Capturing the Women's Vote

Happy International Women’s Day! Честит 8-ми март!! Today we celebrate the increased recognition of the power of women's voices, and votes. Make no mistake, many a society has gone far but there is still a winding road ahead and the ultimate destination appears to be a space frontier light years away. Because despite the fact that women are more represented in decision-making bodies, and politicians hug and coo to babies during the campaigns, rarely are issues tackled head on such as unequal pay, free child care, and an honest discussion of who provides social care and how they are remunerated for it. These are not issues that concern only women - they concern and weigh down the household as a whole, the family (defined broadly) as a whole - that is to say, the building  blocks of the society  which demise is an integral part of the lamenting phase ON any political agenda. These are not issues that can be solved solely by increased representation (not equal yet in numerous public and private bodies). Following the political debates during the last few weeks, I could not help but think that for years women have been treated as genies - good at multi-tasking, good at ‘getting the job done’, expected to boost the economy and increase tax revenues through greater labour market participation while still miraculously ticking off 70-80 per cent of domestic chores and struggling to be satisfied with the ‘flexibility’ offered to them. Often this becomes the celebrated ideal - of the ‘good’ genie that participates, and votes, and is heavily involved in any and all workload allocations. Instead we should celebrate the rattling coming from the all-so patriarchal lamp/bottle that one day will be given a rub too far.

Trust and Academia

In his thoroughly compelling and enjoyable account of the role of trust in modern societies, Trust: the Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, Francis Fukuyama wrote: "consider professionals like doctors, lawyers, or university professors. The professional receives both a general college education and several years of technical education in his or her specialty and is expected to display a high degree of judgement and initiative as a matter of course. The nature of this judgement is often complex and context dependent and therefore cannot be spelled out in detail in advance. This is the reason that professionals, once they have received their technical accreditation, can go completely unsupervised if they are in business of themselves, or else are relatively loosely supervised if work in an administrative hierarchy. In other words, professionals tend to be trusted to a higher degree than nonprofessionals and therefore operate in a less rule-bound environment. Although they are perfectly capable of betraying the trust placed in them, the concept of a professional serves as a prototype of a high-trust, relatively unregulated occupation. It is inevitable that there should be a decrease in trust as education and skill levels decrease: a skilled worker, such as an experienced lathe operator, is given less autonomy than a professional, and an unskilled assembly line worker requires more supervision and rules than the skilled craftsman (1995: 223)."

My own research focuses on trust in relation to the increasing ethnic heterogeneity in modern societies. I cannot help to notice, however, that the nature of academic work and academia in general seems to have veered from the above course. Now, we have the Research Assessment Exercise for the setting of quality criteria and impact factors that previously academics internalised through peer pressure. Needless to say, there is nothing wrong about setting a few rules. This could be an important pathway to recognition and status... As long as these rules are not one too many. The concept of intellectual endeavour might be often mythologized and unproven to boost productivity but de-legitimizing it serves only to make some fundamental academic tasks such as research and teaching much more mechanistic.

Fukuyama warns that: "past a certain point, the proliferation of rules to regulate wider and wider sets of social relationships becomes not the hallmark of rational efficiency but a sign of social dysfunction. There is usually an inverse relationship between rules and trust: the more people depend on rules to regulate their interactions, the less they trust each other, and vice versa (1995: 224)".

Let us all hope we have not reached that point although some worrisome patterns exist. This last academic year has seen a lot of industrial action by university-based trade unions which can be interpreted as a sign of disintegrating trust bonds; and in terms of the academic archetype, as a response to the laying out of more and more academic duties in "a highly detailed and legalistic form". In Fukuyama's words: "it is only natural, then, that trade unions respond with demands that the employers specify their duties and responsibilities in explicit detail as well, since the latter could not be trusted to look out for the welfare of the workers in return (1995: 224)". Trust is fragile and it will be surprising if the growing pressure were to leave university cohesion undented. 

We are all in this together

I have been following closely the storm currently raging throughout social psychology in regards to results replicability. After the exposure of several prominent names in the field such as Diederik Stapel, Dirk Smeesters and Lawrence Sanna, who presented falsified and outright fraudulent results for years, you cannot open Nature or Science magazine without stumbling across yet another failed attempt to come to terms with influential studies which, well, cannot be proved either right or wrong.

