Mikołaj Szołtysek
Biographic Data
| ID | 172909 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mikołaj Szołtysek |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mikołaj |
| FAMILY NAME | Szołtysek |
| SIGNATURE | SZOŁTYSEK M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4814-5586 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 127 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 30 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Historical Europe in the Asian “mirror”
Scholars have long argued that the familial, demographic, and sociocultural conditions in historical Europe left little room for patriarchal bias compared to Asia. However, these claims have not been rigorously tested through large-scale, data-driven, comparative analyses and statistical modeling. This paper fills this gap by applying Gruber and Szołtysek (Hist Fam 2016. https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2014.1001769 ) Patriarchy Index to IPUMS-in…
The Patriarchy Index ten years after
This article revisits the Patriarchy Index (PI) a decade after its introduction, extending its scope to the United States and situating it within the broader North Atlantic demographic regime. Using harmonized census microdata (IPUMS USA, NAPP, Mosaic), we estimate PI values for the 1880 and 1910 U.S. censuses and compare them with contemporaneous European populations. We map these patterns at county scale and by race, revealing important interna…
Mosaic Database
This paper looks at the progress that the Mosaic database has enabled in the study of family structures in continental Europe in the past. Our main argument is that the combination of comprehensive archival research, digitization and computation, data mining, and open-access dissemination that is at the core of the Mosaic project is bringing about an important shift in the fundamental principles that have driven European family history research t…
European Family Patriarchy in the Past and Contemporary Developmental Inequalities
This paper aims to show that contemporary developmental outcomes in Europe vary with historical patterns of age and gender inequality. It builds on the authors' earlier work constructing the Patriarchy Index (PI), which measures age and gender inequality within households based on historical census data. The claimed relationships are tested in a regression framework in which the outcome variables are a set of development indicators (GDP per capit…
Missing girls’ in historical Europe
Recent research argues that discriminatory practices unduly inflated female excess mortality during infancy and childhood in historical Europe. This article reviews the existing evidence by (1) evaluating the sources that can be used to study this phenomenon; (2) providing a state-of-the-art account of the prevalence of these discriminatory practices, as well as the factors that explain them; and (3) outlining a research agenda that could fill in…
Missing girls’ in interwar Poland
Our testing of the relationship between child sex ratios (CSRs) and demographic, socioeconomic, and cultural diversity across nearly 300 districts of interwar Poland around 1931 yields a picture more complicated than common explanations of high masculinization of offspring. In line with existing literature, we found district-level CSRs to be positively associated with the extent of agriculture but negatively related to the relative spread of fema…
Family patriarchy and child sex ratios in historical Europe
Although recent findings suggest that gender-discriminatory practices unduly increased female mortality rates during infancy and childhood in historical Europe, especially in Southern and Eastern Europe, there is little research on the conditions that triggered these practices. Relying on child sex ratios (the number of boys per hundred girls in a particular age group) as a cumulative measure of sex-differential mortality around birth, infancy, a…
Inferring “missing girls” from child sex ratios in historical census data
The topic of “missing girls” in historical Europe has not only been mostly neglected, but previous research addressing this issue usually took the available information too lightly, either rejecting or accepting the claims that there was discrimination against female children, without assessing the possibility that the observed child sex ratios could be attributable to chance, mortality differentials, or registration quality. This article contrib…
Global and local correlations of Hajnal’s household formation markers in historical Europe
Previous scholarship has assumed global correlations between premarital service in husbandry, marriage age, the extent to which marriage coincided with the attainment of household headship, and the nuclear household structure. According to John Hajnal, these were the four core principles of historical household formation systems. However, whether such correlations applied universally across Europe remains uncertain. We test this possibility by ap…
Making a Place for Space
Much of the previous scholarship on the historical living arrangements of the aged has taken place without the benefit of large-scale harmonised census microdata and did not embrace even rudimentary forms of spatial modelling. Drawing on the pooled cross-sectional census microdata from the North Atlantic Population and Mosaic projects, we derive measures of intergenerational co-residence among the elderly for 277 regional populations from Catalon…
