Selcan Mutgan

So excited to announce that I have been awarded a SEK2.7M Project Grant from @riksjubileumsfond.bsky.social to study the dynamics of meaning divergence! 🎉

5 minutes with Sabrina Mai Meet Sabrina Mai, an expert in fields including Disasters and Risk, and Social Networks. Her research focuses on organisational behavior in the context of risk and disasters. In her free time she grea...

🚀 Introducing our new Postdoctoral Fellow!
A warm welcome to Sabrina Mai who joins SweCSS as our new Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Computational Social Science:

Wide Social Influence and the Emergence of the Unexpected: An Empirical Test Using Spotify Data Article: Wide Social Influence and the Emergence of the Unexpected: An Empirical Test Using Spotify Data | Sociological Science | Posted October 23, 2025

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New paper out in @sociologicalsci.bsky.social with @marckeuschnigg.bsky.social and Peter Hedström! We identify a social-influence mechanism that widens individuals' behavioral repertoires and breaks the link between individuals' initial preferences and the collective outcomes they bring about.

NYU Abu Dhabi is recruiting a 3-year Postdoctoral Associate for a Computational Social Science project on the coevolution of ingroup bias and group boundaries.
For more details and to apply, please visit: apply.interfolio.com/173544.

Gender Differences in Economics Seminars (Forthcoming Article) - We assess whether men and women are treated differently when presenting their economics research. We collected data across thousands of seminars, job market talks and conferenc...

Forthcoming in the AER: "Gender Differences in Economics Seminars" by Pascaline Dupas, Amy Handlan, Alicia Sasser Modestino, Muriel Niederle, Mateo Seré, Haoyu Sheng, Justin Wolfers, and Seminar Dynamics Collective. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

From Flux to Capital: Distinguishing Patterns of Income and Wealth Segregation in the Netherlands Who are “the rich” and how should their residential patterns be studied? In society, the rich are defined not only by their high income but also—and perhaps more importantly—by their high wealth. How...

In this article, @javiersanmillan.bsky.social @clementinecttn.bsky.social and Maarten van Ham compare the spatiotemporal patterns of income vs. wealth segregation, affluence and poverty in the Netherlands. Using geo-coded register microdata, they show that...

doi.org/10.1002/psp....

✨CREST Sociology is hiring ✨

Assistant or Associate Professor in Computational Sociology

Details here: www.shorturl.at/E57le

Abstract We investigate a phenomenon which we have experienced as common when dealing with an assortment of Italian public and private institutions: people promise to exchange high-quality goods and services, but then something goes wrong and the quality delivered is lower than had been promised. While this is perceived as ‘cheating’ by outsiders, insiders seem not only to adapt to, but to rely on this outcome. They do not resent low-quality exchanges; in fact, they seem to resent high-quality ones, and are inclined to put pressure on or avoid dealing with agents who deliver high quality. The equilibrium among low-quality producers relies on an unusual preference ranking which differs from that associated with the Prisoners’ Dilemma and similar games, whereby self-interested rational agents prefer to dish out low quality in exchange for high quality. While equally ‘lazy’, agents in our low-quality worlds are oddly ‘pro-social’: for the advantage of maximizing their raw self-interest, they prefer to receive low-quality goods and services, provided that they too can in exchange deliver low quality without embarrassment. They develop a set of oblique social norms to sustain their preferred equilibrium when threatened by the intrusion of high quality. We argue that high-quality collective outcomes are endangered not only by self-interested individual defectors, but by ‘cartels’ of mutually satisfied mediocrities.

Gambetta & Origgi on the LL Game, in which agents prefer to deliver and receive (!) low quality.

This paper is absolutely savage but also feels uncomfortably relevant to parts of academia outside of Italy 👀

diegogambetta.org/wp-content/u...

New article w/ @jenjirayahirun.bsky.social: Exogamous 2nd gen immigrants in Sweden live further from parents than do endogamous immigrants, but closer than natives. But in terms of residential choices, exogamous immigrants are least likely to move near parents.

NEW: Mood, "Equalization through Deterioration: The Shrinking Gender Gap in Swedish School Grades" sociologicalscience.com/articles-v12...

Call for two or more open-rank academic positions in Sociology

We're hiring in wonderful Copenhagen 🇩🇰

Two or more open rank sociology professorships (tt assistant, associate with tenure, or full prof with tenure).

You'll join a leading sociology department in Europe with many core fields represented!

#sociology

More 👇

jobportal.ku.dk/videnskabeli...