I disagree however with the stigmatization of a particular discipline. The way the matter is dealt with in the social sciences is not unlike the cautious behaviour individuals adopted during the Black Plague – mark the ailing house with a black cross, quarantine the infected and hope you have hidden somewhere far outside of the malaise’s ghastly reach. This is just an illusion. A much broader discussion and a clean sweep are needed throughout the Social Sciences. When the day of judgement comes, many a study in sociology, economics and social psychology may indeed be found needing in the replication department. The Cambridge Replication Workshop organized for Harvard students studying Social Science Research Methods have notoriously struggled with academics agreeing to secure the datasets on which important and well-published research is based. The issue has become so pervasive that the Economic and Social Research Council in Britain is considering obliging academics to make both the datasets and the data drilling files generated during the research funded by the council publicly available. This may seem like a pain but is more than a necessary evil. As a social scientist, we all make some particular decisions about cleaning and modifying our datasets but these, hopefully, come with a rationale behind them that is justifiable and should be open to critique. Vague and evasive claims that replication attempts have failed in following the intrinsic logic of a study are not acceptable or we might just as well scrap the ‘science’ bit in our social science CVs.  

We owe it to ourselves, to the field and to other colleagues, especially young ones, to ask the hard questions. As Daniel Kahneman said in an open letter to social psychologists: “… I see a train wreck looming. I expect the first victims to be young people on the job market. Being associated with a controversial and suspicious field will put them at a severe disadvantage in the competition for positions.” All our social science fields have become increasingly competitive, and although the pressures of academia cannot be an excuse for fraud, we need to acknowledge the major restructuring in our disciplines and academic careers, and respond accordingly. Neither by ditching old-fashioned research morale and scientific rigour down the drain, nor by vilifying and excommunicating some for the sake of keeping deep treacherous waters still. 

The Relevance of the 'Superman Question' to the Current UK Migration Debate

While passions in the current UK immigration debate are running high, perhaps we all ought to pause and consider the 'Superman Question'. That is to say, what would we do with Superman given his status of an illegal alien? Should he be deported? He has come to Earth illegally after all and no dedication in protecting American core democratic values and wearing funky glasses in an effort to blend in can change this fact - a circumstance that befalls too on the shoulders of quite a few, more average, illegal immigrants. The question was posed by Junot Diaz, a Pulitzar prize winner of Dominican descent and creative writing professor at MIT last Monday on the US TV show "The Colbert Report" but it seems highly relevant and almost universally applicable. 

After watching the show, I could not help but think how people will respond to this question in reality. Would it have the desired effect of challenging our prejudices and shaking up value systems? Unlikely. Let us forget for a moment that Superman is not a 'visible' migrant and thus quite unrepresentative of the general pool of illegal migrants in many large immigrant societies; forget even about his painstaking efforts at assimilation and life of 'normality'. There is another reason why he would be accepted - no questions asked - irrespective of the legality of his residence. It is just that he ... is a highly-skilled migrant. 

The immigration debate in the UK revolves less around the legality of migrants (although it did feature in David Cameron's most recent speech 2013) but it remains infused with issues of skill and status. There seems to be a wide-spread belief that UK is blighted by hordes of unskilled migrants, who with little transferable human capital (as opposed to the "brightest and the best" that the country needs), have no other recourse but to join the dole and abuse the system. My own research (Demireva 2011, Demireva and Kesler 2011) and that of others* has shown that this is simply not true. Compared to white British workers, all migrant groups but especially migrants from Eastern and Central Europe, Turkish and Middle Eastern migrants experience severe occupational de-skilling once in Britain. Transition models indicate that the picture of labour market participation of migrants is complex, yet, Central and Eastern European migrants make successful transitions from unemployment to employment. If anything, the policies aimed at managing migration put into place by successive UK governments appear to have ensured the acquisition of the desired and high skill-level migrants, and continuous employment spells are the norm rather than unemployment or inactivity.

