Hardly a week goes by without reports of elected officials – often pictured as ‘populists’ – having used vitriolic language and attacked the personal traits of their opponents. In a context of ‘restyling of politics’, the style of political actors is presented as increasingly emotive, personalised, and confrontational. In the absence of systematic comparative study, such claims remain however trivial intuitions and anecdotes that are as old as politics. This raises critical questions: are modern political styles new trends or old habits? What are the institutional and political factors that constrain or favour the rise of certain styles? The POLSTYLE project provides a groundbreaking empirical and theoretical contribution by analysing the evolutions of political styles in four European democracies since 1960. It posits that configurational evolutions shape the stability and changes of political styles over time: it depends upon the varying responses of the types of actors, arenas and political systems vis-à-vis abrupt exogenous shocks and endogenous incremental changes. For these empirical and theoretical goals, the project builds a unique dataset of actors’ political styles performing in various arenas (TV, print press, parliaments, and Twitter). Different indicators will trace evolutions of political styles in terms of contents, nature of interactions and forms of expressions. Finally, the project develops a theory that explains how and why patterns of styles unfold according to configurational evolutions. Overall, the POLSTYLE project decisively contribute to ongoing theoretical debates about the nature of political representation in modern democracies, and how democratic linkages with voters are built on a daily basis. While some scholars and political observers suggest that current political styles entail nothing less than the inexorable decline of democracy; other scholars have praised them as virtues for the functioning of our democracies.

Plant development is based on the activity of meristems. The aerial part of plants is generated from the activity of the shoot apical meristem (SAM). These meristems determine the plant architecture and correct plant architecture have an immense impact in crop productivity. In the plant model Arabidopsis thaliana, a key gene for the correct functioning of the SAM is SHOOT MERISTEMLESS (STM). To study the function of this gene and to apply this knowledge to control plant architecture to generate valuable new plant varieties is of vital importance to determine how this gene is regulated throughout development. Gene regulation is controlled mainly by the action of transcription factors at transcriptional level and also by RNA-binding factors at post-transcriptional level. Then the goal of the project is to determine the set of transcription factors and RNA-binding factors that regulate STM throughout plant development. Current techniques for the determination of the set of factors regulating a gene give partial results, are time-consuming and require huge amounts of biological samples. Then, new tools have to be developed. The most promising ones involve the use of quantitative Proteomics with the latest advances of high-resolution Mass Spectrometry. We take advantage in the recognized expertise in this field of Proteomics by the host institution to develop these new techniques and put them available for the research community. In particular, the results and new discoveries obtained from this project are intended to represent a great progress in plant research.

Rates of domestic violence and the relative risk of premature death for women are higher in sub-Saharan Africa than in any other region. Yet we know remarkably little about the economic forces, incentives and constraints that drive discrimination against women in this region, making it hard to identify policy levers to address the problem. This project will help fill this gap. I will investigate gender discrimination from two complementary perspectives. First, through the lens of economic history, I will investigate the forces driving trends in women’s relative well-being since slavery. To quantify the evolution of well-being of sub-Saharan women relative to men, I will use three types of historical data: anthropometric indicators (relative height), vital statistics (to compute numbers of missing women), and outcomes of formal and informal family law disputes. I will then investigate how major economic developments and changes in family laws differentially affected women’s welfare across ethnic groups with different norms on women’s roles and rights. Second, using intra-household economic models, I will provide new insights into domestic violence and gender bias in access to crucial resources in present-day Africa. I will develop a new household model that incorporates gender identity and endogenous outside options to explore the relationship between women’s empowerment and the use of violence. Using the notion of strategic delegation, I will propose a new rationale for the separation of budgets often observed in African households and generate predictions of how improvements in women’s outside options affect welfare. Finally, with first hand data, I will investigate intra-household differences in nutrition and work effort in times of food shortage from the points of view of efficiency and equity. I will use activity trackers as an innovative means of collecting high quality data on work effort and thus overcome data limitations restricting the existing literature

In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), high levels of ethnic diversity have often been considered in quantitative research as constraining social and economic development. Yet most of the research on ethnicity and development has given little thought to the complexity of ethnic identities, treating ethnic identity as a static affiliation to a single group. As such, it is not easy to reconcile findings from this literature with more recent empirical work that stress that multi-ethnicity is not a rare phenomenon in SSA and that ethnic identity identities may be less salient than national identities. In response, the TransmId project (Intergenerational Transmission of Identity in sub-Saharan Africa) proposes a novel understanding of ethnicity by focusing on the intergenerational transmission (IGT) of identity in SSA. By studying which identity traits (e.g. language use, religious practice) are passed down generations, we can gain a more nuanced understanding of ethnicity while considering it both as socially salient and dynamic. The project combines insights from the theoretical economic literature on parental investment in IGT with perspectives from political science and sociology on institutional factors and socialisation mechanisms. TransmId relies on economic modelling, statistical analyses, and first-hand data. The project’s workflow follows the sequence of intergenerational transmission over generations, from marriage decisions to investments in children’s identities. First, I will focus on understanding the drivers of intermarriages using data from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Second, I will design a lab experiment in Kenya to assess parents’ preferences regarding their children’s identity (e.g. multi-ethnicity, ethnic and national identities). Third, building on case studies and on a cross-country longitudinal analysis, TransmId will provide a comparative perspective on the role of institutional contexts in shaping IGT decisions.