Generational Imprinting: How Political Events Shape Cohorts Turgut Keskintürk August, 2025 How, and for whom, do political events translate into enduring political change? This article advances a three-stage model of cohortization, in which salient events produce age differential changes in attitudes, elite cues drive identity-congruent political sorting, and life-course timing regulates whether these attitude changes remain persistent over time. Focusing on the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 as a quasi-natural experiment, I test this model by analyzing attitudes toward U.S. law enforcement among non-Hispanic White Americans using five surveys that collectively span from 2016 to 2024. The findings consistently show that Democrats and Independents became strongly unfavorable toward law enforcement—much more so among younger than older individuals. Moreover, the changes persisted for younger individuals, while fading among older individuals, leading to cohort-led polarization. This article integrates two classic—though largely partial—theories of political learning, offering a model for understanding how salient events can realign generational divides.

a new working paper: osf.io/vsr5b

I propose a three-stage model of cohortization where dynamics of cohort learning and political sorting serve as complementary engines of aggregate political change.

I apply this to the case of the killing of George Floyd & the BLM.

it's also my job market paper!

Come work on my new research project! We are studying whether and how #parentalLeave is shared in different types of families, how the use of parental leave has changed in different families since the 2000s, and how parents’ social environments influence their leave uptake.

#research #hiring

Poster for the Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS) Programme Autumn 2025 at Linköping University. The text explains that the seminars feature international scholars, are open to all, and will be broadcast on Zoom.

✨ The IAS Seminar Series returns for the Fall 2025 semester with a stellar lineup of speakers and thought-provoking talks. Open to all!

#AcademicSky #Sociology #CSS

📢 IAS is looking for new PhD students!
There are still 3 more weeks to apply! deadline: August 31st.

Read more: liu.se/en/work-at-l...

#Sociology #AcademicSky

netreg.se The Complete Network of Sweden - Swereg.net - is a research project concerned with the extraction and analysis of the complete network of social exposure between all individuals in Sweden.

I'm happy to be a part of netreg.se . . A project to use register data to study the entire social network of Sweden. Check out our poster at IC2S2 today.

🤔 Curious how religion & gender shape teens’ free time?

In @sociusjournal.bsky.social, David Kretschmer and I show:
Muslim girls do more housework 🏠, but are least active in sports 🏃‍♀️ and going out 🎉 than Muslim boys and non-Muslims.

Gaps shrink as they enter adulthood. 🔄

👉 doi.org/10.1177/2378...

Ethnic preferences, opportunity structures, and the school segregation process Abstract. Previous research has shown that parents often have strong ethnicity-related school preferences, and it has been suggested that these preferences

@selcanmutgan.bsky.social et al. find that ethnic school segregation in Sweden is largely a downstream consequence of “the ethnic segregation of the housing market and the geographic distribution of schools.” @europeansocreview.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1093/esr/...

a new article in Political Psychology: osf.io/rhf4q

we argue that studies of belief change have an identifiability problem much like the APC problem: the composition of change (who changed or how much they changed) is observationally confounded.

with @pablobellode.bsky.social & @stephenvaisey.com:

PhD student in Analytical Sociology

🚨🎓 We’re looking for new PhD students!
The area of specialization is open, but successful applicants should demonstrate a clear interest in themes that align with ongoing research at @iasliu.bsky.social
📅 Deadline: 31.08.2025
💼 Fully funded positions
How to apply 👉 liu.se/en/work-at-l...

Tracking+choice also seem to be driven by the previous school's diversity, nbhd, and other factors that affect ability. Last week, I listened to Susanne Böller's excellent presentation on within-school sorting in primary schools (in Germany). That may have consequences as well. Tough one! :)

Oh, it's been a while since I read this paper. Thanks for bringing it up—I hadn't been thinking about it in this context. Indeed, ability tracking in this case would introduce an additional constraint (or perhaps it's the primary constraint that eliminates certain options?)

My educated guess(!): several opportunity constraints apply to residential choices as well, but within group inequalities and population structure also play a significant role in that process. www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....

Thanks Katja! Would be great to see replication in other contexts! If there are strict school catchment areas in place with no school choice policy but clear quality/compositional differences between schools, I guess one would have to study residential market using similar methodologies.

There's some evidence that some high-income families living in lower-income nbhds move just before their child starts school. But, I would hesitate to make strong claims about their impact on school segregation. That is the current project, hopefully I will have some answers in the future 🤞

It is even less clear how these residential moves eventually affect school choices and school segregation over time. In this paper journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... we used matching models: school quality (controlling for ses) doesn't change significantly after a residential move before school.

Some families moved (before school) to areas with schools with a larger share of immigrant populations, some did not. The pattern was almost a normal distribution (for the difference between immigrant pop in schools in new and old neighborhood). residential market is also a different beast!

Thanks Kerstin! Indeed, one often assumes that parents choose schools when selecting a residential area. There is no easy answer to this question :) During the review process, we analyzed data from two cohorts of 1st graders (before they started school), and the results were mixed.

Thanks, Rob! If you end up reading it, feel free to reach out with any comments/questions. I keep thinking about and working on the same issues.

Thanks, Dieuwke! Great to hear that the paper resonates with you!