"At the Starting Line: Rural Poverty and Inequality among Hispanic Newborns" Abstract The recent movement of Hispanics into rural immigrant destinations has sometimes deflected attention from another major source of rural population growth – fertility. High rates of Hispanic fertility raise an important question: Do Hispanic newborn babies start life’s race behind the starting line,…

"Policy without politics? Domestic agendas, market pressures and "informal but tough" economic conditionality in the Italian labour market reform"

"Child care in Italy: are there social class differences in the access to services?" abstract Child care has become increasingly central in the debate about the transformation and the recalibration of the welfare state. If the welfare state debate until the 1990s was mainly centered around policy fields such as pensions and unemployment benefits (Esping-Andersen,…

"Is America Going to Become Less Conservative?:  Immigrants, Place of Settlement and Partisan Acquisition." Abstract As Latinos become the largest ethnic minority in the United States, commentators have argued that their presence will eventually shift the partisan composition of even the most conservative states.  Will it?  There are competing research findings on mobility and partisanship.  One strand suggests…

"What Things Can We Do with Words? Answers from Italian Fascism (1919–1922) and Georgia Lynchings (1875–1930)" abstract The talk illustrates a quantitative social science approach to texts developed by the author, Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA). QNA relies on computer-assisted story grammars to analyze narrative, where a story grammar is the simple Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) structure. In…