Leslie Mccall
Biographic Data
| ID | 130149 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Leslie Mccall |
| GIVEN NAMES | Leslie |
| FAMILY NAME | Mccall |
| SIGNATURE | MCCALL L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7700-3969 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3,084 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 35 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Updating 'The Future of Coding
Over the past decade, social scientists have adapted computational methods for qualitative text analysis, with the hope that they can match the accuracy and reliability of hand coding. The emergence of GPT and open-source generative large language models (LLMs) has transformed this process by shifting from programming to engaging with models using natural language, potentially mimicking the in-depth, inductive, and/or iterative process of qualita…
Artificial Intelligence Policymaking
Sociological research on artificial intelligence (AI) is flourishing: sociologists of inequality are examining new and concerning effects of AI on American society, and computational sociologists are developing novel ways to use AI in research. The authors advocate for a third form of sociological engagement with AI: research on how AI can be publicly governed to advance equity in American society. The authors orient sociologists to the rapidly e…
Bringing the market in
There has been an upsurge in research on the politics of economic inequality in the 21st century. Discussions of popular responses to rising inequality have expanded in turn yet remain centered on support for explicit government redistribution of income from the rich to the poor. We argue that this focus may downwardly bias measurement of preferences for less inequality and propose an expanded framework that incorporates preferences regarding mar…
The Future of Coding
Advances in computer science and computational linguistics have yielded new, and faster, computational approaches to structuring and analyzing textual data. These approaches perform well on tasks like information extraction, but their ability to identify complex, socially constructed, and unsettled theoretical concepts-a central goal of sociological content analysis-has not been tested. To fill this gap, we compare the results produced by three c…
Class Position and Political Opinion in Rich Democracies
In many high-income countries today, scholarly interest in the politics of class has coincided with growing economic inequality, rising support for nonmainstream political parties and candidates, and increasing flows of immigration. We review social science research on the views of different class segments vis-à-vis economic, political, and sociocultural issues, finding greater scholarly attention to the interdependence of economic, social, and p…
Economic Self-Reliance and Gender Inequality between U.S. Men and Women, 1970–2010
Women have become increasingly economically self-reliant, depending more on paid employment for their positions in the income distribution than in the past. We know little about what happened to men, however, because most prior research restricts changes in self-reliance to be "zero-sum," with women's changes necessitating opposite and proportionate changes among men. This article introduces a measure that allows asymmetric changes and also incor…
Read My Lips
Researching a topic of popular interest, as tax policy most definitely is, raises some challenges. First, these issues are often understood differently by politicians and journalists than they are by scholars. In this case, political discourse mostly operates under the assumption that Americans strongly dislike taxes, whereas most researchers would say that Americans are ambivalent about them—dissatisfied with some aspects but supportive of other…
Exposure to rising inequality shapes Americans’ opportunity beliefs and policy support
Significance Although rising economic inequality in the United States has alarmed many, research across the social sciences repeatedly concludes that Americans are largely unconcerned about it. We argue that this conclusion may be premature. Here, we present the results of three experiments that test a different perspective—the opportunity model of beliefs about inequality. Tempering the conclusions of past work, the findings suggest that percept…
The multidimensional politics of inequality
Many Democrats hoped that a particular kind of identity politics – women's – would help Hillary Clinton win the White House. In the aftermath of the election, some commentators bemoaned the fact that a majority of white women had voted for Trump, and called it a kind of betrayal, underlining their expectation that women would naturally, on the basis of their gender identity, support a woman with women‐friendly politics. Indeed, this kind of think…
Political and Policy Responses to Problems of Inequality and Opportunity
There is surprisingly little research on American norms of economic inequality and opportunity, particularly in the era of rising inequality since the 1980s. In this chapter, I describe three political and policy responses to problems of inequality and opportunity and examine how they square with public opinion. Each approach is characterized by a particular mix of views concerning inequality (of outcomes) on the one hand and opportunity on the o…
Making Sense of Public Opinion
The Political Meanings of Social Class Inequality
