David Pettinicchio

University of Toronto | U of T · Department of Sociology

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, disability rights found a place on the U.S. policy agenda. However, it did not do so because social movement groups pressured political elites or because politicians were responding to changes in public preferences. Drawing from recent work in neoinstitutionalism and social movements, namely the theory of strategi...

Given the growing interest in social movements as policy agenda setters, this paper investigates the contexts within which movement groups and actors work with political elites to promote their common goals for policy change. In asking how and why so-called outsiders gain access to elites and to the policymaking process, I address several contempor...

Intersectional feminist scholars emphasize how overlapping systems of oppression structure gender inequality, but in focusing on the gendered, classed, and racialized bases of stratification, many often overlook disability as an important social category in determining economic outcomes. This is a significant omission given that disability severely...

Although ample research shows that people with disabilities face significant labor market barriers, questions remain about whether and how disadvantages in employment and earnings contribute to economic insecurity. We use 1999 to 2012 Canadian Survey of Financial Security data to study disparities in nonhousing assets, which include household savin...

This chapter reviews the different dimensions of disadvantage associated with disability while emphasizing the social structures that create and maintain such disadvantages. We review quantitative research demonstrating disadvantage in education, employment, income, wealth, and economic security, while noting the drawbacks of deficit accounts that...

The Fair Labor Standards Act's minimum wage laws provide important protections for workers. However, it still permits employers to pay subminimum wages to youth under age 20, student-vocational learners, full-time students, individuals with disabilities, and tipped workers. This has important economic consequences, especially for economically vulne...

Based on an analysis of over 1,000 Canadians with disabilities, our new study found that individuals used family, savings and government supports to supplement inadequate employment income during the pandemic. But, access to these different supports varied considerably. While these supports are incredibly important for people with disabilities, man...

The growth of precarious employment coupled with declining social safety nets has increased economic insecurity among many households, leaving them without key resources to weather financial hardships like those brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. This has been especially true for people whose disabilities, health statuses, and already precarious...

In this paper, we outline and describe key areas of inquiry speaking to the sociology of disability-based economic inequality. In addition to providing a synthesis of some- times disparate literatures located through- out the social science landscape (but often with key sociological contributions), we also seek to motivate sociological inquiry into...

This chapter reviews the different dimensions of disadvantage associated with disability while emphasizing the social structures that create and maintain such disadvantages. It reviews quantitative research demonstrating disadvantage in education, employment, income, wealth, and economic security, while noting the drawbacks of deficit accounts that...

CERB is an example of a liberal welfare policy that distinguishes between the deserving and undeserving. Benefits were limited to $2,000 per month and taxable. Benefits were only available to people who earned a minimum of $5,000 in the previous year and whose work was directly affected by COVID-19. https://theconversation.com/cerb-helped-canadian...

In The Politics of Inequality, David Pettinicchio has gathered an interdisciplinary team of leading experts to make a valuable contribution to the existing inequalities literature through a political sociology lens. Broad social, political and economic forces associated with neoliberalism and globalization, climate change, migration and immigration...

Diversity in the fashion industry, it seems, is on the rise, with recent efforts poised to address the exclusion of people with disabilities. Based on a content analysis of editorials, advertising campaigns, and 213 online consumer comments between 2014 and 2019, we examine how diversity is showcased: speci!cally, whether images of disability serve...

Diversity in the fashion industry, it seems, is on the rise, with recent efforts poised to address the exclusion of people with disabilities. Based on a content analysis of editorials, advertising campaigns, and 213 online consumer comments between 2014 and 2019, we examine how diversity is showcased: specifically, whether images of disability serv...

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed employment situations for workers everywhere. This is especially true among people with disabilities and chronic health conditions who face greater risks in contracting COVID-19 and experience larger disadvantages within the labor market. Drawing from original data gathered through a national online sur...

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed employment situations for workers everywhere. This is especially true among people with disabilities and chronic health conditions who face greater risks in contracting COVID-19 and experience larger disadvantages within the labor market. Drawing from original data gathered through a national online sur...

Aujourd’hui plus que jamais, les personnes handicapées font face à un avenir économique incertain. Alors que la pandémie du COVID-19 fait rage, elles se retrouvent placées, partout dans le monde, dans une situation sociale, économique et politique désavantageuse. Si la pandémie a suscité des réflexions inédites s’agissant du bien-être économique, d...

Individuals worried about getting COVID-19 and those economically impacted by the pandemic were also more likely to report deteriorating mental health as well as those reporting feeling lonely and lacking a sense of belonging.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has led to worsening mental health outcomes throughout the Canadian population, its effects have been more acute among already marginalized groups, including people with disabilities and chronic health conditions. This paper examines how heightened fears of contracting the virus, financial impacts, and social isolatio...

