This dissertation emerges out of an effort to understand the supra-individual aspects of attitudes and tastes, and especially those political attitudes that make up "public opinion." Various theoretical accounts conceive of large-scale attitude systems in terms of fields, shared schemas, cultural logics, or partisan ideologies. Though diverse, these accounts all depict attitudes as structural phenomena, defined by patterns of relations between cultural, cognitive, or social elements. In the three substantive chapters, I draw on network analysis, statistics, information theory, and computer science to create original methods for such structural analyses. I use them to provide new insights on culture as both individual cognition and macro-scale social organization. The first project examines networks of political attitudes. I find that, across subgroups, attitudes either follow the dominant liberal-conservative logic, or lack systemic organization. In the second project, I clarify and extend existing theories of cultural schemas to develop a greatly improved approach to detecting them in surveys. In the final project, I approach political attitudes as a field of competition. If public opinion is a debate between competing ideological camps, do the camps at least agree on which issues they are debating? My analyses of the skill with which individuals at different positions in the opinion space report their attitudes suggests that no such agreement exists.

This dissertation analyzes the political economy of the real estate sector in China since its post-1978 creation. During Mao's socialist era, the nation had no real estate sector. Only with economic reforms in 1978 and the production of commodity housing in the 1980's did a real estate sector come into being. This study asks two questions in particular: How did the major metropolitan centers on the eastern seaboards of China manage to accomplish monumental amounts of infrastructural and urban development in the short span of thirty years? Second, what was the role of the state--at the central level and at the local level--that enabled the construction of this industry, capital accumulation and development?

The analytical construct of the developmental state is used as a useful starting point. As is widely known, critical resources in the form of land, large project opportunities, financing options and permits in Chinese real estate are in local state control. The presence of the state looms large in Chinese real estate. To finesse how this construct fits and does not fit the situation in Chinese real estate provides analytical leverage.

Although the high levels of central and local state involvement in the real estate sector is undisputed, I argue instead that one of the core characteristics of the developmental state - i.e., an institutionally cohesive bureaucracy - was widely missing whether at the local level or at the central level. This was true despite the accepted wisdom that an effective and independent bureaucracy is critical for industrial transformation, let alone its creation.

Instead, within the post-reform real estate sector, central policymakers planted and activated a new set of "game rules" that structured the delivery of urgently needed urban infrastructure and residential building construction. It did so by putting in place three critical reform elements: (i) commodifying urban land use rights (LURs), which had been administratively allocated for free and in perpetuity according to central economic plans prior to the constitutional amendment of 1988; (ii) valorizing the critical importance of economic and infrastructural growth by inserting such achievements into the professional criteria for political promotions of provincial, prefectural and municipal-level leaders; and (iii) allowing the revenues from land use rights (LUR) sales to go directly into the extrabudgetary reserves of local governments at a time when budget constraints were hardening. In other words, I argue that the new political economy of land usage and real estate development put in place an entrepreneurial local state structure. The incentive structures for local state agents is directly tied to promoting economic growth; and municipal governments have a direct financial stake in generating governmental income through urban LUR sales and commercial real estate development. Concomitantly, real estate developers increasingly populated the field throughout the 1990's, attracted by increasing profits. The entrepreneurial interdependence of local government leaders and property developers who are both looking to capitalize on real estate-generated profits centrally characterize the dynamics of this field.

In the absence of full marketization of key resources such as land and capital, furthermore, which remain under local government control and influence, the real estate firms themselves work to stabilize their access to resource dependencies. Real estate firms manage, nurture, maintain and coddle their relationships with local government officials even as they try to compete in the marketplace and branch forth into larger operations. This relational "maintenance work" has been accomplished via three dominant mechanisms: (i) corruption and bribery at the individual level; (ii) quid-pro-quo behavior of building of infrastructure or public buildings and public works in return for land allocations, tax breaks and commercial opportunities; and (iii) founders' long-standing relationships with state officials who have access to profitable opportunities and/or land; or through their history as red capitalists entailing generative periods of state employment.

This entrepreneurial state model of development provides an additional developmental path distinct from either the Anglo-Saxon "market-led" form or the East Asian developmental "state-led" form of economic development. In the entrepreneurial state model, the state is, in fact, a market actor driven to pursue its own profits as though it, too, were a business agent. In the developmental state typology, state officials plan and intercede in the market indirectly via the centralized administrative apparatus, coordinating projects, investing in hard and soft infrastructure, promoting business and creating an environment conducive to economic vitality. But it is the enterprises themselves that engage in the entrepreneurial activity. Direct profit goes to the entrepreneurs rather than to the developmental state; and the state plays a more coordinative and promotional role than in the case of the entrepreneurial state. In the entrepreneurial state model, state agents vie to generate profits that accrue to them either institutionally or personally. The positive incentives flowing from economic development accrue directly to the state actors in question.

This dissertation examines the relationships between law and society when encountering disruptive, risky economic activities. In doing so, it assesses how culture, politics, civil society, and powerful industry interests influence the laws and legal instruments intended to protect or benefit citizens exposed to such activities. My case is the domestic shale-energy boom brought about by “fracking,” which, over the past decade, has revolutionized the US energy economy and sparked controversy for its potentially detrimental effects on local communities and the environment. By examining sociological influences on states’ fracking regulations and revealing inequalities reinforced in individual mineral-rights leasing contracts, I span time and space to analyze the social forces that shape who wins and who loses when fracking comes to an area.

