DONDENA Seminar - Fabrizio Bernardi

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“Unequal Luck: Chance as a Mechanism of Educational Inequality” 

SPEAKER: Fabrizio Bernardi (UNED).

ABSTRACT:

Sociology has paid limited attention to the role of luck in shaping individual socioeconomic outcomes. This study examines how luck events, conceptualized as chance events that provide or deplete resources for educational attainment, contributes to educational inequalities by family socioeconomic status (SES). We theorize that unexplained variance in regression models can serve as an indirect indicator of exposure to both favorable and adverse luck. Incorporating a stochastic component into a sequential threshold model of educational attainment, we derive a novel hypothesis: chance events play a greater role and generate more variability in outcomes when structural resources and individual educational propensity are misaligned, specifically among low-SES students with high propensity and high-SES students with low propensity. We test this hypothesis using variance function regression models with sibling fixed effects on two U.S. datasets. Educational propensity is operationalized using polygenic indices (PGIs). The results support our expectations: educational attainment is most volatile when parental SES and educational propensity diverge, particularly among low-SES students with high propensity, whose trajectories appear most exposed to chance. We conclude by discussing implications for the emerging sociology of luck and for research on inequality and mobility more broadly.
 

BIO: 

Fabrizio Bernardi is Full professor of Sociology at the UNED Madrid. He received hisPhD in Sociology and Social Research from the university of Trento, worked as assistant professor at University of Bielefeld, as Associate professor at UNED and as Full professor at the European University Institute. He has been Chair of the European Consortium for Sociological Research between 2012 and 2020 and he is currently Editor in Chief of European Sociological Review. His more recent work focuses on compensatory advantage as an inequality creating mechanism, educational expansion and the role of luck in socio-economic success.