Research on a wide range of topics related to rising economic inequality is flourishing throughout the social sciences. One topic that is gaining fresh attention is the politics of inequality. We know very little, however, about how Americans define and perceive inequality or how they express and enact their political desires for more or less of it. In the absence of such knowledge, and under the influence of powerful theoretical models that depi…
Understanding inequality through the lens of cultural processes
International audience
The Undeserving Rich
It is widely assumed that Americans care little about income inequality, believe opportunities abound, admire the rich, and dislike redistributive policies. Leslie McCall contends that such assumptions are based on both incomplete survey data and economic conditions of the past and not present. In fact, Americans have desired less inequality for decades, and McCall's book explains why. Americans become most concerned about inequality in times of …
Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies
Intersectional insights and frameworks are put into practice in a multitude of highly contested, complex, and unpredictable ways. We group such engagements with intersectionality into three loosely defined sets of practices: applications of an intersectional framework or investigations of intersectional dynamics; debates about the scope and content of intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological paradigm; and political interventions empl…
Point de vue — Penser la configuration des inégalités (sexe, classe, « race »)
et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France.Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit
Intersectionality and Social Explanation in Social Science Research
To the extent that intersectionality is becoming a common term in mainstream social science, it is as a methodological justification to separate out different racial, ethnic, gender, class, and other social groups for empirical analysis. One might call this the "intersectionality hypothesis," and in its best incarnation, it is about getting the facts right and finding the differences that matter. But an intersectional analysis in the social scien…
Women and Men as Class and Race Actors
Paula England's ambition in Gender Revolution: Uneven and Stalled (2010) is to explain why occupational sex segr gation and the gender division of familial labor are still robust despite decades of egalitarian values and policies. But because the explanations she offers the status of hypotheses rather than well-documented conclusions (England 2010, p. 150), her article raises many questions for which we have few answers. Still, there is perhaps m…
Income Inequality
Rising income inequality from the mid-1990s to the present was characterized by rapid income growth among top earners and new patterns of employment and income pooling across families and households. Research on economic inequality expanded from a more narrow focus on wage inequalities and labor markets to other domains including incentive pay, corporate governance, income pooling and family formation, social and economic policy, and political in…
Americans' Social Policy Preferences in the Era of Rising Inequality
Rising income inequality has been a defining trend of the past generation, yet we know little about its impact on social policy formation. We evaluate two dominant views about public opinion on rising inequality: that Americans do not care much about inequality of outcomes, and that a rise in inequality will lead to an increase in demand for government redistribution. Using time series data on views about income inequality and social policy prefe…
Inequality, public opinion and redistribution
According to the "median-voter" hypothesis, greater inequality in the market distribution of earnings or income tends to produce greater generosity in redistributive policy.We outline the steps in the causal chain specified by the hypothesis and attempt to assess these steps empirically.Prior studies focusing on cross-country variation have found little support for the median-voter model.We examine over-time trends in eight nations during the 198…
Introduction to Special Issue of Social Politics
Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society - Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2005
Intersektionalitetens komplexitet
Since critics first alleged that feminism claimed to speak for all women, feminist researchers have been aware of the limitations of gender as a single analytical category. Leslie McCall argues in this artide for the need to consider the methodological aspects of intersectional analyses. Three approaches to the complexity of intersectionality are identified, anticategorical, intercategorical and intracategorical. McCall argues for the benefits of…
The Complexity of Intersectionality
The New Geography of Global Income Inequality
The Complexity of Intersectionality
Income Inequality
Rising income inequality from the mid-1990s to the present was characterized by rapid income growth among top earners and new patterns of employment and income pooling across families and households. Research on economic inequality expanded from a more narrow focus on wage inequalities and labor markets to other domains including incentive pay, corporate governance, income pooling and family formation, social and economic policy, and political in…
Sources of Racial Wage Inequality in metropolitan labor markets
Research on racial inequality has become increasingly specialized, often focusing on a single explanation and subgroup of the population. In a diverse society, a broader comparative framework for interpreting the causes of wage inequality for different racial, ethnic, and gender groups is called for. The effects of a range of different factors on the wages of Latinos, Asians, and blacks, relative to whites and separately for women and men, are ex…
