Merton Award

Ozan Aksoy and Aron Szekely, Making Sense of Honor Killings, published in American Sociological Review, 2025

Studies that rigorously test micro-level mechanisms to explain the emergence and persistence of macro-social phenomena are inherently valuable and deserving of publication in leading scholarly outlets. Yet some contributions are especially significant because they address societal problems with profound moral and public implications. The work of Ozan Aksoy and Aron Szekely belongs firmly in this category, tackling a phenomenon that deeply affects communities and carries severe and enduring consequences for individuals and societies alike.

Their article presents an impressive and methodologically rigorous study that combines theoretical innovation with a sharply defined empirical focus. The paper is distinguished by its precise specification of explanatory mechanisms, its careful and thoughtfully constructed research design, and its successful integration of micro-, meso-, and macro-level processes within a coherent analytical framework. The methodological procedures are both innovative and transparent, enabling readers to clearly evaluate how the evidence substantiates the theoretical arguments. Equally remarkable is the clarity of the writing, which renders a complex and sensitive subject accessible without sacrificing analytical sophistication or nuance.

Importantly, the theoretical and empirical contributions of this work open promising new avenues for the study of collectively sanctioned violence, a field of inquiry that is both timely and urgently needed.

It was a genuine pleasure to read this article and an even greater pleasure to recognize its outstanding contribution by awarding its authors the prestigious 2026 Robert K. Merton Award.

The award committee

• Elisa Bellotti
• Federico Bianchi
• Marco Giesselmann

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

Ozan Aksoy and Diego Gambetta, Behind the Veil. The Strategic Use of Religious Garb, published in European Sociological Review, 2016

There is anecdotal evidence that since the late 20th century young, educated, and urban Muslim women veil more frequently and strictly. Does this imply that the classical sociological theories of religion, which predict that modernization should cause a decrease in religious behaviours, do not apply to Islam? We investigate this question using structural equation modelling to analyse three datasets, one from Turkey, one covering 25 Muslim countries, and one from Belgium where Muslims are a minority. We find that averagely religious women conform to the classical theories’ predictions. But among highly religious women the modernizing forces—education, occupation and higher income, urban living, and contacts with non-Muslims—increase veiling. We conjecture that for highly religious women modernizing factors raise the risk and temptation in women’s environments that imperil their reputation for modesty: veiling would then be a strategic response, a form either of commitment to prevent the breach of religious norms or of signalling women’s piety to their communities. Our findings have implications for cultural policy and Muslim integration in Europe.

The award committee

• Gianluca Manzo (Chair)
• Gunn Elisabeth Birkelund
• Marc Keuschnigg
• Christian Steglich

Sarah K. Cowan, Secrets and Misperceptions: The Creation of Self-Fulfilling Illusion, published in Sociological Science, 2014

 The Robert K. Merton Award in Analytical Sociology 2016 is awarded to Sarah K. Cowan from New York University for her paper “Secrets and Misperceptions: The Creation of Self-fulfilling Illusions”, published in Sociological Science.

This study examines who hears what secrets, comparing two similar secrets — one which is highly stigmatized and one which is less so. Using a unique survey representative of American adults and intake forms from a medical clinic, I document marked differences in who hears these secrets. People who are sympathetic to the stigmatizing secret are more likely to hear of it than those who may react negatively. This is a consequence not just of people selectively disclosing their own secrets but selectively sharing others’ as well. As a result, people in the same social network will be exposed to and influenced by different information about those they know and hence experience that network differently. When people effectively exist in networks tailored by others to not offend then the information they hear tends to be that of which they already approve. Were they to hear secrets they disapprove of then their attitudes might change but they are less likely to hear those secrets. As such, the patterns of secret-hearing contribute to a stasis in public opinion.