Legislative roll-call voting is crucial in policy making. Standard approaches to studying roll-call voting focus on legislator attributes, ignoring how social factors, such as legislator relations, may drive voting. Using original data based on a state legislature, I adopt a relational approach to examine how legislator relations impact roll-call voting net of attributes. Results show that relations strongly influence voting, adding significantly to the explanatory power of the models. These results imply that standard approaches to studying roll-call voting should incorporate consideration of social factors, suggesting the value of social influence models in studies of political phenomena.

Objectives. We investigate social consensus and dissensus within and between nations in three important justifications for pay differences: family needs, performance on the job, and education/authority. Methods. Data are from 31 nations and 66,777 individual respondents analyzed using structural equation and multilevel regression methods with multiple imputation of missing data. Results. In poor countries, but not in rich, most believe that family needs legitimate higher pay. Within countries-particularly English-speaking ones-low SES groups endorse family needs, but high SES groups reject them. Valuing performance and effort is widespread throughout the world and throughout all segments of society, high and low. Education and authority are widely valued, more in poor nations than in rich, with some demographic differences but few socioeconomic cleavages. Conclusions. There is conflict both within nations and between them as to whether need and education/authority justify unequal pay, but consensus that performance on the job does justify it.

Knowing how campaign contributors influence policymaking is important for understanding political power, but the existing literature—much of it outside sociology—has mixed findings. Using data on Political Action Committee (PAC) contributors and roll call voting in eight U.S. Houses, 1991–2006, I approach the issue using a novel, sociological approach that focuses on social ties between lawmakers and mutually shared contributors. The findings show consistent, statistically significant contributor influence via these ties in seven of the eight Houses. I discuss the implications of these findings for contributor‐lawmaker reciprocal exchange, the social embeddedness of policymaking, and political power.

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Although jurors should make decisions based only on the law and case facts, they can be biased by extralegal factors (see e.g., Feigenson, 2000). This bias can take a number of different forms. For instance, jurors may be more lenient toward defendants seen as similar to themselves or members of their in-group (in-group bias; Kerr, Hymes, Anderson, & Weathers, 1995), and more punitive toward defendants who are members of an out-group (prejudicial bias). Alternately, jurors could be more punitive toward defendants who are members of their in-group (the "black sheep effect"; Marques, 1990).There is an assumption that jury deliberation can "correct for" jurors' personal biases (Kaplan & Miller, 1978). This may be particularly true for prejudicial bias, as deliberation generally tends to