How Many Household Formation Systems Were There in Historic Europe? A View Across 256 Regions Using Partitioning Clustering Methods
This paper reconsiders one of historical demography’s most pertinent research problems: the fiddly concept of historical household formation systems. Using a massive repository of historical census micro-data from the North Atlantic Population Project and the Mosaic project, the four markers of Hajnal’s household formation rules were operationalized for 256 regional rural populations from Catalonia in the west to central Siberia in the east, betw…
One size does not fit all”
The extent of elderly residential isolation from kin varied considerably between European historical societies, but few attempts have been made to understand these patterns systematically across space. So far, large‐scale accounts of factors underlying these patterns have calibrated a global model based on a single regression equation, thus implicitly assuming that the relationships between elderly living arrangements and their correlates are spa…
Historical family systems and contemporary developmental outcomes
Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the role of the historical family as the instigator of disparate developmental trajectories. However, a major challenge faced by these studies was that they had to work around a lack of reliable historical data. This study demonstrates how embarking on the recent outburst of historical microdata infrastructures may help to improve these explorations by suggesting additional statistics and a derive…
Age heaping patterns in Mosaic data
This paper analyzes the extent and nature of age-misreporting in the Mosaic data, currently one of the largest historical census microdata infrastructures for continental Europe. We use demographic measures known as the age heaping indexes to explore regional, periodic and sex-specific patterns of age misreporting across 115 Mosaic regional datafiles, from Catalonia to Moscow, during Europe's demographic ancien régime and thereafter. The paper's …
The Patriarchy Index
This article presents a new measure of family-driven age- and gender-related inequalities. This composite measure, which we call the Patriarchy Index, combines a range of variables related to familial behavior that reflect varying degrees of sex- and age-related social inequality across different family settings. We demonstrate the comparative advantages of the index by showing how 266 historical populations from the Atlantic coast of Europe to M…
A stem-family society without the stem-family ideology? The case of eighteenth-century Poland
This paper mobilizes historical census microdata and quantitative methods to answer a seemingly qualitative question of whether the stem-family organization, profoundly described in sociological and anthropological literature, existed in historical western Poland. The paper’s narrative takes a threefold argumentation format, each step relying on different methodologies. First, using household registers data and basic tools of historical demograph…
The patriarchy index
This article stands at the confluence of three streams of historical social science analysis: the sociological study of power relations within the family, the regional demography of historical Europe, and the study of spatial patterning of historical family forms in Europe. It is a first exercise in the design and application of a new 'master variable' for cross-cultural studies of family organization and relations. This indexed composite measure…
Mosaic
In recent years, there has been a marked increase in the demand for global data on historical family systems, both in the social sciences and in the humanities. Until lately, however, scholars interested in historical global family variation had to rely on simplified and often ahistorical world-scale classifications of family systems by world geographic regions. This article communicates Mosaic to the scholarly community – one of the largest infr…
Residence Patterns and Demographic Constraints
This article provides an account of how demographic conditions have shaped co-coresidence patterns in historic Eastern Europe. Census microdata from eighteenth-century Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine are confronted with the computer microsimulation of kin sets to show how the combined effects of fertility, marriage, and mortality influenced the availability of kin for coresidence. The enactment of demographic constraints on residential ch…
Variations spatiales des structures de ménage en Allemagne au xix e siècle
L’Allemagne du xix e siècle est un laboratoire particulièrement intéressant pour l’étude des différences démographiques entre régions, et pourtant les structures de la famille à cette époque dans cette partie de l’Europe restent peu explorées. Cet article analyse la variabilité des situations domestiques avec une mesure agrégée de la complexité des ménages fondée sur les statistiques publiées du recensement allemand de 1885. Des méthodes descript…
Living arrangements and household formation in an industrializing urban setting