Report after report show that migrants in the UK contribute substantially to the economy and their take up of welfare is very modest compared to the native population. As mentioned already in quite a few places, in terms of benefits claiming (DWP 2012), only 6.4% of the entire claimant population are estimated to have been non-UK nationals when they first registered for a National Insurance Number. Whereas there is significant variation in this rate by benefit type, still only 8.5% of all Jobseekers are estimated to have been non-UK nationals when they first registered contrasted with 3.5% for working age disabled benefit claimants. Importantly, but only cursorly mentioned in this debate, the initial results from a sample exercise to match non-EEA claimants who were recorded as foreign nationals at the time they first registered for a National Insurance Number suggests that more than half (54%) will have obtained British citizenship subsequently, and the majority of the remainder will have some form of immigration status providing legitimate access to public funds. 

In regards to social housing, Rutter and Latorre (2009) present data that new migrants to the UK over the last five years make up less than two per cent of the total of those in social housing. In fact, 90 per cent of those who live in social housing are UK born. Most of the newly-arrived migrant group who occupy social tenancies are refugees who have been granted permission to remain in the UK, however, their number remains very small. Robinson (2007) show that reflecting the relatively high levels of employment within A8** households moving into the social rented sector, only a relatively small proportion of tenants or their partners were recorded as qualifying for or being in receipt of state benefits, and only a very small proportion avail of social housing with no other source of income except for benefits. Moreover, looking across EU member states in general, Harrison et al. (2005) found that severe housing disadvantage persists amongst national indigenous minorities and that law, monitoring and regulation vary widely, and some Member States have only made limited progress towards equality of treatment or recognition of diversity.

There is also no evidence that crime rates, which are now an integral part of the UKIP rhetoric, have been on the rise as a result of the new immigration waves. An LSE report (Bell and Machin 2011) shows that, contrary to wide-spread beliefs, when the effect of flows associated with the A8 accession countries is examined (or with those entering with work permits or Tier 2 visas), significant negative effects on property crime (and no effect on violent crime) are found. In other words, areas with higher shares of these types of immigrants in the population experienced faster falls in property crime rates than other areas. The researchers concluded that A8 migrants are special in the sense that they came to the UK with the express intent of working and have very strong labour market attachment which materializes in a positive rather than a negative effect. Further still, a survey carried out by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) in 2008 found no evidence that Eastern Europeans were responsible for a crime wave and Peter Fahy, the chief constable who co-authored the report has since remarked that a lot of worry about crime in Britain is encouraged by rumours and misunderstandings. 

A speech cannot hold endless factual information and perhaps the reports I just discussed were not included for the sake of brevity and of streamlining the expose. Yet, the main arguments of Cameron's 2013 speech are uncannily similar to the ones that he already propositioned in 2011 - net migration should go down together with the number of foreign nationals abusing the welfare system. Thus, a wealth of research did not see the light of political agendas both in 2011 and 2013. 

Again, as before Cameron raised the question of the level of belonging of migrants and their participation in the UK social life; again he just barely touched upon the moral quagmire that is the expectation of migrants on fixed contracts without right to settle to be part of a community. Unsurprisingly, he failed to mention the increasing volume of British retirement migration (more than one million Britons own a home in coastal areas in Spain alone [Hardill et al. 2005]) and the challenges that British retired migrants could bring to the welfare systems of other EU member states. Yet, Cameron was quite frank and unambivalent in 2011 and in 2013 about who he holds responsible for the increased migration challenges (besides the previous Labour government). In his own words, in 2011 the real issue was that "migrants are filling gaps in the labour market left wide open by a welfare system that for years has paid British people not to work". In 2013, he remarked that "even at the end of the so-called 'boom', there were around five million people in our country of working age on out of work benefits". Now, that is a problem that no 'Superman Question' can fix and in my opinion deserves to be discussed in detail and finally made separate from the migration debate.  Any politician owes it to the five million voters who so often get stigmatised. 

