State or market? Italians' attitudes and the role of social class in the last thirty years

The article investigates whether and how Italians’ attitudes towards the role of the state and the market have changed between 1990 and 2020. Specifically, it will investigate two sets of opposite attitudes: individualism versus collectivism, and free market liberalism versus statism. Two opposing macro hypotheses are considered. The first is that Italian citizens adopt attitudes that are in line with policy trends (policy feedback), while the second is that there is a tendency to develop a compensatory reaction (thermostat effect). In fact, the regulation of Italian capitalism has seen important changes in the last thirty years in Italy. Economic and social policies have undergone reform processes in the direction of deregulation and privatization. Moreover, the article seeks to understand whether and to what extent belonging to a given social class influences these attitudes. The findings show that the influence of class has continued to be significant over the period, though it has weakened overall as a result of convergence towards collectivist-statist values. This trend can be interpreted as reflecting a thermostat effect

Cultural influences on the gender division of household labor. Evidence from migrant populations in Europe.

Does culture influence the gender division of household labor? Many family scholars are convinced that this is the case, but they can rarely make robust causal inferences because regressions of individual behavioral data on attitudes data (the most frequently performed kind of analysis) suffer from spuriousness and reverse causation problems. In this contribution I address this issue by applying a method derived from epidemiology and recently imported in economics (Fernandez 2011) and sociology (Polavieja 2015). Culture is measured at the countries of origin among natives and then imputed to immigrants of those cultures observed in different destination countries. Immigrants are assumed to have inherited at least in part the cultural traits of their national origin. In this way their behaviors, by construction, cannot affect their culture. For this analysis, I used ESS data (round 5) on migrant families and their division of household labor matched with EVS data (wave 4) on cultural traits observed at their countries of origin (N = about 2000 immigrants resident in 28 host countries, coming from 43 different European origins). I found that several cultural traits, that are expressions of traditional gender role arrangements, significantly and substantially affect the division of household labor of migrants.Keywords: Epidemiological Approach, Housework, Ancestry Culture, Instrumental Variable Regressio

Explaining the Male Contribution to Household Labor: Does Peers’ Behavior Matter?

Notwithstanding a large strand of research over the last forty years, the gender division of household labor still remains a puzzle for social scientists. In this article, we concentrate on men’s behavior because it has revealed to be particularly resistant to change: the movement toward equality in the division of household labor, occurred during the last decades, was mostly due to changes in women’s behaviors rather than men’s. To understand why the pace of male change has been so slow, we focus on a factor that has never been considered in the division of household labor: the role of peers’ behavior. At the theoretical level, we address the problem within the framework of the diffusion of social innovations, like an egalitarian division of household labor is. At the methodological level, we introduce an experimental vignette design embedded in a survey. In this way, we deal with endogeneity issues that are typical in the estimation of peer effects. By showing randomized versions of the same story where peers’ behavior is manipulated, we assess, through respondents’ judgments, the likelihood that men’s household labor changes as a consequence of peers’ domestic behavior. Our findings show that peers count in pushing men to do more housework and childcare. However, their effect is constrained by other characteristics of the egalitarian division of household labor