Cet article fait le point sur la littérature en démographie historique consacrée à la question des relations entre les processus généralement désignés sous les termes « d’industrialisation » et « d’urbanisation » et les transformations de la famille. Appliquant des méthodologies quantitatives aux recensements de 1867 et 1900, nous examinons l’impact du développement du mode de vie urbain sur le système familial de Rostock, une ville en voie d’ind…
Stem Families, Joint Families, and the European Pattern
[[family systemsliving arrangementsdemographic variationstem familyjoint familyelderly ]] This article makes a new contribution to the discussion of historical European family forms. Its starting points are two recent contributions by Steven Ruggles in which the author discussed the historical appearances of stem and joint families across the globe. Drawing on most recent developments in census microdata infrastructure from historical Eastern, Ce…
Spatial construction of European family and household systems
This essay represents an attempt at a re-examination of the Western scientific evidence for the existence of the divergent ‘Eastern European family pattern’. This evidence is challenged by almost entirely unknown contributions of Eastern European scholars, revealing the stark incompatibility of the two discourses. This paper is informed to a large extent by Richard Wall's voluminous research on European household and family systems. Wall's origin…
The Genealogy of Eastern European Difference
The view of Eastern Europe as a locus of complex family organisation and familistic societal values has reached the status of general dogma in Western social sciences and demography. By offering an overview of almost entirely unknown scholarly achievements of Eastern Europeanists, this essay represents an attempt to persuade scholars to accept less stereotypical images of families from outside “Western Europe.” Well into the late 1990s, Eastern E…
Quantifying patriarchy
The notion of 'patriarchy' has pervaded the scholarly descriptions of peasant families in historical Eastern and South-Eastern Europe.The term has often included many different elements, such as the dominance of patrilineal descent, patrilocal or patrivirilocal residence after marriage, power relations that favour the domination of men over women and of the older generation over the younger generation, customary laws that sanctioned these pattern…
Mosaic
In recent years, there has been a marked increase in the demand for global data on historical family systems, both in the social sciences and in the humanities. Until lately, however, scholars interested in historical global family variation had to rely on simplified and often ahistorical world-scale classifications of family systems by world geographic regions. This article communicates Mosaic to the scholarly community – one of the largest infr…
The patriarchy index
This article stands at the confluence of three streams of historical social science analysis: the sociological study of power relations within the family, the regional demography of historical Europe, and the study of spatial patterning of historical family forms in Europe. It is a first exercise in the design and application of a new 'master variable' for cross-cultural studies of family organization and relations. This indexed composite measure…
Stem Families, Joint Families, and the European Pattern
[[family systemsliving arrangementsdemographic variationstem familyjoint familyelderly ]] This article makes a new contribution to the discussion of historical European family forms. Its starting points are two recent contributions by Steven Ruggles in which the author discussed the historical appearances of stem and joint families across the globe. Drawing on most recent developments in census microdata infrastructure from historical Eastern, Ce…
Historical family systems and contemporary developmental outcomes
Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the role of the historical family as the instigator of disparate developmental trajectories. However, a major challenge faced by these studies was that they had to work around a lack of reliable historical data. This study demonstrates how embarking on the recent outburst of historical microdata infrastructures may help to improve these explorations by suggesting additional statistics and a derive…
The Patriarchy Index
This article presents a new measure of family-driven age- and gender-related inequalities. This composite measure, which we call the Patriarchy Index, combines a range of variables related to familial behavior that reflect varying degrees of sex- and age-related social inequality across different family settings. We demonstrate the comparative advantages of the index by showing how 266 historical populations from the Atlantic coast of Europe to M…
Age heaping patterns in Mosaic data
This paper analyzes the extent and nature of age-misreporting in the Mosaic data, currently one of the largest historical census microdata infrastructures for continental Europe. We use demographic measures known as the age heaping indexes to explore regional, periodic and sex-specific patterns of age misreporting across 115 Mosaic regional datafiles, from Catalonia to Moscow, during Europe's demographic ancien régime and thereafter. The paper's …
Missing girls’ in historical Europe
