Julius Hehenkamp

Marco Giesselmann, David Brady and Tabea Naujoks, The Increase in Refugees to Germany and Exclusionary Beliefs and Behaviors, published in American Journal of Sociology, 2024

In 2015–16, Germany experienced a rapid and controversial increase in refugees that varied substantially across German districts. This increase provides unique leverage for analyzing how fractionalization, threat, and contact shape the consequences of immigration and ethnolinguistic heterogeneity. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel and local district-level administrative data on refugee shares, the paper innovatively focuses on within-person/within-district change in six exclusionary beliefs and behaviors. The paper demonstrates a two-level cross-cutting process that integrates threat and contact theory but contradicts fractionalization theory. As the refugee share increased nationally, concerns about immigration and Far Right party support increased. However, district-level refugee shares significantly reduced concerns about immigration and Far Right party support. Also, rising district-level refugee shares are not associated with concerns about social cohesion, trust, residential moves, and subjective fair tax rates. While districts with fewer refugees drove the national-level threat, rising district-level refugee shares reduced or did not heighten exclusionary beliefs and behaviors.​

Marco Giesselmann, David Brady, and Tabea Naujoks receive the 2025 Robert K. Merton Award for their excellent paper on “The Increase in Refugees to Germany and Exclusionary Beliefs and Behaviors”.

The 2025 award committee

• Elizabeth Roberto (chair)
• René Flores
• Janet Xu
• Yuan Hsiao

Christopher Muller and Daniel Schrage, The political economy of incarceration in the cotton south, 1910–1925, published in American Journal of Sociology, 2021

Christopher Muller and Daniel Schrage receive the 2023 Robert K. Merton Award. We congratulate them for their excellent paper on “The political economy of incarceration in the cotton south, 1910–1925”.

Here is what the Award Committee (Elizabeth Bruch, Martin Arvidsson, Amir Goldberg, and Ozan Aksoy) said:

This article brings novel empirical analysis and evidence to bear on a classic question in the political economy of punishment. Social theorists have long argued that increases in incarceration are linked to contractions in labor demand. But prior work is largely descriptive, lacking analytical clarity about the mechanisms that give rise to this association as well as causal evidence. The authors elegantly resolve these issues by combining rich historical data on mechanisms with a natural experiment on a boil weevil infestation in Georgia. In doing so, they advance a conditional theory of the political economy of punishment that can be extended to other times and places.

The topic is important. The article is written free of obscure jargon. The study combines methodological rigor with a clear and convincing causal design and a meticulous data collection. The theoretical mechanisms that link labor demand with incarceration are carefully described and rigorously assessed. Importantly, the authors also establish scope conditions establishing the conditions under which the observed relationship between incarceration and labor demand would not hold. Overall, this is an exemplary demonstration of how the tools of causal inference and the richness of historical data can be integrated with the theoretical aims of analytical sociology.

The award committee 2023

• Elizabeth Bruch (chair)
• Martin Arvidsson (2022 Robert K. Merton Award winner)
• Amir Goldberg
• Ozan Aksoy

Arnout van de Rijt, Self-Correcting Dynamics in Social Influence Processes, published in American Journal of Sociology, 2019

Arnout van de Rijt receives the 2020 Robert K. Merton Award. We congratulate him for his excellent paper on self-correcting dynamics in social influence processes, published in the American Journal of Sociology 124(5), 2019. Here is what the Award Committee says:

“The article questions a widely accepted theory in contemporary sociology according to which a self-reinforcing process, rendering the popular even more popular, allows inferior objects (low-quality products, unqualified people, or bad ideas) to become and maintain successful. Information technology, for example in social media, is a context where this mechanism is believed to be particularly relevant because it continuously exposes users to up-to-date information on the popularity of objects.  Social influence, so the established hypothesis goes, may lead individuals to choose what is popular over what is best and create dysfunctional Matthew effects.

Combining re-analyzes of prominent experiments and an own online experiment, the author demonstrates that such self-reinforcing processes require a very strong degree of positive feedback. He also reveals that in many prominent empirical studies levels of feedback are lower, so that popularity dynamics are instead self-correcting, with superior choices becoming dominant over time.

With clearly explicated explanatory mechanisms that causally relate micro- and macro-level influences and effects, the author builds on and challenges highly prominent earlier work about self-reinforcing social influence. The main strength of the paper is in taking a new and highly informative perspective on these data. Its important contribution to analytical sociology lies in adding a crucial new aspect to an existing theory and extending existing methods such that they can highlight how this crucial aspect makes a big difference for the macro-outcomes that arise from micro-level social influence.”

Our honorable mention goes to Lars Leszczensky and Sebastian Pink for their network study on the drivers of ethnic homophily, published in the American Sociological Review 84(3), 2019. We are proud for having received a great set of submissions.

• Marc Keuschnigg (chair)
• Daniel Alexandrov
• Andreas Flache
• Amir Goldberg