This study examines how people with disabilities and chronic health conditions—members of a large and diverse group often overlooked by Canadian public policy—are making sense of the Canadian federal government's response to COVID-19. Using original national online survey data collected in June 2020 (N=1,027), we investigate how members of this gro...

The COVID-19 pandemic has made more salient the ways in which extant inequalities based on status characteristics like race, class, gender, and disability make individuals from these groups more vulnerable to the virus. At the same time, the crisis has also revealed broader structural problems highlighted by how pandemic policy responses have exclu...

Despite established recommended standard definitions, measures, and methods by the UN Washington Group on Disability Statistics and the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) to assess dimensions of disability, national censuses vary widely in the questions used to identify people with disabilities. Although many s...

Despite established recommended standard definitions, measures, and methods by the UN Washington Group on Disability Statistics and the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) to assess dimensions of disability, national censuses vary widely in the questions used to identify people with disabilities. Although many s...

Background Although the COVID-19 pandemic has led to worsening mental health outcomes throughout the Canadian population, its effects have been more acute among already marginalized groups, including people with disabilities and chronic health conditions. This paper examines how heightened fears of contracting the virus, financial impacts, and soci...

Despite established recommended standard definitions, measures, and methods by the UN Washington Group on Disability Statistics and the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) to assess dimensions of disability, national censuses vary widely in the questions used to identify people with disabilities. Although many s...

Americans with disabilities represent a significant proportion of the population. Despite their numbers and the economic hardships they face, disability is often excluded from general sociological studies of stratification and inequality. To address some of these omissions, this paper focuses on employment and earnings inequality by disability stat...

According to our survey conducted in June 2020 — collected when case counts were actually declining and provinces were beginning to open up and end their shutdowns — 78 per cent of respondents reported being concerned about contracting COVID-19. Heightened concerns were also associated with poorer mental health outcomes, as shown in the graph above...

The respondent continued “I mean, you can see major differences between both us [Canadian news] and the U.S. in just how news comes across. News here is presented in a much more factual way. U.S. news, it’s always political. Even if it’s scientific, it becomes political.” Indeed, 60 per cent of our respondents said they do not trust American polit...

This article addresses whether and how unions help to dismantle workplace inequality experienced by people with different types of disabilities. Using pooled 2009–2018 CPS MORG data of 630,799 respondents covering almost a decade, we find that union membership benefits workers with disabilities more than other groups and workers with the severest d...

This paper addresses whether and how unions help to dismantle workplace inequality experienced by people with different types of disabilities. Using pooled 2009-2018 CPS MORG data of 630,799 respondents covering almost a decade, we find that union membership is especially beneficial for people with disabilities compared to the larger population, as...

This study examines how people with disabilities and chronic health conditions—members of a large and diverse group often overlooked by Canadian public policy—are making sense of the Canadian federal government’s response to COVID-19. Using original national online survey data collected in June 2020 (N=1,027), we investigate how members of this gro...

At the University of Toronto and University of Alberta, we conducted a nationwide survey that revealed Canadians with disabilities and chronic health conditions are very worried about getting COVID-19. We also found that about 40 per cent of our respondents have added to their credit card debt since the start of the pandemic, and almost half say th...

Many respondents also believe people with disabilities have been especially overlooked by their governments. As one respondent with both physical and cognitive limitations noted, “People with disabilities are the only demographic to not receive any help from any level of government.”

There is a steady drop in the percentage of people who were employed and at work in the week before. This percentage decreases from 60 percent in January and February 2020 to 59 percent in March 2020 to 48 percent in April 2020 – an 18 percent decrease between March and April. Most of these workers moved into unemployment, which rose from 3 percent...

Although ample research shows that people with disabilities face significant labor market barriers, questions remain about whether and how disadvantages in employment and earnings contribute to economic insecurity. We use 1999 to 2012 Canadian Survey of Financial Security data to study disparities in nonhousing assets, which include household savin...

This article addresses whether and how unions help to dismantle workplace inequality experienced by people with different types of disabilities. Using pooled 2009–2018 CPS MORG data of 630,799 respondents covering almost a decade, we find that union membership benefits workers with disabilities more than other groups and workers with the severest d...

Disability organizations and policy coevolved. Because organizations are shaped by the kinds of frameworks, tools, resources, and political opportunities policies provide, disability groups mobilized around rehabilitative and health services at a time when the interaction between government and voluntary associations revolved around service provisi...

Intersectional feminist scholars emphasize how overlapping systems of oppression structure gender inequality, but in focusing on the gendered, classed, and racialized bases of stratification, many often overlook disability as an important social category in determining economic outcomes. This is a significant omission given that disability severely...