Recent research argues that discriminatory practices unduly inflated female excess mortality during infancy and childhood in historical Europe. This article reviews the existing evidence by (1) evaluating the sources that can be used to study this phenomenon; (2) providing a state-of-the-art account of the prevalence of these discriminatory practices, as well as the factors that explain them; and (3) outlining a research agenda that could fill in…
Three kinds of preindustrial household formation system in historical Eastern Europe
In their modelling and classificatory ventures western scholars have usually mistakenly included family forms in historical Eastern Europe by induction in well-established generalizations about Russian or Balkan populations. At the same time, well into the late 1990s, most of Eastern European historians have shown no interest in studying domestic groups in socio-historical perspective. This article attempts to restate that picture through a thoro…
Central European household and family systems, and the ‘Hajnal–Mitterauer’ line
The article examines marriage behaviours, household patterns and household formation rules prevailing among the population of the Upper Silesian parish of Bujakow during the late 18th and the first part of the 19th century. Their character, it is argued, is crucial not only for the proper understanding of European family systems in the past, but also for accurate comparisons of family systems in Europe and Asia. The family pattern prevailing in t…
Family patriarchy and child sex ratios in historical Europe
Although recent findings suggest that gender-discriminatory practices unduly increased female mortality rates during infancy and childhood in historical Europe, especially in Southern and Eastern Europe, there is little research on the conditions that triggered these practices. Relying on child sex ratios (the number of boys per hundred girls in a particular age group) as a cumulative measure of sex-differential mortality around birth, infancy, a…
Inferring “missing girls” from child sex ratios in historical census data
The topic of “missing girls” in historical Europe has not only been mostly neglected, but previous research addressing this issue usually took the available information too lightly, either rejecting or accepting the claims that there was discrimination against female children, without assessing the possibility that the observed child sex ratios could be attributable to chance, mortality differentials, or registration quality. This article contrib…
Spatial construction of European family and household systems
This essay represents an attempt at a re-examination of the Western scientific evidence for the existence of the divergent ‘Eastern European family pattern’. This evidence is challenged by almost entirely unknown contributions of Eastern European scholars, revealing the stark incompatibility of the two discourses. This paper is informed to a large extent by Richard Wall's voluminous research on European household and family systems. Wall's origin…
Making a Place for Space
Much of the previous scholarship on the historical living arrangements of the aged has taken place without the benefit of large-scale harmonised census microdata and did not embrace even rudimentary forms of spatial modelling. Drawing on the pooled cross-sectional census microdata from the North Atlantic Population and Mosaic projects, we derive measures of intergenerational co-residence among the elderly for 277 regional populations from Catalon…
How Many Household Formation Systems Were There in Historic Europe? A View Across 256 Regions Using Partitioning Clustering Methods
This paper reconsiders one of historical demography’s most pertinent research problems: the fiddly concept of historical household formation systems. Using a massive repository of historical census micro-data from the North Atlantic Population Project and the Mosaic project, the four markers of Hajnal’s household formation rules were operationalized for 256 regional rural populations from Catalonia in the west to central Siberia in the east, betw…
Quantifying patriarchy
The notion of 'patriarchy' has pervaded the scholarly descriptions of peasant families in historical Eastern and South-Eastern Europe.The term has often included many different elements, such as the dominance of patrilineal descent, patrilocal or patrivirilocal residence after marriage, power relations that favour the domination of men over women and of the older generation over the younger generation, customary laws that sanctioned these pattern…
Global and local correlations of Hajnal’s household formation markers in historical Europe
Previous scholarship has assumed global correlations between premarital service in husbandry, marriage age, the extent to which marriage coincided with the attainment of household headship, and the nuclear household structure. According to John Hajnal, these were the four core principles of historical household formation systems. However, whether such correlations applied universally across Europe remains uncertain. We test this possibility by ap…
A stem-family society without the stem-family ideology? The case of eighteenth-century Poland
This paper mobilizes historical census microdata and quantitative methods to answer a seemingly qualitative question of whether the stem-family organization, profoundly described in sociological and anthropological literature, existed in historical western Poland. The paper’s narrative takes a threefold argumentation format, each step relying on different methodologies. First, using household registers data and basic tools of historical demograph…
