Do leaders’ promises raise expectations of transformative reform, and what follows when delivery fails? I study Giuseppe Garibaldi’s 1860 march through Southern Italy. I exploit the unanticipated halt at Vairano to compare municipalities he visited with similar places he was on course to reach but did not. Visited towns aligned with unification in the short run, as shown by a lower incidence of brigandage in 1861. Over time, they disengaged from national politics: in 1913, the first election with male universal suffrage, turnout was lower in the municipalities he visited. Person-centered legacies mirror this arc: these places sent fewer volunteers to Garibaldi’s corps in 1866 and gave less support in 1948 to a party that campaigned on his image. Onomastic data from military rolls show an immediate rise, then a mid-1860s reversal, in boys named Giuseppe, alongside dips in Savoy-aligned names. Effects are strongest where the “cheap bread” pledge mattered most ex ante, pointing to expectations as the key mechanism. Charisma thus acts as an expectations multiplier: it accelerates mobilization, but when institutions do not deliver, it magnifies disenchantment, leaving durable imprints on participation, representation, and political memory.

Working paper available soon!

How do mass media shape gender norms? This paper studies the expansion of local newspapers in Victorian and Edwardian Britain and their impact on women’s labor supply, marriage, fertility, and political mobilization. We link data on the staggered arrival of newspapers across 620 districts to census microdata, petition records, and newspaper text. Using a dynamic difference-in-differences design, we find that, on average, newspaper access reinforced traditional gender roles: female labor force participation declined, marriage accelerated, and fertility rose. Yet these patterns reversed in districts exposed to a major feminist shock—the 1866 suffrage petition for women's suffrage. In these areas, newspapers increased women’s labor market participation, delayed marriage, and reduced fertility. Effects were strongest in places with lower baseline female empowerment. Text analysis reveals that positive framing of the petition independently boosted female labor supply. Moreover, exposure to favorable coverage of the 1866 petition increased local petitioning rates for female political emancipation, suggesting media shaped not only beliefs but collective action. These results show that newspapers acted not just as information sources, but as coordination technologies—amplifying or stalling change depending on timing, content, and narrative salience. Symbolic inclusion can shift social equilibria—but the emancipatory power of media depends on who is visible, when, and how.

Can gender roles and gender equality explain the incidence and brutality of armed conflicts? While qualitative studies have long recognized the impact of unequal gender roles on violence, no empirical study has already explored this relationship. Feminist scholars in international relations have recently made a stand to affirm how the juxtaposition of privileged masculinity and “devalorized” femininity can contribute to explaining the patterns of violence. Indeed, as the sociologist Johan Galtung explains, the mutual relationship between structural and cultural violence helps in understanding how gender-related inequalities can become inescapable rationalizations of war-initiation. This essay aims at quantitatively investigating whether the intra-regional level of gender equality has an impact on the occurrence of internal conflicts and the number of battle-related deaths. I collect fine-grained geographical data on conflict and gender norms from 29 countries of continental Africa. Results indicate that higher gender equality leads to less brutal (but not fewer) conflicts. To establish causality, I exploit the distance to the closest water spring as an instrument for gender roles, by relying on Ester Boserup’s theory of the role of women in human development. Indeed, collecting water is a traditionally female occupation and women have been used to carry heavy loads over long and winding routes, taking away valuable time from income-generating jobs and education. IV estimates confirm that improvements in gender equality reduce the brutality but not the incidence of conflicts: a 1 standard deviation increase in gender equality results in 0.21 s.d. less fatalities in conflicts.