seminar and workshop led by Ilian Dinas and Biljana Meiske from the European University Institute.
15 05 2025
Dear All,
The Centre of Excellence in the Social Sciences (CESS) is pleased to invite you to attend a seminar and workshop led by Ilian Dinas and Biljana Meiske from the European University Institute.
ISESS SEMINAR:
Title: Mating Market Competition and Gender Norms
Date: Wednesday, May 21, 2025
Time: 13:15 – 14:15
Location: Old Library, Main Campus, University of Warsaw, Room 308 (Level III), Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28
More information here.
This seminar will be held in English and will take place in person only. There will be no online streaming. No registration is required.
WORKSHOP:
Title: Cultural Transmission
Date: Thursday, May 22, 2025
Time: 10:00 – 14:00
Location: Room 1.110 (1st floor) at the Faculty of Modern Languages, Dobra 55
Registration (until May 18): Registration form
More information here.
Workshop abstract:
Culture—understood as the set of beliefs, norms, and preferences shaped through human interaction and transmitted across generations—has been shown to influence behavior beyond the effects of institutions or genes alone. This short-term workshop explores the mechanisms of cultural transmission, the conditions that sustain cultural continuity, and the forces that drive cultural change. We will examine both vertical and horizontal pathways of transmission, with particular attention to the role of social norms in maintaining or shifting cultural patterns. The workshop draws on examples from sociology, political science, and economics to illustrate how cultural change unfolds in diverse settings.
Speaker Bio:
Elias Dinas holds the Swiss Chair in Federalism, Democracy and International Governance. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the European University Institute (2010) and his research interests include the dynamics of political socialization, the downstream effects of institutional interventions and the legacy of authoritarian rule on the ideological predispositions of citizens in new democracies. He has also a keen interest in research methodology. His work has been published, among others, in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and Political Analysis and mentioned in The Economist, the Atlantic and the New York Times.
Biljana Meiske completed her PhD in Economics in 2022 from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance. She comes to the EUI after a one-year postdoc at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the National Research Council of Italy in Rome. Her research uses insights from behavioural economics and experimental methods to study conflict and cooperative behaviour. Her previous work studied the drivers of opposition to new immigration among established immigrants, punishing behaviour in social networks, the importance of monetary status for enjoyed influence, the effects of economic shocks on conflict behaviour etc.
During the Fellowship at the EUI, Biljana wants to pursue her research on understanding the origins and consequences of discriminatory behaviour and the policies employed to limit it. She is particularly interested in cultural policies and collective memory institutions and their effect on the norms and behaviours in the societies subjected to them. At the EUI, Biljana plans to collaborate with the researchers centred around ‘Democracy in the 21st century’ research cluster.
Seminar abstract:
We study norms regulating socially acceptable female behavior and how between-group competition in the mating market shapes their development. We focus on a case study featuring an inflow of ethnic Greek refugees arriving from Turkey following the Greco-Turkish conflict in the early 20th century and examine how the composition of the incoming refugee population influenced local gender norms. We leverage the fact that many male refugees were captured or executed before emigrating, resulting in a female-skewed refugee population, thereby triggering a competition shock in the mating market. At the time, prevailing norms stigmatized women living outside male-headed households, making female refugees vulnerable to stereotypes of low moral standards. For a sufficient level of competition, an individual from the local population has an incentive to double down on conservative gender norms as a means of undermining the reputation of the newcomer competitors, even if this does not align with their true preferences. Specifically, individuals invested in the mating prospects of local women—whether for themselves or their families—benefitted from emphasizing female ‘purity’ as a valued trait, as doing so amplified their comparative advantage over the morally stigmatized competition. We hypothesize that this, in turn, led to an increased value placed on conservative values signaled by female behavior. To study this idea, we exploit the variation in the gender composition of refugees in each locality as a proxy for the intensity of competition relying on the as-good-as-random allocation of refugees across Northen Greece. We combine data from multiple censuses; marriage registries; and a fine-tailored survey to test our proposed mechanism against competing explanations for the observed patterns.
We look forward to welcoming you to these events.