Does genderfit? Bourdieu, feminism, and conceptions of social order
Inequality, public opinion and redistribution
According to the "median-voter" hypothesis, greater inequality in the market distribution of earnings or income tends to produce greater generosity in redistributive policy.We outline the steps in the causal chain specified by the hypothesis and attempt to assess these steps empirically.Prior studies focusing on cross-country variation have found little support for the median-voter model.We examine over-time trends in eight nations during the 198…
Americans' Social Policy Preferences in the Era of Rising Inequality
Rising income inequality has been a defining trend of the past generation, yet we know little about its impact on social policy formation. We evaluate two dominant views about public opinion on rising inequality: that Americans do not care much about inequality of outcomes, and that a rise in inequality will lead to an increase in demand for government redistribution. Using time series data on views about income inequality and social policy prefe…
Gender and the New Inequality
The new inequality is often characterized by the increasing wage gap between workers with a college education and those without. Yet, although the gap in hourly wages between college-educated and non-college-educated women is high and rising, the topic has been overshadowed by research on gender inequality and wage inequality among men. Using the 1990 5-percent Public Use Microdata Samples, independent sources of macro data, and controls for indi…
Class Position and Political Opinion in Rich Democracies
In many high-income countries today, scholarly interest in the politics of class has coincided with growing economic inequality, rising support for nonmainstream political parties and candidates, and increasing flows of immigration. We review social science research on the views of different class segments vis-à-vis economic, political, and sociocultural issues, finding greater scholarly attention to the interdependence of economic, social, and p…
The Future of Coding
Advances in computer science and computational linguistics have yielded new, and faster, computational approaches to structuring and analyzing textual data. These approaches perform well on tasks like information extraction, but their ability to identify complex, socially constructed, and unsettled theoretical concepts-a central goal of sociological content analysis-has not been tested. To fill this gap, we compare the results produced by three c…
Explaining levels of within-group wage inequality in U.S. labor markets
Most research on earnings inequality has focused on the growing gap between workers of different races and at different education, age, and income levels, but a large portion of the increasing inequality has actually occurred within these groups. This article focuses on the extent and sources of “within-group” wage inequality in more than 500 labor markets in the United States in 1990. In addition to documenting that within-group wage inequality …
Intersectionality and Social Explanation in Social Science Research
To the extent that intersectionality is becoming a common term in mainstream social science, it is as a methodological justification to separate out different racial, ethnic, gender, class, and other social groups for empirical analysis. One might call this the "intersectionality hypothesis," and in its best incarnation, it is about getting the facts right and finding the differences that matter. But an intersectional analysis in the social scien…
The multidimensional politics of inequality
Many Democrats hoped that a particular kind of identity politics – women's – would help Hillary Clinton win the White House. In the aftermath of the election, some commentators bemoaned the fact that a majority of white women had voted for Trump, and called it a kind of betrayal, underlining their expectation that women would naturally, on the basis of their gender identity, support a woman with women‐friendly politics. Indeed, this kind of think…
Introduction to Special Issue of Social Politics
Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society - Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2005
Spatial Routes to Gender Wage (In)equality
I examine how different dimensions of restructuring are related to gender wage inequality. The analysis extends research on regional wage differentials to include differentials between men and women in two educational groups at opposite ends of the educational hierarchy. Relative wages across regional labor markets in the United States are modeled in a multilevel framework as outcomes of variation in economic conditions associated with restructur…
The New Geography of Global Income Inequality
Women and Men as Class and Race Actors
Paula England's ambition in Gender Revolution: Uneven and Stalled (2010) is to explain why occupational sex segr gation and the gender division of familial labor are still robust despite decades of egalitarian values and policies. But because the explanations she offers the status of hypotheses rather than well-documented conclusions (England 2010, p. 150), her article raises many questions for which we have few answers. Still, there is perhaps m…
Economic Self-Reliance and Gender Inequality between U.S. Men and Women, 1970–2010
