RESEARCH

Abstract: Discourse on gender-based violence started as a political struggle driven by feminist movements allied with progressive parties in the 1970s. However, in recent years, both progressive and conservative Italian parties have proposed and approved laws to combat gender-based violence. The combination of cross-partisan legislation and sharp cultural divisions makes Italy an interesting case for examining how polarization can persist alongside legislative consensus. This study draws on a large corpus of newspaper articles (7,978) from progressive, moderate, and conservative national outlets to address the following questions: How did the distribution of frames of gender-based violence vary across the political spectrum between 2005 and 2023 (ideological polarization)? Did newspapers make explicit adversarial claims against the opposing political side (affective polarization), and if so, around which frames? Combining Structural Topic Modeling and qualitative content analysis, this article shows that the salience of gender-based violence increased across the political spectrum. However, ideological polarization persists regarding how newspapers describe gender-based violence and which solutions they privilege, with progressives increasingly focusing on preventive, rather than punitive, interventions. At the same time, gender-based violence became a catalyst for deep partisan divisions around gender identity and immigration, two discursive overlaps that fuel affective polarization. By examining the framing process as a site of both ideological and affective polarization, this study bridges the literatures on social problems and political polarization and provides a data-driven understanding about the actual content of opposing positions. 

Abstract: Between 2004 and 2021, the number of judicial complaints filed for domestic violence in Italy quadrupled. Over the same period, the number of antiviolence centers (AVCs) providing support to women victims of violence increased from roughly 100 to nearly 400 nationwide. This study investigates the effect of AVC openings on judicial complaints filed for domestic violence. Leveraging an original province-level dataset and an event-study design with staggered treatment adoption, I find that the opening of an AVC leads to an increase in domestic violence complaints filed by women and against men. Results are particularly pronounced in smaller provinces and provinces with greater gender inequalities in the labor market. Such reporting increases among the Italian but not among the foreign population. While these results may be due to increases in violence stemming from retaliation, I show that self-reported experiences of violence do not increase during this period, supporting the conclusion that localized institutional interventions - such as the establishment of AVCs - can influence patterns of legal mobilization among vulnerable groups.

Abstract: Italian antiviolence centers (AVCs) are gender-segregated spaces that offer publicly funded support to “women victims of male violence.” In today’s context of heightened visibility and polarization around transgender people, the seemingly simple restriction to “women” requires frontline antiviolence workers to engage in an unspoken process of gender determination – the social practice of assigning others to gender categories. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 51 women working or volunteering in AVCs across 13 Italian regions, this article examines how antiviolence workers determine who is eligible for support. Despite some tensions, respondents adopt a predominantly trans inclusive approach, shaped by external political conditions and the characteristics of the field. Respondents’ trans inclusiveness emerges as a coalition-building strategy in response to a conservative government that, resisting cultural interventions, combines punitive measures with biological essentialism and transmisogyny. By recognizing trans women as women victims of male violence, antiviolence workers reinforce their understanding of gender-based violence as culturally rather than biologically produced and further motivate their commitment to cultural change, despite the risk of destabilizing binary gender categories. This study contributes to scholarship on gender determination, identity politics, and boundary-setting in gender-segregated spaces, revealing how gendered notions of violence and victimhood shape the recognition of trans women as women in the antiviolence field.

Abstract: While barely 10% of Italian births were to unmarried mothers in 1999, by 2019 this figure reached 34%. A similar change had occurred decades before in other European countries, but in Italy, a country known for its religiosity and strong attachment to familial values, this substantial and rapid increase was uncertain and even surprising. Analyzing Census data from 2001 to 2019, I decompose this rise into increased nonmarital fertility, decreased marital fertility, and change in the fraction of women married and unmarried. I show that between 2001 and 2011, the rise in the Nonmarital Fertility Ratio (NFR) mainly reflected the increased nonmarital fertility, while between 2011 and 2019, the rise reflected both the growth in the fraction of women who were unmarried and a decline in marital fertility. Shifts in population composition of reproductive age women over time, such as the higher proportion of older women or the higher fraction of foreign women, did not explain these changing patterns. Patterns of nonmarital fertility differed across regions, with earlier and faster adoption in Northern and Central Italy. These demographic patterns are consistent with a generational shift in attitudes towards a greater acceptance of nonmarital births.  

