"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…

"The changing political economy of  self-employment in Italy" abstract This presentation is based on a research on self-employment carried out in 2010-12 in Italy, and published in a book in 2012 (C. Ranci, (ed.) Partite Iva. Il lavoro autonomo nella crisi italiana, Il Mulino, 2012). The research was focused on a general reconstruction of the…

"Taking the Cloak Off the DAG:  The New Frontier of Causal Analysis in the Social Sciences" Abstract The counterfactual approach to causal analysis will continue to transform the social sciences in the next decade.  The potential outcome model, which was largely developed in statistics and economics between 1975 and 2005, has now been joined by…

"The Global Auction for High Skilled Jobs and the Death of Human Capital" abstract For decades, the idea that more education will lead to greater individual and national prosperity has been a cornerstone of developed economies. Indeed, it is almost universally believed that college diplomas give Americans and Europeans a competitive advantage in the global…

"The ideational dimension of civil society: an empirical study ofChinese activists and NGO leaders" (at Campus Luigi Einaudi (CLE), University of Torino, Lungodora Siena 100/a, classroom D4) abstract Despite recent policy changes, governmental monitoring and control of grassroots NGOs remain pervasive and effective to a large extent in China. The enforcement of control over NGOs is complicated…

"Do women know less about politics than men? The gender gap in Political Knowledge" Abstract:This study analyzes the gender differences in political knowledge in a rarely studied area: Europe. The results are obtained via 2-level hierarchical linear models using the 2009 European Election Studies, Voter Study (EES) and show that men provide more correct answers…

"Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism" abstract Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism studies distributive politics:  how parties and governments use material resources to win elections. The authors develop a theory that explains why loyal supporters, rather than swing voters, tend to benefit from pork-barrel politics; why poverty encourages clientelism and vote buying; and why redistribution and voter participation do…

"Can China Close its Huge Rural-Urban Gap?" abstract China today may have the sharpest social cleavage between its rural and urban citizens of any country on earth, with urban households on average having close to 4 times the income of rural households.  Paradoxically, this sharp social cleavage is mainly a legacy of the socialist system…

"Intergovernmentalism and its limits: The implications of the Euro crisis on the European Union"

"Concealed Advantage: The US Federal Reserve's Financial Intervention after 2007" abstract The Federal Reserve is an outlier in two respects: it enjoys unprecedented autonomy and it controls enormous authority and resources across a broad range of financial issues. That the Fed makes unilateral decisions that commit and impact trillions of public and private funds is…

"Managing Regulation - A Firm's Perspective" Abstract When dealing with problems of market access, firms are frequently faced with a perplexing number of sectoral and cross-sectoral regulators at the national, European and international level. They have to interact with these regulators in order to obtain decisions necessary for their operations. Given multiple regulators at the…

"Value Neutral Research: Methodological Challenges of Ethnographic Research in Critical Security Studies" abstract This paper grown out of a recurring practical concern for critical approaches to security broadly understood as including the full range of post-linguistic turn approaches to security. Work in these traditions appears to violate one of the most fundamental principles of work…

"Industrial Agglomeration vs. Clusters – “Real” Communication or is it all “in the air”?" Abstract The phenomenon of industrial concentration has many names: agglomeration, industrial districts, and clusters are but a few. Industrial clusters have maintained their importance in today’s economy, but the definition of clusters is vague and inclusive. With two decades of research…

"N=2: The comparative study of the EU and the US as a research programme" abstract EU-US comparisons have proliferated in the past two decades or so. Yet by and large this scholarship so far has proceeded without a serious reflection on its own nature, raison d’être, and key characteristics—a lack of ‘self-awareness’ which in turn hampers mutual…

"Social Dialogue in the New Member States and the Great Recession: Only Doom and Gloom?"

"The Return of Geopolitics in Europe? Social mechanisms and foreign policy identity crises" abstract The end of the Cold War demonstrated the historical possibility of peaceful change and seemingly showed the superiority of non-realist approaches in International Relations. Yet in the post-Cold War period many European countries have experienced a resurgence of a distinctively realist…

"A formal model of decision-making on independence and accountability of regulatory agencies" abstract This paper aims to analyse, in theoretical terms, the concepts of independence and accountability, and at theorizing their relationship. Until now, the literature has disregarded (or not highlighted to a sufficient extent) the existence of an inverse relationship between independence and accountability.…