Frontiers in Social Science features new research in the flagship journals of the Social Science Research Council’s founding disciplinary associations. Every month we publish a new selection of articles from the most recent issues of these journals, marking the rapid advance of the frontiers of social and behavioral science.
Panel survey data and a list experiment reveal that 75 percent of the post-Crimea increase in Vladimir Putin’s popularity was not sincere.
When international conflict causes an authoritarian leader’s popularity to soar, extant theories lead us to treat such “rallying” as sincere preference change, the product of surging patriotism or cowed media. This study advances a theory of less-than-fully sincere rallying more appropriate for nondemocratic settings, characterizing it as at least partly reflecting cascading dissembling driven by social desirability concerns. The identification strategy combines a rare nationally representative rally-spanning panel survey with a list experiment and econometric analysis. This establishes that three quarters of those who rallied to Putin after Russia annexed Crimea were engaging in at least some form of dissembling and that this rallying developed as a rapid cascade, with social media joining television in fueling perceptions this was socially desirable.
In a sample of 2 million first-time referrals of adult patients to specialist medical providers, male patients referred to female specialists disproportionately seek second opinions and further treatment from male specialists, reducing female specialist billings by 11 percent.
Stratification in professional careers arises in part from interpersonal dynamics in client-expert dyads. To reduce perceived uncertainty in judgments of the quality of experts, clients may rely on ascriptive characteristics of experts and on pairwise, relational factors to assess the advice they receive. Two such characteristics, expert gender and client-expert gender concordance, may lead to differences in clients’ trust in expert advice. To explore these issues, we investigate the incidence of patient-initiated second opinions (SOs) in medicine. In an examination of millions of medical claims in Massachusetts, we find that male patients are much more likely than female patients to obtain an SO if the first specialist they consult is female. Moreover, when the first specialist a patient consults is gender non-concordant and the patient seeks an SO, male patients are substantially more likely to switch to a same-gender specialist in the SO visit. Because patients who lack confidence in the advice of the first-seen specialist infrequently return to this specialist for medical services, female specialists generate lower billings. Analyses of medical spending in follow-up visits suggest that gendered patterns in questioning the advice of medical experts have the potential to contribute substantially to the gender pay gap in medicine.