Abstract: Research suggests that child development is positively affected when families can access overlapping, simultaneous forms of public assistance. Universal participation in social safety net programs is rare among eligible populations, though, and assessing the dynamics of multiple benefits use is particularly complex: which households with children receive multiple benefits, which combinations of benefits are most common, and which households are most likely to access benefits as the safety net expands in some ways and contracts in others? We use almost 40 years of data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to examine trends in both the number of public benefits accessed by American households with children and the types and combinations of benefits that households access. We find that the percentage of households with children using at least two benefits has increased, but the beneficiaries of increasing benefit use have been disproportionately higher-educated, White, and married households with incomes above the poverty line.  

Abstract: For a sample of Central and Eastern European countries, characterized by historically high female labor force participation and currently low fertility rates, we analyze whether fathers' increased involvement in the family (housework and childcare) has the potential of increasing both fertility and maternal employment. Using two waves of the Generations and Gender Survey, we show that more paternal involvement in the family increases the likelihood that the mother will have a second child and work full-time. Men's fertility and work decisions are instead unrelated to mothers' housework and childcare. We also show that fathers' involvement in housework plays a more important role than involvement in childcare. The role of fathers' involvement in housework is confirmed when we consider women who initially wanted or intended to have a child, whose partner also wanted a child, or who intended to continue working.  

Abstract: Financialization is playing an increasingly significant role in shaping inequalities in modern societies. In a landscape where finance is becoming more important, women have lower financial literacy and inclusion than men, and racial/ethnic minority groups are worse off compared to the White population. However, the impact of the intersection of gender and race in this area is not well understood. Using data from the 2015 and 2018 U.S. National Financial Capability Study (NFCS), we document distinct intersectional inequalities in financial literacy and inclusion. In addition to the expected disparities along gender and racial lines, we find that the gender gap in financial literacy among Black individuals is significantly smaller than among any other race and ethnic group. Specifically, Black men are the most disadvantaged when it comes to financial literacy and inclusion. Even after considering pathways such as education, family, and employment status, these intersectional financialization divides persist. Our findings indicate that inequalities related to finance and the policies designed to address them cannot be separated from the systemic structural inequalities within which they are created and perpetuated.  

Abstract: In this paper we examine feelings towards feminists over the last three decades in the U.S. We are particularly interested in popular reports of a growing gender divide in support for feminists and the potential role of education to any such observed change. Drawing on nationally representative data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) over the period 1988 to 2020, we examine responses to a feeling thermometer assessing warmth towards feminists on a scale from 0 (cold) to 100 (warm) degrees. Results show that the gender gap in average warmth towards feminists increased from just 1 degree in 1988 to 7 degrees in 2020, with women feeling increasingly warmly towards feminists compared to men over time. However, levels and trends in the gender gap vary by education. In 2020, the gender gap in warmth towards feminists was twice as large among those with some college education compared to those with a high school education or less. Similarly, the change in the gender gap from 1988 and 2020 was twice as large for those with some college education than for those with a high school education or less. OLS regression models confirm that the increasing gender gap in warmth towards feminists is statistically significant and robust to the inclusion of sociodemographic covariates. Decomposition analyses suggest that changes in relationships between education and warmth towards feminists contribute more to the change in the gender gap between 1988 and 2020 than changes in college enrollment. Importantly, the relationship between education and warmth towards feminists strengthened over time primarily for women. Additional analyses reveal distinctive patterns by age. While feelings toward feminists warmed over time among young college-educated men, and older men with and without college, feelings towards feminists cooled among young, less-educated men.

Abstract: Understanding how group disparities vary across contexts is central to social science. Longitudinal Kitagawa-Oaxaca-Blinder (KOB) decompositions examine changes in mean group disparities over time, but many questions concern distributional features beyond the mean and comparisons beyond time. We introduce a generalized KOB (gKOB) framework to address these questions. First, it uses recentered influence functions (RIFs) to decompose disparities in statistics beyond the mean. Second, it treats time as one contextual dimension, extending the analysis to places and other settings. Third, it defines estimands nonparametrically, allowing multiple estimation strategies. We illustrate gKOB using 2024 ANES data to compare gender disparities in attitudes toward feminists across the Southern and Non-Southern United States. We derive a general RIF for kurtosis to decompose contextual contrasts in distributional shape, showing that covariates explain more of the contrasts in kurtosis than in mean attitudes. More broadly, gKOB reveals contextual variation in group disparities beyond average differences.