multicultural contexts. To subject these to empirical scrutiny, we examine the degree to which the effect of immigration on native support for redistributive social policy (regarding jobs, unemployment, income, retirement, housing, and healthcare) varies across multicultural context. Our findings suggest that immigration flows appear to positively affect support for social policy in countries with a high degree of multiculturalism. For some types of social policy, immigration flows actually increase support for social policy in highly multicultural countries but reduces such support in assimilationist countries. However, cross-national variation in immigrant stocks is uncorrelated with support for social policy regardless of the level of multiculturalism. We conclude by highlighting how our findings point to the need for more research on how multiculturalism impacts native perceptions of immigrants.

Intersectionality scholars have long identified dynamic configurations of race and gender ideologies. Yet, survey research on racial and gender attitudes tends to treat these components as independent. We apply latent class analysis to a set of racial and gender attitude items from the General Social Survey (1977 to 2018) to identify four configurations of individuals’ simultaneous views on race and gender. Two of these configurations hold unified progressive or regressive racial and gender attitudes. The other two formations have discordant racial and gender attitudes, where progressive views on one aspect combine with regressive views on the other. In the majority of survey years, the most commonly held configuration endorsed gender equality but espoused new racialist views that attributed racial disparities to cultural deficiencies. This perspective has become increasingly common since 1977 and is most prevalent among White women and White men, likely due to racial-group interest. Black women and Black men, in contrast, are more likely to embrace progressive racial and gender attitudes. We argue that White men’s gender egalitarianism may be rooted in self-interest, aimed at acquiring resources through intimate relationships. In contrast, Black men adopt progressive racial and gender attitudes to form a necessary coalition with Black women to challenge racism.

In this article, we provide an empirical analysis of the relationship between multiculturalist policies and immigrant attitudes toward homosexuality. Normative discourses implicate multiculturalism as a key obstacle to the sociocultural integration between immigrants and natives within affluent democracies. At the core of this controversial debate are differences over the extent to which multiculturalism impedes or promotes the adoption of sexual norms from host societies to immigrants. However, a dearth of empirical studies has allowed political actors to levy broad, but largely speculative, claims that multiculturalist policies aggravate cultural conflicts between incoming immigrants and the values of host societies. We begin to address this issue by examining whether immigrants’ attitudes toward homosexuality vary in any direction across multicultural contexts. We find no evidence that multicultural policies exacerbate negative attitudes toward homosexuality, or facilitate the greater acceptance of sociocultural norms surrounding homosexuality for immigrants and Muslim immigrants. The findings are consistent across alternative measures of multiculturalism and two large cross-national samples: The European Social Survey and the World Values Survey. Interestingly, we find some support that multiculturalist policies may be correlated with greater acceptance of homosexuality among natives rather than immigrant respondents. However, further research is necessary to develop and unpack this potential relationship.

Multi-racial (mixed-race) people constitute a growing percentage of the United States (US) population. The study reported in this paper used residential segregation measures as a proxy for social distance, to examine whether segregation levels of multi-racial groups differ from those of mono-racial groups in the US in 2010. First, we find that all multi-racial groups considered in the study experience lower levels of segregation at county level than their mono-racial counterparts. However, black-whites and Hispanic-whites experience higher levels of segregation than other multi-racial groups. Second, we find region and minority composition of counties are associated significantly with segregation levels for multi-racial groups, but relative income is not.