The dissertation is organized around three empirical studies. In the first, I draw from theories of social movements, organizations, politics, and markets to examine how social movements, economic industries, and state institutional environments influence the decisions of states to issue new regulations governing fracking or ban it altogether. Analyzing a longitudinal dataset of 34 states at risk of fracking from 2009 to 2016, and consistent with findings from political sociology and social-movement literatures, I find that increased economic security and increased environmental movement organizational capacity in a state boost the likelihood that a state will regulate the fracking industry or even ban fracking entirely. I also find that higher potential profitability (and accordingly, potential environmental risk) for fracking in a state moderates the effects of state government ideology and resource dependence on industry. These findings support my argument that the effects of non-state actors and institutional context on the regulation of disruptive industrial activity in new markets depend, in part, on the extent of potential economic benefits and societal risks posed by the economic activity.

In the second empirical chapter, I examine the political, economic, and cultural factors influencing how stringently states regulate fracking. Analyzing state fracking chemical disclosure requirements from 2009 through 2016, I find that a state’s expected chemical disclosure stringency is most positively influenced by how stringently its geographically proximate peer states regulate. Interacting economic hardship with fossil-fuel industry political influence is associated with less stringent regulation. I argue for a field theory-based approach to state-level regulation, which conceives of states as both constitutive of their own regulatory fields and embedded within broader fields, taking similarly situated states into account but susceptible to industry capture during particularly difficult economic times.

Finally, in the last empirical chapter, I move from the state to the local level and investigate how social inequalities become reinforced in legal instruments. Specifically, I analyze economic disparities in a ubiquitous but understudied aspect of the fracking boom: mineral-rights lease contracts. Lease contracts represent an alternative, but no less important, way that socio-legal processes determine who stands to gain, and who stands to lose, when fracking comes to town. I analyze a unique proprietary dataset of nearly 90,000 leases in Texas’s Barnett shale. I find that 1) local-community embeddedness yields expected higher payments to mineral-rights owners when compared to those who reside outside of the local community, and 2) people of color, in particular those of Hispanic/Latino ethnicity, receive significantly lower royalty terms when compared to whites, all else equal. The results hold when extended to a national-level analysis. These findings suggest that local ties can open pathways to locally sourced information and confer social capital, which can be beneficial during contract negotiations. They also support sociological theories of how social biases and categories affect economic transactions, resulting in patterned inequalities and discriminatory effects for socially disadvantaged groups. This chapter opens a new empirical domain—subsurface property rights—for socio-legal studies of contracts, and it offers new theoretical directions into how social inequalities become reinforced in legal instruments.

This dissertation examines how changes in American society over the past four decades have shaped personal networks. Specifically, it uses survey data to assess changes in the personal networks of residents of northern California in 1977-8 and 2015-6. The dissertation is organized as three papers, each considering one key way that personal networks may have changed.

The first paper examines the changing role of distance in the maintenance of personal ties. Contra popular suppositions that technology is making social interactions superficial or that technology is a panacea for social support, I find that people today are more selective about friends and family whom they rely upon, both ignoring those nearby more often and casting a wider geographic net for emotional support. I examine changes in relationships with siblings, friends, and mothers and fathers. Intimate supportive exchanges that were not strongly differentiated by proximity in the late 1970s were more likely to be conducted with individuals who live farther away by the mid-2010s. Compared to respondents of the late 1970s, mid-2010s respondents were also more likely to feel “especially close” to parents and friends who lived more than an hour away. As one may suspect, exchanges that require getting together, such as socializing or obtaining practical support, are still sustained by proximity. Overall, people use distance and technology together to exchange more with their most important ties, while allowing others to wither.

The second paper asks whether women’s greater labor force participation has led to changes in the composition of their personal networks. I find that women have gained supportive work-related ties in the last four decades compared to men. For both time periods, I identify individuals associated with work who were also named as providers of four supportive exchanges: socializing, confiding, obtaining practical help, and asking for advice. Respondents could describe these individuals as coworkers, people who did the same kind of work, or people whom they had met at work. While women in the late 1970s lagged men in forming work-related supportive ties, women today have caught up with or surpassed men. Follow-up analyses support two explanations for the shift. First, women continue to largely befriend women, not men, at work; this suggests that some of the increase in women’s supportive ties at work can be attributed to the increased presence of women in the workplace. Second, compared to men today and to women of the late 1970s, women today who are not working are much more likely to interact with people associated with work. This suggests that women are better able than men to maintain work-related ties.

Paper three considers whether changing gender roles and norms at home and at work have led men’s and women’s personal networks to become more similar. Demographic changes such as women’s increasing and men’s decreasing labor force participation and related cultural changes such as more egalitarian beliefs about the division of labor in the household would suggest some convergence in the characteristics of men’s and women’s personal networks. Research on personal networks often emphasizes differences between men and women in terms of kin involvement, access to nonkin resources, emotional intimacy, and overall burdens and support. In each of the four areas mentioned, I find some evidence of convergence. The gap between men and women has decreased in terms of the number of kin they consider close, their willingness to confide, their ties to adult children, their overall network burdens, and access to people from work contexts. In the only instances of divergence, women pulled ahead of men in terms of access to advice from nonkin and, it seems, became even more likely than men to serve as confidants. In other ways the networks of men and women remained distinctive. I argue that the overall picture is one of partial convergence and that we ought to view some of the differences typically associated with men and women’s networks as products of their time.

In sum, the papers suggest that there are substantively significant and statistically measureable changes in the personal networks of Americans in the last four decades, particularly in terms of the balancing of men’s and women’s networks and in terms of using technology to maintain important ties regardless of distance.