Joshua Kjerulf Dubrow

Sociologists everywhere: Country representation in conferences hosted by the International Sociological Association, 1990–2012

Professional events that feature face-to-face interaction of social scientists from across the world are, next to publications and research, important forms of scientific knowledge production and dissemination. Thus, they are vital to the World Science System (WSS). Like other WSS elements, scholarly involvement in international social science events is characterized by unequal cross-national representation. This article focuses in-depth on the International Sociological Association (ISA), a major international social science professional association, to examine inequality in attendance at its flagship conferences. To what extent do countries differ with respect to the number of scholars attending ISA conferences? What factors drive attendance? The authors base their hypotheses on the economic, political and social dimensions that influence country representation. To test these hypotheses the authors use a dataset containing information on 212 countries and their participation in the eight ISA conferences – World Congresses and Forums – held from 1990 to 2012. Results show that a country’s GDP, level of democracy and social science research infrastructure (SSRI) substantially determine their level of representation. SSRI effects are significant above and beyond the effect of GDP and of other controls. Findings also show a meaningful over-time decrease in representation inequality according to countries’ GDP.

Political Biographies and Electoral Outcomes Across Post-Communist Europe

This special section of Problems of Post-Communism looks at the relationship between the personal characteristics of legislative candidates and electoral processes in the aging “new” democracies of Poland and Romania. Political biographies and the demographic characteristics of those running for public office matter. Representation and accountability are central principles for a system of governance that goes beyond procedure alone (Dahl 2005; Schmitter and Karl 1991), and candidate and parliamentarian characteristics provide us with a picture of the representativeness of parties and parliaments and the professionalization of politics (Shabad and Słomczyński 2002). Indeed, Tunkis finds that group identities matter for party loyalty, and Chiru and Popescu find that gender impacts electoral success. The articles in this special section draw upon the East European Parliamentarian and Candidate dataset (EAST PaC). EAST PaC is composed of the candidates who stood for national parliamentary elections in Poland, Ukraine, and Hungary and spans the 1990s through the 2010s. The main sources of data on parliamentary candidates are official records from governments and state agencies responsible for maintaining election archives. For each country, EAST PaC data for all elections are pooled so that the candidate is the unit of analysis and is matched across elections. Candidates’ demographic and electoral characteristics are the values of variables. All told, EAST PaC covers three countries, 29 years, 23 elections, and 97,439 unique candidates. EAST PaC’s uniquely detailed information on almost every postCommunist parliamentary candidate and election empowers researchers to analyze party system trends and acquire new insights into electoral democracy. Details about the methodology of these data are provided in the volume Towards Electoral Control in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Joshua Kjerulf Dubrow and Nika Palaguta (2016). EAST PaC data and the book are funded by the grant “Who Wins and Who Loses in the Parliamentary Elections? From Formal Theory to Empirical Analysis,” from Poland’s National Science Centre (Sonata Bis decision number 2012/05/E/ HS6/03556), and are free of charge and publicly available to download at the Polish Data Archive (ADS). Who political candidates are and where they are from, not to mention who the winners and losers of repeated elections may be, is consequential for the evolution of the quality of democracy in post-Communist countries in terms of representation, accountability, and political inequality of voice. This special section featuring the EAST PaC data provides a new window into these issues.

Political Behavior and Big Data

Interest in the use of “big data” in the social sciences is growing dramatically. Yet, adequate methodological research on what constitutes such data, and about their validity, is lacking. Scholars face both opportunities and challenges inherent in this new era of unprecedented quantification of information, including that related to political actions and attitudes. This special issue of the International Journal of Sociology addresses recent uses of “big data,” its multiple meanings, and the potential that this may have in building a stronger understanding of political behavior. We present a working definition of “big data” and summarize the major issues involved in their use. While the papers in this volume deal with various problems - how to integrate “big data” sources with cross-national survey research, the methodological challenges involved in building cross-national longitudinal network data of country memberships in international nongovernmental organizations, methods of detecting and correcting for source selection bias in event data derived from news and other online sources, the challenges and solutions to ex post harmonization of international social survey data – they share a common viewpoint. To make good on the substantive promise of “big data,” scholars need to engage with their inherent methodological problems. At this date, scholars are only beginning to identify and solve them.

Intersectionality and Women’s Political Empowerment Worldwide

Intersectionality allows us to confront the reality that women’s political experiences vary, such that empowerment for some may not mean empowerment for all. Intersectionality points out the ways that women are internally a diverse group, brings other forms of oppression into the center of study, explicitly references power, and acknowledges the complexities of social and political life. In this chapter, we discuss how intersectionality should influence the research questions that we ask, the explanations for why women remain politically disempowered, and the methodology we use. Challenging and revolutionary, intersectionality is an opportunity for researchers to more fully comprehend the rich and deep political life of women and girls from diverse experiences, and thus the idea, policy, and practice of political empowerment across the world.

The Ballot Box Revolutions in Ukraine, Poland, and Hungary

This special issue chronicles and explains the whirlwind of national politics and elections in Ukraine, Poland, and Hungary from the fall of Communism to the present. The foci are the main political actors: parties, candidates, and parliamentarians. The larger context is the electoral laws, party systems, and social structures in which they operate. All authors in this special issue rely on the East European Parliamentarian and Candidate (EAST PaC) data that contain the universe of candidates who stood for national parliamentary elections from the 1990s to the 2010s. EAST PaC data are free to the public, available in Poland’s Social Data Archive (Archiwum Danych Społecznych). Articles in this issue spotlight electoral politics across nations and time, with a focus on countries recently undergoing great political turns.