We hear a lot about the gender pay gap and the racial wealth gap, but rarely about how disability also affects economic security. New research by Michelle Maroto (https://michellemaroto.com/), David Pettinicchio (https://www.davidpettinicchio.com/), and Andrew C. Patterson (https://www.andrewcpatterson.com/about) investigates how disability interac...

The politics of retrenchment is a powerful, threat- ening force mobilizing citizens by reminding them that nothing—not even their civil rights—should be taken for granted. Ed Roberts, founder of the independent living movement, said at a protest nearly 40 years ago, that “politics is pressure.” For people with disabilities and other increasingly ma...

Purpose - This chapter assesses how gender and disability status intersect to shape employment and earnings outcomes for working-age adults in the United States. Methodology/approach - The research pools five years of data from the 2010-2015 Current Population Survey to compare employment and earnings outcomes for men and women with different types...

This paper compares participation in different forms of political action between natives , immigrants and non-citizen immigrants using data from thirteen European countries across six waves of the European Social Survey. The authors highlight problems associated with previous categorizations of political action, and find that when political action...

There has been a growing interest in the relationship between culture and crime in recent years, but there is little research investigating the role of religion. To clarify this empirical cleavage, we propose a Durkheimian model of the countervailing effects of religion on violent crime. We test our propositions with robust linear models and a larg...

Objective. There has been a growing interest in the relationship between culture and crime in recent years, but there is little research investigating the role of religion. To clarify this empirical cleavage, we propose a Durkheimian model of the countervailing effects of religion on violent crime. Methods. We test our propositions with robust line...

p>Americans with disabilities represent a significant proportion of the population. Despite their numbers and the economic hardships they face, disability is often excluded from general sociological studies of stratification and inequality. To address some of these omissions, this paper focuses on employment and earnings inequality by disability st...

Prior studies on perceptions of structural disadvantage and injustice, efficacy, and collective action have suffered from two major limitations: (1) they have used single-country samples, usually of economically advanced countries, and (2) generally theorized and investigated perceptions of structural injustice and efficacy separately. Drawing on v...

Occupational segregation is a fundamental cause of structural inequality within the labor market, but it remains under-researched in the case of disability status. Using 2011 American Community Survey data for working-age adults, we examine the representation of persons with different types of disabilities across occupations and industries. We find...

Although Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to address, in large part, the declining economic well-being of people with disabilitiestwenty years laterthe trend has not reversed. To shed light on this puzzle, we use multilevel models to analyze Current Population Survey data from 1988 through 2012 matched with state-level pred...

This article explains the effects of ethnic nationalism on Anglophone and Francophone migration. The rise of Québec ethnic nationalism in the 1960s dismantled the cultural division of labour, which created new opportunities for Fran- cophones but threatened Anglophones' traditional dominance over the Québec economy. This had negative consequences f...

This article examines whether shared religious beliefs and religious social relationships (Durkheim) and belief in a personal, moral God (Stark) negatively affect attitudes toward the acceptability of white-collar crime. In addition, using a large cross-national sample and estimating multilevel models, we test whether effects are conditional on mod...

Social movements are conventionally understood as a means by which groups seek to resolve col- lective grievances outside of the regular political process. With this in mind, I explore the impor- tant role of ''institutional activists'' - insiders with access to resources and power - who proactively take up causes that overlap with those of grassro...

This article draws from an ongoing debate over explanations of homicide. Within this debate, we investigate the pro-social effects of civil society and social capital. Few cross-national studies explore whether elements of social capital either increase or decrease homicide. The cross-national work that does is often characterized by small, homogen...

Over the last ten years, several western countries have recognized gay marriage either by providing gay couples the same rights as heterosexual couples, or by allowing civil unions. Other western countries have not. What accounts for this variation? This paper reviews and analyzes the key demographic, institutional and cultural arguments found in t...

Most research on efficacy and participation in collective action has focused on single country samples with little attention paid to the relationship between efficacy and country-level structural factors. Drawing on value expectancy theory, we theorize a link between macro-level political institutions and micro-level efficacy. To address the previo...

This paper explores the role of parties, interest groups and public opinion in the enactment of ‘controversial’ social policy particularly when the issue is salient with political elites, but not salient with the public. The author analyses party documents, interest group testimony, media statements and public opinion data. He finds that political...

The authors discuss the shift from classic culture of poverty arguments to more contemporary uses of cultural variables in explaining criminal justice practices in Western industrialized countries. The authors use “cultures of inequality” to refer to the increasing taste or tolerance for inequality in the general population across nations. They als...