Women have become increasingly economically self-reliant, depending more on paid employment for their positions in the income distribution than in the past. We know little about what happened to men, however, because most prior research restricts changes in self-reliance to be "zero-sum," with women's changes necessitating opposite and proportionate changes among men. This article introduces a measure that allows asymmetric changes and also incor…
Bringing the market in
There has been an upsurge in research on the politics of economic inequality in the 21st century. Discussions of popular responses to rising inequality have expanded in turn yet remain centered on support for explicit government redistribution of income from the rich to the poor. We argue that this focus may downwardly bias measurement of preferences for less inequality and propose an expanded framework that incorporates preferences regarding mar…
Updating 'The Future of Coding
Over the past decade, social scientists have adapted computational methods for qualitative text analysis, with the hope that they can match the accuracy and reliability of hand coding. The emergence of GPT and open-source generative large language models (LLMs) has transformed this process by shifting from programming to engaging with models using natural language, potentially mimicking the in-depth, inductive, and/or iterative process of qualita…
Artificial Intelligence Policymaking
Sociological research on artificial intelligence (AI) is flourishing: sociologists of inequality are examining new and concerning effects of AI on American society, and computational sociologists are developing novel ways to use AI in research. The authors advocate for a third form of sociological engagement with AI: research on how AI can be publicly governed to advance equity in American society. The authors orient sociologists to the rapidly e…
The Political Meanings of Social Class Inequality
Research on a wide range of topics related to rising economic inequality is flourishing throughout the social sciences. One topic that is gaining fresh attention is the politics of inequality. We know very little, however, about how Americans define and perceive inequality or how they express and enact their political desires for more or less of it. In the absence of such knowledge, and under the influence of powerful theoretical models that depi…
Understanding inequality through the lens of cultural processes
International audience
Making Sense of Public Opinion
Intersektionalitetens komplexitet
Since critics first alleged that feminism claimed to speak for all women, feminist researchers have been aware of the limitations of gender as a single analytical category. Leslie McCall argues in this artide for the need to consider the methodological aspects of intersectional analyses. Three approaches to the complexity of intersectionality are identified, anticategorical, intercategorical and intracategorical. McCall argues for the benefits of…
Read My Lips
Researching a topic of popular interest, as tax policy most definitely is, raises some challenges. First, these issues are often understood differently by politicians and journalists than they are by scholars. In this case, political discourse mostly operates under the assumption that Americans strongly dislike taxes, whereas most researchers would say that Americans are ambivalent about them—dissatisfied with some aspects but supportive of other…
Does genderfit? Bourdieu, feminism, and conceptions of social order
Pierre Bourdieu
The Social and Political Economy of the Household
Rights at Work
Spatial Routes to Gender Wage (In)equality
I examine how different dimensions of restructuring are related to gender wage inequality. The analysis extends research on regional wage differentials to include differentials between men and women in two educational groups at opposite ends of the educational hierarchy. Relative wages across regional labor markets in the United States are modeled in a multilevel framework as outcomes of variation in economic conditions associated with restructur…
Explaining Levels of Within-Group Wage Inequality in U.S. Labor Markets
Most research on earnings inequality has focused on the growing gap between workers of different races and at different education, age, and income levels, but a large portion of the increasing inequality has actually occurred within these groups. This article focuses on the extent and sources of "within-group" wage inequality in more than 500 labor markets in the United States in 1990. In addition to documenting that within-group wage inequality …
Explaining levels of within-group wage inequality in U.S. labor markets
Most research on earnings inequality has focused on the growing gap between workers of different races and at different education, age, and income levels, but a large portion of the increasing inequality has actually occurred within these groups. This article focuses on the extent and sources of “within-group” wage inequality in more than 500 labor markets in the United States in 1990. In addition to documenting that within-group wage inequality …
Gender and the New Inequality
The new inequality is often characterized by the increasing wage gap between workers with a college education and those without. Yet, although the gap in hourly wages between college-educated and non-college-educated women is high and rising, the topic has been overshadowed by research on gender inequality and wage inequality among men. Using the 1990 5-percent Public Use Microdata Samples, independent sources of macro data, and controls for indi…
Sources of Racial Wage Inequality in metropolitan labor markets