Variations spatiales des structures de ménage en Allemagne au xix e siècle
L’Allemagne du xix e siècle est un laboratoire particulièrement intéressant pour l’étude des différences démographiques entre régions, et pourtant les structures de la famille à cette époque dans cette partie de l’Europe restent peu explorées. Cet article analyse la variabilité des situations domestiques avec une mesure agrégée de la complexité des ménages fondée sur les statistiques publiées du recensement allemand de 1885. Des méthodes descript…
European Family Patriarchy in the Past and Contemporary Developmental Inequalities
This paper aims to show that contemporary developmental outcomes in Europe vary with historical patterns of age and gender inequality. It builds on the authors' earlier work constructing the Patriarchy Index (PI), which measures age and gender inequality within households based on historical census data. The claimed relationships are tested in a regression framework in which the outcome variables are a set of development indicators (GDP per capit…
Missing girls’ in interwar Poland
Our testing of the relationship between child sex ratios (CSRs) and demographic, socioeconomic, and cultural diversity across nearly 300 districts of interwar Poland around 1931 yields a picture more complicated than common explanations of high masculinization of offspring. In line with existing literature, we found district-level CSRs to be positively associated with the extent of agriculture but negatively related to the relative spread of fema…
One size does not fit all”
The extent of elderly residential isolation from kin varied considerably between European historical societies, but few attempts have been made to understand these patterns systematically across space. So far, large‐scale accounts of factors underlying these patterns have calibrated a global model based on a single regression equation, thus implicitly assuming that the relationships between elderly living arrangements and their correlates are spa…
The Genealogy of Eastern European Difference
The view of Eastern Europe as a locus of complex family organisation and familistic societal values has reached the status of general dogma in Western social sciences and demography. By offering an overview of almost entirely unknown scholarly achievements of Eastern Europeanists, this essay represents an attempt to persuade scholars to accept less stereotypical images of families from outside “Western Europe.” Well into the late 1990s, Eastern E…
Rethinking Eastern Europe
This article discusses family patterns in the vast territories of historical Poland and Lithuania at the end of the eighteenth century. It explores one of the largest collections of historical household data in Europe on pre-industrial rural settings, and applies a variety of methodologies to reveal various aspects of family systems, as well as their spatial distribution. Three regional family patterns have been distinguished in the historical Po…
Central European household and family systems, and the ‘Hajnal–Mitterauer’ line
The article examines marriage behaviours, household patterns and household formation rules prevailing among the population of the Upper Silesian parish of Bujakow during the late 18th and the first part of the 19th century. Their character, it is argued, is crucial not only for the proper understanding of European family systems in the past, but also for accurate comparisons of family systems in Europe and Asia. The family pattern prevailing in t…
Three kinds of preindustrial household formation system in historical Eastern Europe
In their modelling and classificatory ventures western scholars have usually mistakenly included family forms in historical Eastern Europe by induction in well-established generalizations about Russian or Balkan populations. At the same time, well into the late 1990s, most of Eastern European historians have shown no interest in studying domestic groups in socio-historical perspective. This article attempts to restate that picture through a thoro…
Rethinking Eastern Europe
This article discusses family patterns in the vast territories of historical Poland and Lithuania at the end of the eighteenth century. It explores one of the largest collections of historical household data in Europe on pre-industrial rural settings, and applies a variety of methodologies to reveal various aspects of family systems, as well as their spatial distribution. Three regional family patterns have been distinguished in the historical Po…
Life-cycle service and family systems in the rural countryside
Cet article cherche, à partir de l’examen des dénombrements et recensements de près de 700 localités polonaises du xvii e siècle, à mieux saisir les relations existant entre l’institution du service domestique, les structures du foyer, les règles de formation du ménage et les caractéristiques de l’organisation du travail prévalant parmi les populations paysannes de l’Europe du Centre-Est. L’étude démontre de grandes différences dans les traits do…
Real and Synthetic Household Populations and Their Analysis