*See Brynin and Guveli (2012) for an overall overview of British minorities' occupational segregation

**A8 countries are:

• Czech Republic
• Estonia
• Hungary
• Latvia
• Lithuania
• Poland
• Slovakia
• Slovenia

Reference: 

Bell, B. and Machin, S. (2011) "The Impact of Migration on Crime and Victimisation", A report for the Migration Advisory Committee, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE 

Demireva, N. (2011) “New Migrants in the UK: Employment Patterns and Occupational Attainment”; The Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37 (4): 637-655

Brynin, M and Guveli, A. (2012) "Understanding the ethnic pay gap in Britain", Work, Employment and Society, 26(4): 574-587

Demireva, N. and Kesler, C. (2011) “The Curse of Inopportune Transitions: the Labour Market Behaviour of Immigrants and Natives in the UK”, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 52 (4): 306-326 

DWP report (2012)  "Nationality at point of National Insurance number registration of DWP benefit claimants: February 2011", DWP

Cameron, D. (2011). "Immigration Speech in full", http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13083781

Cameron, D. (2013) "Immigration Speech in full", http://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2013/03/25/david-cameron-immigration-speech-in-full

  

HARDILL, I.  SPRADBERY, J.; ARNOLD­BOAKES, J and MARRUGAT, ML "Severe health and social care issues among British migrants who retire to Spain", Ageing and Society, Volume 25 (05): pp 769 ­ 783

Harrison, M. , Law, I. and Phillips, D. (2005) "MIGRANTS, MINORITIES AND HOUSING: EXCLUSION, DISCRIMINATION AND ANTI-DISCRIMINATION IN 15 MEMBER STATES OF THE EUROPEAN UNION",  EUMC Report

Robinson, D. (2007) "European Union Accession State Migrants in Social Housing in England", People, Place & Policy Online (2007): 1/3, pp. 98-111

Rutter, J. and Lattore, M. (2009) "Social housing allocation and immigrant communities", Equality and Human Rights Commission

Jill Rutter and Maria Latorre

Getting Published: Studies with Mechanical Turk Samples

One thing that I noticed early on in my academic career was that for pretty much every topic I was interested in there were at least forty pages of bibliography on ISI Web of Knowledge. The task to produce novel and ground-breaking research feels  harder when the wealth of studies already published stares you in the face from your computer screen and gives your dreams of academic grandeur a translucent texture. For many academics this is a life-defining moment of embracing this vocational challenge and delving straight into the proverbial sea of literature.

Rarely, however, an extraordinary thing happens and you find yourself overviewing a handful of articles. The literature on experiments using Amazon’s platform for cognitive testing Mechanical Turk is a case in point. It is still quite sparse and for the student proficient in skimming will take no more than two hours to summarize. In the table below I have noted some of the most prominent articles. Importantly, the mere existence of these studies breaks two related myths. Yes, the body of experimental research is much larger and there are quite a few academics sceptical to the use and virtues of Mechanical Turk, especially when it comes to representativeness of the results obtained from samples of Turkers. Moreover, the ‘publishability’ of the results has been largely contested. In reality, some good studies using Mechanical Turk (as it is with every topic and research tool) are published in an array of prestigious journals such as Nature and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. This surely is only the beginning. What better reason to try Mechanical Turk and see for yourself?

Authors	Title (Year of Publication)	Journal	Discipline
Rand DG, Greene JD, Nowak MA	Spontaneous giving and calculated greed (2012)	Nature	Behavioural Psychology
Dreber A, Ellingsen T, Johannesson M, Rand DG.	Do People Care About Social Context? Framing Effects in Dictator Games (2012)	Experimental Economics	Economics
Rand DG , Arbesman S, Christakis NA.	Dynamic networks promote cooperation in experiments with humans (2011)	Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences	Psychology
DeVoe, Sanford, House, J.	Time, money, and happiness: How does putting a price on time affect our ability to smell the roses? (2012)	Journal of Experimental Social Psychology	Social Psychology
Rand, David G.	The promise of Mechanical Turk: How online labor markets can help theorists run behavioral experiments (2012)	Journal Of Theoretical Biology	Biology
Brian F. Schaffner	Racial Salience and the Obama Vote (2011)	Political Psychology	Psychology
Henderson, Marlone	When others cross psychological distance to help: Highlighting prosocial actions toward outgroups encourages philanthropy (2012)	Journal of Experimental Social Psychology	Social Psychology