How does place inform Americans’ partisan attachments? This article takes up this question by drawing on four rounds of interviews with residents across two midwestern cities that share several demographic characteristics but have voted differently in presidential elections for decades. These cases pose a puzzle to existing scholarship, which often argues that place politics is rooted in local structural characteristics—economics and demographics. Instead, the author argues that local organizational arrangements mediate residents’ experiences of both local structural conditions and national politics, leading them to cohere around shared understandings of their social problems and how their social identities fit into party politics. This can lead similar people to identify with different political parties. By identifying local organizations as a key mechanism linking place to partisanship, this article contributes to classic and growing literatures on the relationship between place and politics and also sheds new light on political variation across the industrial heartland.

It seems intuitive that the more effort one exerts to escape poverty, the likelier one should be to succeed. Findings from a two-year ethnographic study of low-income Black men transitioning to adulthood challenge this intuition. Participants in the study encountered two-tiered effort traps. First, schools and life circumstances regularly primed participants to overexert themselves in pursuit of escaping poverty and meeting long-term goals. Second, participants’ resulting efforts proved not merely futile but counterproductive, keeping them committed to untenable workloads past a point of no return and causing exhaustion and failure. Effort traps are a previously unrecognized mechanism of social reproduction: a structured way that ambitious young people from low-income families can be set up to fail, not despite their best efforts but precisely because of them.

How do work and family life courses differ in welfare states with varying emphasis on the state, market, and family for welfare provision? The authors compare life courses until midlife in Denmark, Finland, the United Kingdom, former West Germany, and reunified Germany. Longitudinal life course analyses using administrative and survey data support three main conclusions. First, young adults who accumulate high earnings experience similar life courses in all countries. In contrast, typical life courses of low earners, particularly their family lives, differ widely between European welfare states. Second, constellations of decommodifying, familizing, and defamilizing policies shape cross-national differences in typical low-earning life courses, their primary sources of economic support, and relative living standards. Third, women are most likely to experience low-earning life courses in familizing welfare states (Germany, United Kingdom) compared to relative gender equality among low-earning life course types in welfare states that combine high defamilization and decommodification (Denmark, Finland).

Earnings segregation at work is an understudied topic in social science, despite the workplace being an everyday nexus for social mixing, cohesion, contact, claims making, and resource exchange. It is all the more urgent to study as workplaces, in the last decades, have undergone profound reorganizations that could affect the magnitude and evolution of earnings segregation. Analyzing linked employer-employee panel administrative databases, the authors estimate the evolving isolation of higher earners from other employees in 12 countries: Canada, Czechia, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, South Korea, and Sweden. They find in almost all countries a growing workplace isolation of top earners and dramatically declining exposure of top earners to bottom earners. The authors perform a first exploration of the main factors accounting for this trend: deindustrialization, workplace downsizing, restructuring (including layoffs, outsourcing, offshoring, and subcontracting), and digitalization contribute substantially to the increase in top earner segregation. These findings open up a future research agenda on the causes and consequences of top earner segregation.