In this article, the authors describe a validation of methods for dealing with census microdata with no delineated households. The 1819 census of Rostock, Germany, is an enumeration of individuals without household reference. Following a description of this census, the authors test an algorithm that constructs households from individual person records according to a strictly defined set of rules. The rules for assigning people to household units …
Living arrangements and household formation in an industrializing urban setting
Cet article fait le point sur la littérature en démographie historique consacrée à la question des relations entre les processus généralement désignés sous les termes « d’industrialisation » et « d’urbanisation » et les transformations de la famille. Appliquant des méthodologies quantitatives aux recensements de 1867 et 1900, nous examinons l’impact du développement du mode de vie urbain sur le système familial de Rostock, une ville en voie d’ind…
Stem Families, Joint Families, and the European Pattern
[[family systemsliving arrangementsdemographic variationstem familyjoint familyelderly ]] This article makes a new contribution to the discussion of historical European family forms. Its starting points are two recent contributions by Steven Ruggles in which the author discussed the historical appearances of stem and joint families across the globe. Drawing on most recent developments in census microdata infrastructure from historical Eastern, Ce…
Spatial construction of European family and household systems
This essay represents an attempt at a re-examination of the Western scientific evidence for the existence of the divergent ‘Eastern European family pattern’. This evidence is challenged by almost entirely unknown contributions of Eastern European scholars, revealing the stark incompatibility of the two discourses. This paper is informed to a large extent by Richard Wall's voluminous research on European household and family systems. Wall's origin…
The Genealogy of Eastern European Difference
The view of Eastern Europe as a locus of complex family organisation and familistic societal values has reached the status of general dogma in Western social sciences and demography. By offering an overview of almost entirely unknown scholarly achievements of Eastern Europeanists, this essay represents an attempt to persuade scholars to accept less stereotypical images of families from outside “Western Europe.” Well into the late 1990s, Eastern E…
Quantifying patriarchy
The notion of 'patriarchy' has pervaded the scholarly descriptions of peasant families in historical Eastern and South-Eastern Europe.The term has often included many different elements, such as the dominance of patrilineal descent, patrilocal or patrivirilocal residence after marriage, power relations that favour the domination of men over women and of the older generation over the younger generation, customary laws that sanctioned these pattern…
Variations spatiales des structures de ménage en Allemagne au xix e siècle
L’Allemagne du xix e siècle est un laboratoire particulièrement intéressant pour l’étude des différences démographiques entre régions, et pourtant les structures de la famille à cette époque dans cette partie de l’Europe restent peu explorées. Cet article analyse la variabilité des situations domestiques avec une mesure agrégée de la complexité des ménages fondée sur les statistiques publiées du recensement allemand de 1885. Des méthodes descript…
The patriarchy index
This article stands at the confluence of three streams of historical social science analysis: the sociological study of power relations within the family, the regional demography of historical Europe, and the study of spatial patterning of historical family forms in Europe. It is a first exercise in the design and application of a new 'master variable' for cross-cultural studies of family organization and relations. This indexed composite measure…
Mosaic
In recent years, there has been a marked increase in the demand for global data on historical family systems, both in the social sciences and in the humanities. Until lately, however, scholars interested in historical global family variation had to rely on simplified and often ahistorical world-scale classifications of family systems by world geographic regions. This article communicates Mosaic to the scholarly community – one of the largest infr…
Residence Patterns and Demographic Constraints
This article provides an account of how demographic conditions have shaped co-coresidence patterns in historic Eastern Europe. Census microdata from eighteenth-century Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine are confronted with the computer microsimulation of kin sets to show how the combined effects of fertility, marriage, and mortality influenced the availability of kin for coresidence. The enactment of demographic constraints on residential ch…
A stem-family society without the stem-family ideology? The case of eighteenth-century Poland
This paper mobilizes historical census microdata and quantitative methods to answer a seemingly qualitative question of whether the stem-family organization, profoundly described in sociological and anthropological literature, existed in historical western Poland. The paper’s narrative takes a threefold argumentation format, each step relying on different methodologies. First, using household registers data and basic tools of historical demograph…
