Michael Hout

Michael Hout
Born	(1950-05-14) May 14, 1950
Awards	Otis Dudley Duncan Award, American Sociological Association Section on Population (2007); Clifford Clogg Memorial Award, Population Association of America 1996; Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences(1997), National Academy of Sciences (2003), and American Philosophical Society (2006); American Association of the Advancement of Science (2021)
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Pittsburgh (BA, 1972); Indiana University Bloomington (MA, 1973; PhD in Sociology, 1976)
Doctoral advisor	Phillips Cutright (chair), Paula M. Hudis and Elton F. Jackson

Michael Hout (born May 14, 1950) is a professor of sociology at New York University.

His work uses the General Social Survey to estimate the social standing of occupations introduced into the census classification since 1990. He digitized all occupational information in the GSS (1972–2014) and coded it all to the 2010 standard. Other recent projects used the GSS panel to study Americans' changing perceptions of class, religion, and happiness. In 2006, Mike and Claude Fischer published Century of Difference, a book on twentieth-century social and cultural trends in the United States. Other books include Truth about Conservative Christians with Andrew Greeley, Following in Father's Footsteps: Social Mobility in Ireland, and Inequality by Design

One of Hout's most well known works “Maximally Maintained Inequality: Expansion, Reform, and Opportunity in Irish Education, 1921-75” examines how social class differences in educational attainment persisted despite the expansion of secondary education in Ireland. The study results concluded that educational expansion alone does not necessarily reduce social inequality. Instead, structural factors such as economic incentives, cultural expectations, and institutional constraints play a crucial role in maintaining class disparities in education.

Hout's 2012 article “Social and Economic Returns to College Education in the United States” offers valuable insights around the debates about whether education is merely a reflection of pre-existing advantages or whether it plays a substantive role in shaping outcomes. It concluded that education does indeed have a positive causal effect, particularly for individuals who are less likely to pursue higher education.

Education

Michael Hout received a BA in Sociology and History from the University of Pittsburgh in 1972, and an MA in 1973 and a PhD in sociology in 1976 from Indiana University Bloomington.

Work

He has served as a professor at the University of Arizona, University of California-Berkeley, and New York University.

Awards and Societies

Michael Hout has been elected to several prominent honorary societies. These include election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1997, the National Academy of Sciences in 2003, the American Philosophical Society in 2006, the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences in 2018, and the American Association of the Advancement of Science in 2021.

His contributions to sociology have been recognized through several awards. He received the Robert M. Hauser Award from the American Sociological Association's Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section in 2018. In 2016, the University College Dublin conferred him the honorary degree of Doctors of Letters. He was awarded the Otis Dudley Duncan Award for book, Century of Difference from the American Sociological Association's section on Population in 2007, and the Clifford C. Clogg Memorial Award for his book, Inequality by Design given by the Population Association of America in 1996.

Hout serves on the board of the Societal Expert Action Network.

Research

Hout has explored how social class, race, and education influence political attitudes and voting behavior. His findings often illustrate the ways in which individuals’ social positions shape their political preferences and perceptions of government. For instance, his work has documented shifts in voting patterns and political engagement, particularly within specific demographics. He has continued this work in examining changes in public opinion over time, particularly around critical issues like race, immigration, and economic inequality. He has been instrumental in analyzing the growing polarization in American political attitudes, contributing to the understanding of how group identities and socio-economic factors fuel divisive political climates.

Hout has been studying political attitudes across different social classes since the mid-1970s. Hout has studied the differences between left and right leaning American voters across the intersectionality of race and religion. He studied political leanings on immigration with the turmoil over the 2016 election. Hout has also studied attitudes towards abortion, and how political divides have become more prominent than any other identifying factor. Hout has also observed with the GSS that the extent of opinions has also increased in recent years. Additionally, Hout studies voting patterns amongst different societal groups, attempting to explain voting blocks. Most recently, Hout has worked on how marital status could affect how one decides to vote in elections. He has also studied ethic attachments and class voting patterns.

Hout has also studied inequality and intergenerational mobility. His work has shed light on various dimensions of inequality, including economic status, education, race, and gender. He investigates these factors to unequal life chances and the accessibility of resources, shaping individuals' experiences and opportunities.  An essential aspect of Hout's research involves tracking changes in inequality over time. His studies use longitudinal data to assess how shifting economic policies, educational attainment, and demographic trends affect levels of inequality. Inequality by Design argued that the hyper-individualism of inequality studies like The Bell Curve captured some significant aspects of the rank of individuals but could never account for the rapidly growing inequality of jobs, wages, and family outcomes, and life chances. It expanded on work Michael Hout completed on the interaction between socioeconomic background and higher education in social mobility in the United States and Europe. This quantitative analysis has provided valuable insights into the persistent nature of inequality and the changing landscape of economic and social mobility in the U.S.

