Edwin Amenta
· Professor and Co-Director, Graduate StudiesVerifiedUniversity of California, Irvine · Sociology
Active 1985–2025
About
Professor Edwin Amenta is a scholar with joint appointments in Sociology and Education, and a courtesy appointment in Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). He directs the UCI-MUST (Measurement Undergraduate Success Trajectories) Project and his research applies insights from social stratification and the sociology of organizations to examine how schools and labor markets influence life course outcomes. His scholarship spans three interrelated areas: educational inequality and labor market stratification, youth socialization and school discipline, and experiences, trajectories, and outcomes in higher education. Amenta’s work on social stratification includes cross-national comparative studies of higher education access and completion, vocational education, and self-employment, and he co-directed the international project Stratification in Higher Education, which investigates how higher education expansion, differentiation, and privatization affect class-based access. His research also explores how school and neighborhood contexts mediate labor market transitions and social mobility. In the area of youth socialization, he has led major studies on school discipline, legal norms, and student rights, authoring the book Judging School Discipline and co-directing the School Rights Project, a multi-method study of law and student experience across diverse school settings. He directed a cross-national study of school discipline and student achievement in nine countries, examining how educational institutions shape students’ civic identities and trajectories into adulthood, including their risk of incarceration. Amenta has made significant contributions to higher education research, including coauthoring the books Academically Adrift and Aspiring Adults Adrift, which analyze college learning and post-college outcomes using longitudinal and mixed-method data. He is also a co-editor of The Liberal Arts Advantage, a volume set to be released by the University of Chicago Press in late 2026. His work includes developing new frameworks for assessing discipline-based learning outcomes in higher education and collaborating with national disciplinary associations to pilot alternative assessments aligned with 21st-century skills. Previously, he served as dean of the UCI School of Education, senior fellow at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and director of the Education Research Program at the Social Science Research Council. At SSRC, he oversaw the development of the Research Alliance for New York City Schools. He has held leadership roles within the American Sociological Association and the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility, and has contributed to pedagogical innovation through textbook authorship and field-building service. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and an Ed.M. from Harvard University.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Sociology
- Psychology
- Computer Science
- Social Science
- Data science
- Media studies
- Political economy
- Public administration
- Law
Selected publications
UNC Libraries · 2025-09-18
articleOpen accessSenior authorWhy do some organizations in a movement seeking social change gain extensive national newspaper coverage? To address the question, we innovate in theoretical and empirical ways. First, we elaborate a theoretical argument that builds from the political mediation theory of movement consequences and incorporates the social organization of newspaper practices. This media and political mediation model integrates political and media contexts and organizations' characteristics and actions. With this model, we hypothesize two main routes to coverage: one that includes changes in public policy and involves policy‐engaged, well‐resourced, and inclusive organizations and a second that combines social crises and protest organizations. Second, we appraise these arguments with the first analysis of the national coverage of all organizations in a social movement over its career: 84 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights and AIDS‐related organizations in the New York Times , Los Angeles Times , and Wall Street Journal from 1969 to 2010. These analyses go beyond previous research that provides either snapshots of many organizations at one point in time or overtime analyses of aggregated groups of organizations or individual organizations. The results of both historical and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analyses support our media and political mediation model.
Put Me in, Coach? Referee? Owner? Security?
2025-09-26
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingRussell Sage Foundation eBooks · 2025-01-01
book1st authorCorrespondingSociologica · 2025-12-22
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingIn this interview, Theda Skocpol discusses with her former student Edwin Amenta issues ranging from the academic, to the political, and to the personal. A highly renowned and decorated scholar, Skocpol addresses her shift from being a broadly comparative scholar, with her path-breaking initial work on comparative revolutions, to focusing her scholarly attention on politics and policy in the United States. She argues that it was not as big a leap as it might seem. She also discusses her institutional shift from sociology to political science, but indicates that this move was not an intellectual turn from sociology and notes that she could never have had the career she has had without first gaining a PhD in sociology. Skocpol shares her views on the current crisis in U.S. higher education in part from her perspective of having been dean of Harvard University’s Graduate School. She also discusses her Madison Lecture from just before the 2024 election that returned Donald Trump to the White House, including her prescient predictions of his authoritarian moves, as well as what was unexpected. In the process, she situates the administration’s moves away from democracy and identifies it as a kind of lawless patrimonialism. Based on her wide-ranging research, she suggests strategies for the U.S. Democratic Party to regain power. This interview took place on the morning of November 4, 2025, Election Day in the United States.
What Drives the News Coverage of US Social Movements?
UNC Libraries · 2025-04-01
articleOpen accessSenior authorWhat drives the news coverage of social movements in the professional news media? We address this question by elaborating an institutional mediation model arguing that the news values, routines, and characteristics of the news media induce them to pay attention to movements depending on their characteristics and the political contexts in which they engage. The news-making characteristics of movements include their disruptive capacities and organizational strength, and the political contexts include a partisan regime in power, benefitting from national policies, and congressional investigations. To appraise these arguments, we analyze approximately 1 million news articles mentioning 29 social movements over the twentieth century, published in four national newspapers. We use negative binomial regression analyses and separate time-series analyses of the labor movement to assess the model’s robustness across different movements, time periods, and news sources. In each analysis, the results support the hypotheses based on the institutional mediation model. More generally, we argue that the influence of social movements on institutions depends on the structure and operating procedures of those institutions. This insight has implications for future studies of the influence of movements on major social institutions.