The Patriarchy Index
This article presents a new measure of family-driven age- and gender-related inequalities. This composite measure, which we call the Patriarchy Index, combines a range of variables related to familial behavior that reflect varying degrees of sex- and age-related social inequality across different family settings. We demonstrate the comparative advantages of the index by showing how 266 historical populations from the Atlantic coast of Europe to M…
Historical family systems and contemporary developmental outcomes
Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the role of the historical family as the instigator of disparate developmental trajectories. However, a major challenge faced by these studies was that they had to work around a lack of reliable historical data. This study demonstrates how embarking on the recent outburst of historical microdata infrastructures may help to improve these explorations by suggesting additional statistics and a derive…
Age heaping patterns in Mosaic data
This paper analyzes the extent and nature of age-misreporting in the Mosaic data, currently one of the largest historical census microdata infrastructures for continental Europe. We use demographic measures known as the age heaping indexes to explore regional, periodic and sex-specific patterns of age misreporting across 115 Mosaic regional datafiles, from Catalonia to Moscow, during Europe's demographic ancien régime and thereafter. The paper's …
One size does not fit all”
The extent of elderly residential isolation from kin varied considerably between European historical societies, but few attempts have been made to understand these patterns systematically across space. So far, large‐scale accounts of factors underlying these patterns have calibrated a global model based on a single regression equation, thus implicitly assuming that the relationships between elderly living arrangements and their correlates are spa…
Making a Place for Space
Much of the previous scholarship on the historical living arrangements of the aged has taken place without the benefit of large-scale harmonised census microdata and did not embrace even rudimentary forms of spatial modelling. Drawing on the pooled cross-sectional census microdata from the North Atlantic Population and Mosaic projects, we derive measures of intergenerational co-residence among the elderly for 277 regional populations from Catalon…
How Many Household Formation Systems Were There in Historic Europe? A View Across 256 Regions Using Partitioning Clustering Methods
This paper reconsiders one of historical demography’s most pertinent research problems: the fiddly concept of historical household formation systems. Using a massive repository of historical census micro-data from the North Atlantic Population Project and the Mosaic project, the four markers of Hajnal’s household formation rules were operationalized for 256 regional rural populations from Catalonia in the west to central Siberia in the east, betw…
Global and local correlations of Hajnal’s household formation markers in historical Europe
Previous scholarship has assumed global correlations between premarital service in husbandry, marriage age, the extent to which marriage coincided with the attainment of household headship, and the nuclear household structure. According to John Hajnal, these were the four core principles of historical household formation systems. However, whether such correlations applied universally across Europe remains uncertain. We test this possibility by ap…
Missing girls’ in historical Europe
Recent research argues that discriminatory practices unduly inflated female excess mortality during infancy and childhood in historical Europe. This article reviews the existing evidence by (1) evaluating the sources that can be used to study this phenomenon; (2) providing a state-of-the-art account of the prevalence of these discriminatory practices, as well as the factors that explain them; and (3) outlining a research agenda that could fill in…
Missing girls’ in interwar Poland
Our testing of the relationship between child sex ratios (CSRs) and demographic, socioeconomic, and cultural diversity across nearly 300 districts of interwar Poland around 1931 yields a picture more complicated than common explanations of high masculinization of offspring. In line with existing literature, we found district-level CSRs to be positively associated with the extent of agriculture but negatively related to the relative spread of fema…
Family patriarchy and child sex ratios in historical Europe
Although recent findings suggest that gender-discriminatory practices unduly increased female mortality rates during infancy and childhood in historical Europe, especially in Southern and Eastern Europe, there is little research on the conditions that triggered these practices. Relying on child sex ratios (the number of boys per hundred girls in a particular age group) as a cumulative measure of sex-differential mortality around birth, infancy, a…
Sociology (25 works) · Geography (20 works) · Demography (19 works) · Demography (17 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (16 works) · History (16 works) · Population (16 works) · Genealogy (14 works) · History (13 works) · Census (12 works)