Michael Hout's scholarship on religion combines demographic rigor with rich survey data, most notably from the General Social Survey (GSS), to illuminate patterns of affiliation, attendance, and belief. In “The Center Doesn’t Hold: Church Attendance in the United States, 1940–1984” (1987), Hout and Andrew M. Greeley observed that “official attendance counts fail to capture the ebb and flow of religious participation,” highlighting the tendency of individuals to overreport churchgoing and the danger of relying exclusively on institutional figures. These findings anticipated their later argument in “The Secularization Myth” (1989) that perceived religious decline may be overstated when demographic evidence—especially birth rates, intergenerational retention, and survey-based nuances—is overlooked. At the same time, Hout and Greeley's “Musical Chairs: Patterns of Denominational Change in the United States” (1988) underscored the complexity of affiliation switching: Catholics, Protestants, and others frequently shifted denominational ties without necessarily abandoning religion entirely.

Hout deepened these themes by studying fertility's outsized impact on denominational growth. He, Greeley, and Melissa J. Wilde wrote in “The Demographic Imperative in Religious Change” (2001) that “higher birth rates within evangelical and sectarian groups, coupled with demographic momentum, have a profound influence on American religious markets.” His analyses of Catholic persistence, such as “St. Peter’s Leaky Boat: Falling Intergenerational Persistence Among US-Born Catholics Since 1974” (2016), show younger cohorts drifting from active ties due to political dissatisfaction and cultural shifts; yet he notes that Catholic identity remains resilient overall, with many “returnees” later in life, echoing his observation in “Counting the Returnees” (1990) that “religious affiliation often reemerges in the wake of marriage, childbirth, or other family milestones.”

A further pillar of Hout's work explores the rising number of Americans with “no religious preference,” which he and Claude S. Fischer attribute partly to political backlash in “Explaining the Rise of Americans with No Religious Preference” (2002). In “Religious Ambivalence, Liminality, and the Increase of No Religious Preference in the United States, 2006–2014” (2017), Hout describes a “liminal state” in which many retain private spiritual beliefs while rejecting organized religion, often due to partisan conflicts over moral issues. He also connects religious participation to subjective well-being, cautioning in “Religion and Happiness” (2012) that “the social networks and communal support found in religious groups may foster happiness,” although economic inequalities and generational turnover strongly modulate affiliation patterns. Throughout, Hout has advocated meticulous demographic methods—outlined in “Demographic Methods for the Study of Religion” (2003)—to capture how family formation, mortality, and cohort replacement shape the American religious landscape in ways that defy a simplistic “secularization” narrative.

Methodological contributions

Michael Hout's research approach has significantly shaped quantitative sociology, particularly by pairing advanced statistical techniques with demographic insights. Early in his career, Hout applied and refined log-linear models to examine intergenerational mobility and social stratification in “Association and Heterogeneity: Structural Models of Similarities and Differences” (1987). He collaborated with Leo A. Goodman to extend these innovations in “Statistical Methods and Graphical Displays for Comparing How Two-Way Associations Vary Among Countries, Among Groups, or Over Time” (1998), introducing uniform association models that disentangle the impact of social background, education, and labor market conditions from purely individual attributes. Building on these foundations, Hout's later work integrated multilevel and longitudinal approaches to capture cohort effects and time-based shifts in phenomena such as religious affiliation and occupational structure. As he has emphasized in “Demographic Methods for the Study of Religion” (2003), macro-level transformations—whether in class identification or faith communities—cannot be fully understood without considering how births, deaths, and generational replacement intersect with cultural variables.

Hout's commitment to robust data infrastructure is highlighted by his leadership of the General Social Survey (GSS). During his tenure as chair of the GSS Board of Overseers (1997–2001) and as co-principal investigator (2009–2016), Hout spearheaded the digitization of occupational data, standardizing decades of survey responses to the 2010 census classification—a move that, in the words of a later overview, “allowed researchers to systematically analyze long-term occupational trends under a consistent coding scheme, thereby enabling new insights into social mobility, class identification, and demographic change.” His co-authored article, “Reliability of the Core Items in the General Social Survey: Estimates from the Three-wave Panels, 2006–2014” (2016), further demonstrates his focus on methodological rigor by examining how repeated survey administrations handle measurement error. Likewise, “Updating a Time Series of Survey Questions: The Case of Abortion Attitudes in the General Social Survey” (2022) showcases best practices for revising longstanding questions without compromising historical comparability—an approach closely tied to Hout's overarching belief that robust and accessible data are essential for advancing empirical knowledge of social change. In parallel, his involvement in large-scale projects like the American Opportunity Study underscores a continuing drive to link demographic methods with real-world policy and to ensure that new data infrastructures remain publicly available for the next generation of sociological research.