Research Motivation
At the dawn of social science research, Aristotle of Stagira argued that inequality was the prime “origin of rebellions” (Politics 2019, V, 1301b), as its excessive levels would create “a state of slaves and despots, of people that envy and people that despise” (Politics, V, 1295b).
More than two millennia later, inequality in its many forms is a central concern for societies and democracies. As a social scientist, my broader goal is to explore how inequalities interact with the social, economic, and political domains. More specifically, I study the interplay between Social Stratification, Demography, and Democracy.
Social Stratification and Democracy
In my first stream of research, I examine how different forms of social stratification affects socio-political outcomes that are important for democracy, such as voter turnout (European Sociological Review, 2021; British Journal of Sociology, 2023; Frontiers in Political Science, 2023), social trust (Social Science Research, 2023), social participation (Participation and Conflict/Partecipazione e Conflitto, 2022), political efficacy, party choice, attitudes towards migrants, and more generally attitudes towards democracy.
I contribute to this stream by highlighting how emerging forms of stratification, such as unemployment scarring and precarious work, affect such outcomes, or by studying how established forms of social stratification affect increasingly relevant political concepts (origin/destination social class and political efficacy).
The common pattern emerging from this stream is that socio-economic vulnerability typically translates into political marginality, with contextual socio-economic dynamics either mitigating or exacerbating this relationship.
Social Stratification and Demography
In a second stream, with Richard Breen and Brian Nolan, we examine how earnings inequality is shaped by socio-demographic patterns in OECD countries. Relying on novel decomposition and counterfactual approaches for measures of inequality such as Half the Squared Coefficient of Variation (HSCV/GE(2)) or the Gini Coefficient, we find that the proportion of households led by single women is powerfully associated with higher inequality (Journal of Economic Inequality, 2023).
In a separate paper (Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2023), we focus more on how gender inequality in the labour market: by counterfactually closing gender gaps in employment, hours, and pay in 22 OECD countries, we find out that equalising participation levels would powerfully decrease inequality across most countries, whereas equalising hours and pay is more relevant in countries were participation levels are relatively high
Social Stratification, Demography, and Democracy
Bringing everything together, I study how stratification interacts with demographic aspects to affect democracy. In a work with Geoffrey Evans, we show that ideological distance between the Conservative and Labour parties in the UK depresses turnout overall, and particularly so for citizens in the bottom class and education strata. However, the most affected are young individuals in those strata, without a developed turnout habit.
Following up on the unemployment-turnout comparative study (ESR, 2021), I explore how unemployment experiences affect electoral participation with panel data in the UK (British Journal of Sociology, 2023). Building on the impressionable years framework, I show that unemployment experiences taking place before the age of 35 strongly depress electoral participation, while those after 35 do not have a statistically significant impact.
In sum, joining Social Stratification with a Life-Course approaches helps us further illuminate political outcomes.
The Role of Context and Methods
During the second year of the Ph.D., Gøsta Esping-Andersen told our cohort: “As sociologists, always ask yourself: under what conditions?
Heeding this advice, my research focuses strongly on the interplay between macro-social dynamics and individual characteristics in shaping outcomes. The works on electoral participation, social trust, and social participation show that contextual unemployment and individual unemployment may combine counter-intuitively in affecting socio-political outcomes, due to mechanisms such as social stigma and differential habituation. These examples highlight the broader sociological relevance of the interaction between social structure and agency.
Methodologically, I match these interests with an expertise in multilevel models (Social Science Research, 2023), typically with cross-level interactions, in panel data, instrumental in understanding the role of life-cycle from a quasi-causal perspective (British Journal of Sociology, 2023), and in counterfactual approaches (Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 2023)