Jason Beckfield

Power and Position in the World City System

Globalization has renewed interest in the place and role of cities in the international system. Recent literature proposes that the fate of cities (and their residents) has become increasingly tied to their position in international flows of investment and trade. Data on the branch locations of the world’s 500 largest multinational enterprises in 2000 are subjected to two broad types of network analytic techniques in order to analyze the “world city system.” First, 3,692 cities are analyzed in terms of three measures of point centrality. Second, blockmodeling techniques are employed to generalize further about the positions and roles played by cities in the system. These techniques are used to trace out the structure of the world city system, locate cities in the context of a global urban hierarchy, and explore the degree to which this diverges from a simple one‐to‐one matching of cities onto nation‐states in the world system.

Economic Globalization and the Welfare State in Affluent Democracies, 1975-1998

Previous scholarship is sharply divided over how or if globalization influences welfare states. The effects of globalization may be positive causing expansion, negative triggering crisis and reduction, curvilinear contributing to convergence, or insignificant. We bring new evidence to bear on this debate with an analysis of three welfare state measures and a comprehensive array of economic globalization indicators for 17 affluent democracies from 1975 to 2001. The analysis suggests several conclusions. First, state-of-the-art welfare state models warrant revision in the globalization era. Second, most indicators of economic globalization do not have significant effects, but a few affect the welfare state and improve models of welfare state variation. Third, the few significant globalization effects are in differing directions and often inconsistent with extant theories. Fourth, the globalization effects are far smaller than the effects of domestic political and economic factors. Fifth, the effects of globalization are not systematically different between European and non-European countries, or liberal and non-liberal welfare regimes. Increased globalization and a modest convergence of the welfare state have occurred, but globalization does not clearly cause welfare state expansion, crisis, and reduction or convergence. Ultimately, this study suggests skepticism toward bold claims about globalizations effect on the welfare state.

Inequality in the World Polity: The Structure of International Organization

Recent research reveals strong effects of involvement in international organizations on state policies, but much of this research downplays inequality in world political participation, and there is only a limited understanding of what explains world-polity ties. Using data on memberships in intergovernmental and international non-governmental organizations (IGOs and INGOs) for 1960 through 2000, this study analyzes inequality in the world polity. IGO ties are fairly evenly distributed, but the level of inequality in INGO ties is as high as the level of world income inequality. Since 1960, inequality in ties to IGOs decreased sharply, but inequality in ties to INGOs remained more stable. A conflict-centered model of the world polity is developed here that explains world political participation as a function of material and symbolic conflict. Rich, core, Western states and societies have significantly more ties to the world polity than do others. Powerful states dominate IGOs less now than they did in 1960, but rich, core, Western societies have grown more dominant in the INGO field.

European Integration and Income Inequality

Globalization has attained a prominent place on the sociological agenda, and stratification scholars have implicated globalization in the increased income inequality observed in many advanced capitalist countries. But sociologists have given much less attention to a different yet increasingly prevalent form of internationalization: regional integration. Regional integration, or the construction of international economy and polity within negotiated regions, should matter for income inequality. Regional economic integration should raise income inequality, as workers are exposed to international competition and labor unions are weakened. Regional political integration should also raise income inequality, but through a different mechanism: political integration should drive welfare state retrenchment in market-oriented regional polities as states adopt liberal policies in a context of fiscal austerity. Evidence from random-effects and fixedeffects models of income inequality in Western Europe supports these arguments. The results show that regional integration explains nearly half of the increase in income inequality in the Western European countries analyzed in this article. The effects of regional integration on income inequality are net of several controls, including two established measures of globalization, suggesting that a sociological approach to regional integration adds to our understanding of rising income inequality in Western Europe.

Does Income Inequality Harm Health? New Cross-National Evidence.

The provocative hypothesis that income inequality harms population health has sparked a large body of research, some of which has reported strong associations between income inequality and population health. Cross-national evidence is frequently cited in support of this important hypothesis, but the hypothesis remains controversial, and the cross-national work has been criticized for several methodological shortcomings. This study replicates previous work using a larger sample (692 observations from 115 countries over the 1947–1996 period), a wider range of statistical controls, and fixed-effects models that address heterogeneity bias. The relationship between health and inequality shrinks when controls are included. In fixed-effects models that capture unmeasured heterogeneity, the association between income inequality and health disappears. The null findings hold for two measures of income inequality: the Gini coefficient and the share of income received by the poorest quintile of the population. Analysis of a sample of wealthy countries also fails to support the hypothesis.

