We have set up a full research team according to the original plan. The team has included: 1 academic coordinator; up to 5 postdoctoral fellows at the peak of the project; 1 data analyst for the full reporting period; 3 research assistants; 1 senior visitor during two academic years.
The research team has been structured as follows. Each postdoctoral fellow has been assigned to 1 country or set of countries and/or 1 topic: Chit Basu and Paulo Serôdio to the United Kingdom; Christophe Lévêque and Filip Kostelka to France; Zsuzsanna Magyar to Scandinavia; Marta Curto, Maayan Mor and Ingrid Maurerer to Germany; Dmitrii Kofanov to Russia; Marc Guinjoan to electoral institutions and, more specifically, malapportionment. The data analyst, who has worked with the digitization of maps and data, has provided support to all of them. The research analysts have worked with all postdocs.
We have collected electoral, social and economic data on France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom for the 19th century up until World War Two, Poland and Russia at the turn of the century, and Spain in the 1930s. We have also proceeded to match the different types of data using digitized maps or simply lists of administrative and political units. Data collection has taken slightly longer than expected: some data has been hard to obtain (particularly for France); even when the data was available, census recording practices turned out to be quite heterogeneous and/or confusing (in places like Britain or Sweden); matching census data and electoral records required building very detailed maps. Overcoming all these problems has been rather time intensive, delaying our initial plans by a few months.
The current products of our research include the following complete papers: “From political mobilization to electoral participation: Turnout in Barcelona in the 1930s” (published in the Journal of Politics), “The Rise of Swedish Social Democracy” (R&R in the British Journal of Political Science); "Democratizing from Within: British Elites and the Expansion of the Franchise” (to be submitted in September); “The Struggle for Political Emancipation and the Formation of Modern National Identities” (to be submitted in the Fall); “Family, Gender Norms, and Social Class: The Political Incorporation of Women in Sweden (1921-1960).”