Research on racial inequality has become increasingly specialized, often focusing on a single explanation and subgroup of the population. In a diverse society, a broader comparative framework for interpreting the causes of wage inequality for different racial, ethnic, and gender groups is called for. The effects of a range of different factors on the wages of Latinos, Asians, and blacks, relative to whites and separately for women and men, are ex…
Complex Inequality
The New Geography of Global Income Inequality
Introduction to Special Issue of Social Politics
Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society - Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2005
Intersektionalitetens komplexitet
Since critics first alleged that feminism claimed to speak for all women, feminist researchers have been aware of the limitations of gender as a single analytical category. Leslie McCall argues in this artide for the need to consider the methodological aspects of intersectional analyses. Three approaches to the complexity of intersectionality are identified, anticategorical, intercategorical and intracategorical. McCall argues for the benefits of…
The Complexity of Intersectionality
Inequality, public opinion and redistribution
According to the "median-voter" hypothesis, greater inequality in the market distribution of earnings or income tends to produce greater generosity in redistributive policy.We outline the steps in the causal chain specified by the hypothesis and attempt to assess these steps empirically.Prior studies focusing on cross-country variation have found little support for the median-voter model.We examine over-time trends in eight nations during the 198…
Americans' Social Policy Preferences in the Era of Rising Inequality
Rising income inequality has been a defining trend of the past generation, yet we know little about its impact on social policy formation. We evaluate two dominant views about public opinion on rising inequality: that Americans do not care much about inequality of outcomes, and that a rise in inequality will lead to an increase in demand for government redistribution. Using time series data on views about income inequality and social policy prefe…
Income Inequality
Rising income inequality from the mid-1990s to the present was characterized by rapid income growth among top earners and new patterns of employment and income pooling across families and households. Research on economic inequality expanded from a more narrow focus on wage inequalities and labor markets to other domains including incentive pay, corporate governance, income pooling and family formation, social and economic policy, and political in…
Women and Men as Class and Race Actors
Paula England's ambition in Gender Revolution: Uneven and Stalled (2010) is to explain why occupational sex segr gation and the gender division of familial labor are still robust despite decades of egalitarian values and policies. But because the explanations she offers the status of hypotheses rather than well-documented conclusions (England 2010, p. 150), her article raises many questions for which we have few answers. Still, there is perhaps m…
The Undeserving Rich
It is widely assumed that Americans care little about income inequality, believe opportunities abound, admire the rich, and dislike redistributive policies. Leslie McCall contends that such assumptions are based on both incomplete survey data and economic conditions of the past and not present. In fact, Americans have desired less inequality for decades, and McCall's book explains why. Americans become most concerned about inequality in times of …
Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies
Intersectional insights and frameworks are put into practice in a multitude of highly contested, complex, and unpredictable ways. We group such engagements with intersectionality into three loosely defined sets of practices: applications of an intersectional framework or investigations of intersectional dynamics; debates about the scope and content of intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological paradigm; and political interventions empl…
Point de vue — Penser la configuration des inégalités (sexe, classe, « race »)
et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France.Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit
Intersectionality and Social Explanation in Social Science Research
To the extent that intersectionality is becoming a common term in mainstream social science, it is as a methodological justification to separate out different racial, ethnic, gender, class, and other social groups for empirical analysis. One might call this the "intersectionality hypothesis," and in its best incarnation, it is about getting the facts right and finding the differences that matter. But an intersectional analysis in the social scien…
The Political Meanings of Social Class Inequality
Research on a wide range of topics related to rising economic inequality is flourishing throughout the social sciences. One topic that is gaining fresh attention is the politics of inequality. We know very little, however, about how Americans define and perceive inequality or how they express and enact their political desires for more or less of it. In the absence of such knowledge, and under the influence of powerful theoretical models that depi…
Understanding inequality through the lens of cultural processes
International audience
Making Sense of Public Opinion
Sociology (23 works) · Political science (22 works) · Economics (20 works) · Inequality (18 works) · Politics (16 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (13 works) · Demographic economics (12 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Economic inequality (10 works)