The Social Structure of the World Polity

World polity research argues that modern states are shaped by embeddedness in a network of international organizations, and yet the structure of that network is rarely examined. This is surprising, given that world polity theory implies that the world polity should be an increasingly dense, even, flat field of association. This article describes the social structure of the world polity, using network analysis of the complete population of intergovernmental organizations as it has evolved since 1820. Analysis of the world politys structure reveals growing fragmentation, driven by exclusive rather than universalist intergovernmental organizations. The world polity has thus grown less cohesive, more fragmented, more heterogeneous, and less “small worldly” in its structure. This structure reflects a recent rise in the regionalization of the world polity.

Intercity Relations and Globalisation: The Evolution of the Global Urban Hierarchy, 1981—2007

How is the world city system changing in the context of globalisation? This question is addressed using data on the headquarter and branch locations of the world’s 500 largest multinationals. The paper employs techniques developed for the analysis of networks to evaluate the more than 6300 cities that are linked together by such firms in terms of their point centrality and, using blockmodelling techniques, in terms of the positions they occupy and roles that they play in the system. The analysis indicates that the world city system is in the midst of substantial restructuring and that it is changing in such a way as to concentrate power in a small number of cities. However, in contrast to some accounts, support is not found for the idea that globalisation is generating a ‘new geography of inequality’ at the level of intercity relations.

Exactly how has income inequality changed? : Patterns of distributional change in core societies

The recent resurgence of income inequality in some of the core societies has spawned a wide-ranging debate as to the culprits. Progress in this debate has been complicated by the fact that many of the theories that have been developed to account for the inequality upswing imply radically different patterns of distributional change, while predicting the same outcome in terms of the behavior of standard summary measures (e.g. a rise in the Gini coefficient or in Theil’s inequality). Handcock and Morris (1999) have developed methods that allow the analyst to precisely identify patterns of distributional change and a set of summary measures to characterize such changes. These are based on the relative distribution, defined for our purposes as the ratio of the fraction of households in the baseline year to the fraction of households in the comparison year in each decile of the distribution of income. We use the available high-quality data from the Luxemburg Income Study to explore the evolution of household income inequality in 16 core societies. We describe exactly how inequality grew in some core societies since the late 1960s and discuss the extent to which patterns of distributional change were homogeneous or heterogeneous across the core. We find that: 1) rising inequality is generally associated with polarization, rather than upgrading or downgrading alone; 2) among those societies experiencing the largest increases in inequality, upgrading typically takes precedence over downgrading in the course of such polarization; and 3) declining inequality, where it occurs, has been the result of convergence, with the magnitude of the shift from the lower tail to the middle exceeding that of the shift from upper tail to the middle.

A New Trichotomous Measure of World-system Position Using the International Trade Network

Snyder and Kicks (1979) measure of world-system position continues to serve as the premier trichotomous network indicator of a states location in the capitalist world economy. In this study, we identify several problems with this orthodox measure concerning its age, informal construction, and incorporation of inappropriate networks. We introduce a trichotomous network measure of world-system position that addresses these concerns, applying Borgatti and Everetts (1999) core/periphery model to a three-tiered partition using international trade data. Our trichotomous measure of the trade network identifies an expanded core, consisting of an old orthodox core joined by a set of upwardly mobile states. We estimate the effect of world-system position on economic growth and find that our trade measure significantly outperforms Snyder and Kicks orthodox measure. When controlling for human capital, the strong effects of our trade measure persist, while the weaker effects estimated by the orthodox measure largely disappear. Moreover, our models with human capital reveal that states economically converge within world-system zones, while continuing to diverge between zones.

The Unique Impact of Abolition of Jim Crow Laws on Reducing Inequities in Infant Death Rates and Implications for Choice of Comparison Groups in Analyzing Societal Determinants of Health

OBJECTIVES We explored associations between the abolition of Jim Crow laws (i.e., state laws legalizing racial discrimination overturned by the 1964 US Civil Rights Act) and birth cohort trends in infant death rates. METHODS We analyzed 1959 to 2006 US Black and White infant death rates within and across sets of states (polities) with and without Jim Crow laws. RESULTS Between 1965 and 1969, a unique convergence of Black infant death rates occurred across polities; in 1960 to 1964, the Black infant death rate was 1.19 times higher (95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.18, 1.20) in the Jim Crow polity than in the non-Jim Crow polity, whereas in 1970 to 1974 the rate ratio shrank to and remained at approximately 1 (with the 95% CI including 1) until 2000, when it rose to 1.10 (95% CI = 1.08, 1.12). No such convergence occurred for Black-White differences in infant death rates or for White infants. CONCLUSIONS Our results suggest that abolition of Jim Crow laws affected US Black infant death rates and that valid analysis of societal determinants of health requires appropriate comparison groups.