Russell Sage Foundation eBooks · 2024-09-18 · 3 citations
bookSenior authorPeople’s beliefs and values are subjective, but they are also shaped by a broader common sense about issues, such as abortion or climate change, as well as about questions that transcend single issues, such as the proper reach of government, the lines dividing us and them, and the boundaries of the self. Movements aim to appeal to that broader common sense and, crucially, to change it. In this book Francesca Polletta and Edwin Amenta argue that activists can maximize their ability to get their message out by capitalizing on the institutional norms of the cultural outlets that make up the public sphere. Where such norms do not serve them, activists need to work to establish new norms or create new cultural outlets. Activists can also help to get movement ideas and practices adopted by whole fields of organizations by spurring processes of organizational imitation. And they can fight against the dilution of movement ideas as they are turned into organizational practices by reminding people of other options that were at one point on the table: options that were more transformative but were not impractical. What activists have done and said—and how they have said it and to whom—has meant the difference between movements changing hearts and minds and their speaking into the void.
UNC Libraries · 2024-10-10
articleOpen accessWhat determines the quality of coverage received by social movement organizations when they appear extensively in the news? Research on the news coverage of social movement organizations is dominated by case studies supporting the “protest paradigm,” which argues that journalists portray movement activists trivially and negatively when covering protest. However, movement organizations often make long‐running news for many different reasons, mainly not protest. We argue that some of this extensive news will lead to worse coverage—in terms of substance and sentiment—notably when the main action covered involves violence. Extensive coverage centered on other actions, however, notably politically assertive action, will tend to produce “good news” in these dimensions. We analyze the news of the twentieth century's 100 most‐covered U.S. movement organizations in their biggest news year in four national newspapers. Topic models indicate that these organizations were mainly covered for actions other than nonviolent protest, including politically assertive action, strikes, civic action, investigations, trials, and violence. Natural language processing analyses and hand‐coding show that their news also varied widely in sentiment and substance. Employing qualitative comparative analyses, we find that the main action behind news strongly influences its quality, and there may be several news paradigms for movement organizations.
Sociological Forum · 2024-05-28 · 4 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingAbstract What determines the quality of coverage received by social movement organizations when they appear extensively in the news? Research on the news coverage of social movement organizations is dominated by case studies supporting the “protest paradigm,” which argues that journalists portray movement activists trivially and negatively when covering protest. However, movement organizations often make long‐running news for many different reasons, mainly not protest. We argue that some of this extensive news will lead to worse coverage—in terms of substance and sentiment—notably when the main action covered involves violence. Extensive coverage centered on other actions, however, notably politically assertive action, will tend to produce “good news” in these dimensions. We analyze the news of the twentieth century's 100 most‐covered U.S. movement organizations in their biggest news year in four national newspapers. Topic models indicate that these organizations were mainly covered for actions other than nonviolent protest, including politically assertive action, strikes, civic action, investigations, trials, and violence. Natural language processing analyses and hand‐coding show that their news also varied widely in sentiment and substance. Employing qualitative comparative analyses, we find that the main action behind news strongly influences its quality, and there may be several news paradigms for movement organizations.
Review of “Unbottled: The Fight against Plastic Water and for Water Justice”
Social Forces · 2024-03-31
article1st authorCorrespondingJournal Article Review of "Unbottled: The Fight against Plastic Water and for Water Justice" Get access Review of "Unbottled: The Fight against Plastic Water and for Water Justice" By Daniel Jaffee University of California Press, 2023. 384 pages, Prices (cloth and paper): $95.00/$27.95, https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520306622/unbottled Edwin Amenta Edwin Amenta University of California, Irvine Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, soae047, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soae047 Published: 31 March 2024 Article history Received: 01 February 2024 Accepted: 06 February 2024 Published: 31 March 2024
Research in social movements, conflicts and change · 2023 · 2 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Sociology
- Computer Science
Under which conditions do social movements receive extensive attention from the mainstream news media? We develop an institutional mediation model that argues that combinations of the news-heightening characteristics of movements, including their disruptive capacities, organizational resources, and political orientation, and political contexts, including partisan regimes and benefiting from national policies, bring extensive attention to movements. It also holds that investigations will draw extensive media attention to movements, and those that have achieved prominence in the news will remain prominent under specific conditions. We appraise these combinational arguments by examining 29 social movements across 100 years in four national newspapers using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). Researchers typically use QCA to study the consequences of movements when they hypothesize outcomes to result from multiple combinations of conditions. This raises our second main question: How should scholars best address combinational hypotheses using QCA? Here we employ Venn diagrams to identify and illustrate key analytical issues and anomalies, including constrained diversity in observational data, empirical instances when combinations of conditions do not produce the expected outcome, and instances when unexpected combinations of conditions produce a consistent result. We also demonstrate the value of broad comparisons across movements and over time in these analyses.
Recent grants
NSF · $83k · 2010–2012
NSF · $214k · 2017–2021
NSF · $152k · 2008–2010
Frequent coauthors
- 30 shared
Neal Caren
- 12 shared
Thomas Elliott
University of Guelph
- 10 shared
Amber Celina Tierney
Lake Tahoe Community College
- 6 shared
Drew Halfmann
Harvard University
- 5 shared
Sheera Joy Olasky
- 5 shared
Theda Skocpol
- 5 shared
Francesca Polletta
- 4 shared
Elisabeth S. Clemens
University of Chicago
Awards & honors
- Senior Fellow Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (2013-2015)
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