Heather McLaughlin

Sexual Harassment, Workplace Authority, and the Paradox of Power

Power is at the core of feminist theories of sexual harassment, although it has rarely been measured directly in terms of workplace authority. Popular characterizations portray male supervisors harassing female subordinates, but power-threat theories suggest that women in authority may be more frequent targets. This article analyzes longitudinal survey data and qualitative interviews from the Youth Development Study to test this idea and to delineate why and how supervisory authority, gender nonconformity, and workplace sex ratios affect harassment. Relative to nonsupervisors, female supervisors are more likely to report harassing behaviors and to define their experiences as sexual harassment. Sexual harassment can serve as an equalizer against women in power, motivated more by control and domination than by sexual desire. Interviews point to social isolation as a mechanism linking harassment to gender nonconformity and women’s authority, particularly in male-dominated work settings.

WELFARE AND CITIZENSHIP: THE EFFECTS OF GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE ON YOUNG ADULTS’ CIVIC PARTICIPATION

Recent scholarship and public discourse highlight an apparent waning of civic engagement in the United States. Although the welfare state is generally thought to support democracy by reducing economic inequality, it may paradoxically contribute to political disempowerment of some groups. We examine the effects of state interventions on civic participation among young adults, hypothesizing that involvement with stigmatizing social programs, such as welfare, reduces political engagement, while receipt of nonstigmatizing government assistance does not dampen civic involvement. Using official voting records and survey data from the Youth Development Study (YDS), a longitudinal community sample of young adults, a series of regression models suggests that welfare recipients are less likely to vote than nonrecipients, whereas recipients of non-means-tested government assistance participate similarly to young adults who do not receive government help. These effects hold even when background factors, self-efficacy, and prior voting behavior are controlled. Welfare receipt is not associated, however, with suppressed participation in nonstate arenas such as volunteer work. Intensive interviews with YDS welfare recipients are used to illustrate and develop the analysis.

Social class and workplace harassment during the transition to adulthood

Young disadvantaged workers are especially vulnerable to harassment due to their age and social class position. As young people enter the workforce, their experiences of, and reactions to, harassment may vary dramatically from those of older adult workers. Three case studies introduce theory and research on the relationship between social class and harassment of young workers. We suggest two mechanisms through which class may structure harassment experiences: (1) extremely vulnerable youth are directly targeted based on their social class origins, and (2) the type and condition of youth employment, which is structured by class background, indirectly affect experiences of harassment.

Punishment and social exclusion: National differences in prisoner disenfranchisement

As Sidney Verba and colleagues have noted, “casting a ballot is, by far, the most common act of citizenship in any democracy.” Although universal suffrage represents the democratic ideal, many nations have historically withheld the franchise from women and racial and ethnic minority groups. Even with the gradual incorporation of these groups, however, restrictions on prisoners have persisted. This chapter considers some of the sources of national variation in prisoner disenfranchisement policies. We ask a simple, macro-level question: To what extent are felon voting practices associated with national characteristics such as economic development, democratization, ethnic conflict, and punitiveness? We consider the relationship between each of these characteristics and prisoner disenfranchisement for a broad group of 105 nations, as well as a smaller subsample of 39 European nations. Consistent with expectations, we find prisoner disenfranchisement to be concentrated in less democratized nations with high incarceration rates and low levels of economic development. We consider the implications of these findings for democratic theories of citizenship and criminological theories of prisoner reintegration. Extant research suggests dramatic variation in the extent to which nations disenfranchise prisoners. International voting rights for prisoners essentially fall along a continuum. Some nations, such as Canada, Denmark, and South Africa, allow inmates to vote while in prison. Other countries, such as Egypt and the United Kingdom, ban all prisoners from voting. In between those extremes are countries that allow prisoners to vote under certain conditions, such as Australia, Belgium, and Japan.