|\\\|///|\\\\|////|\\\|///|\\\|
Sergio Galaz-García
|///|\\\|////|\\\\|///|\\\|///|

I am a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellow in the Social Sciences Department at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) and a member of the Juan March Institute for social research. I received my PhD in Sociology from Princeton University. Prior to joining UC3M, I held visiting professor and postdoctoral fellowships at Collegio Carlo Alberto, the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), in Mexico City, and the University of Lisbon. Before finishing my Ph.D., I studied a Masters in Architecture at MIT and a BA in Political Science at Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) in Mexico City.

My research interests sit at the intersection of comparative historical sociology, political behavior, and methodologies for quantitative historical research. I study historical dynamics of civic engagement and the role that experiencing major moments political contingency—commonly known as “historical events”—-play in shaping these dynamics. My work has a regional focus on Western Europe and Latin America and holds a keen interest in developing new measurement and methodological strategies to increase inferential robustness in quantitative historical research.

Ongoing projects are oriented at analyzing the legacies that experiencing a historical event exert on interpersonal political discussion from a quantitative comparative perspective, identifying and and explaining the evolution of class gaps in political discussion in Western Europe since the 1970s oil shocks, and introducing topological data analysis (TDA) techniques for the historical analysis of political attitude consistency.

You can reach me at sgalaz@uc3m.es.

cv | research | teaching

Research

*
The Impact of Historical
Events on Politicization:
Quantitative Comparative Evidence
from Western Europe, 1973-2002

Although the literature largely agrees that “historical events”—unexpected, punctuated, and collectively experienced moments of political contingency—are important political socialization devices, empirical support for this contention is thin. So far, event effects have only been verified for a handful of political contingency instances and political attitudes. Against this backdrop, I reexamine the impact of historical events as political socialization factors by evaluating their long-term effects on everyday political engagement, a foundational political disposition. I test generational hypotheses that see these effects as positive, persistent, and stronger the more disruptive a political event was, and an original “diachronic” outlook that sees event effects as eroding over time, positive or negative depending on whether an event was divisive or unifying, and stronger the more effective it was in modifying state actions. I evaluate these sets of hypotheses by conducting a quantitative comparative analysis, the first to my knowledge, of event effects on a political attribute. Using 68 survey data points, I evaluate the impact of 34 concrete historical events on cohort levels of everyday political discussion in Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands from 1973 to 2002. I find supportive evidence for my diachronic expectations by evaluating the statistical association of levels cohort exposure to the events I analyze with political talk in 72 regressions per country. My findings suggest that events differ across them not in degree, but in the logic of their socializing influence, and underline their capacity to affect political traits beyond attitudes.

—————
/|\

* *
Can Historical Events Equalize Levels on Politicization? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from the German Reunification Period

How are the effects that historical events have on political engagement socially distributed? As an alternative to theories that see the individual-level political impacts of moments of political contingency as top-down processes of historical imprinting, I introduce a set of distributional hypotheses that see these influences as actively mediated by bottom-up processes of historical sensing. I argue that due to socioeconomic and life-cycle differences in political interest, historical events produce increases in politicization whose strength and socially equalizing effects follow and young adulthood gradient. Politicization increases are the highest for young people, and they organized in a way that shrinks socioeconomic disparities in their political engagement. Other ages, on the other hand, experience more moderate politicization increases that make socioeconomic disparities in political engagement grow. I test these hypotheses by analyzing patterns of political talk in West Germany relative to France before and during the German Reunification Period (Nov ’89-Dec –‘90). Using an original indicator that measures yearly levels of eventfulness, I identified this context as a quasi-experimental research setting. The results of my analysis strongly support my argument of perception-based distributional effects of historical events. They indicate that moments of historical contingency carry distinctive and intersectional logics of influence across age and socioeconomic status. They also call for further research on how people make sense and differentially react to the historical contexts they experience.

—————
/|\

* * *
Historical Events as Bridges
Between Social Domains:
Taking Bolsonaro’s Victory Personally
in the 2018 Brazilian Elections

How do historical events—emergent, intense, and collectively experienced instances of political contingency—generate sweeping bursts of politicization when they occur? Rationalist outlooks relate this capacity to the role that events perform as purveyors of information to citizens with exogenous and crystallized political identities. Politico-cultural approaches, on the other hand, contend that events politicize by changing the meanings with which people navigate politics. These outlooks assume that an event’s politicizing impact develops entirely within an explicitly political domain of experience. But, given that politics is scantly instantiated in everyday life, they have a limited ability to explain how events swiftly generate spikes in political engagement. I offer an alternative “connective” approach to understand this capacity. I anchor this influence in events’ ability to generate semantic modifications that crate openings for the infiltration of political narratives into stories and identities driving action from social spheres of more frequent instantiation than politics. I find support for this outlook by conducting qualitative fieldwork in São Paulo in the wake of the unexpectedly strong victory of right-wing extremist Jair Bolsonaro in the 2018 Brazilian presidential elections. My observations in public spaces and moments of sociability between left-leaning citizens depict this time as one of “politicization without politics.” Bolsonaro’s popularity generated feelings of physical vulnerability, leading to political perceptual and behavioral reaccommodations that emerged from changes in personal rather than properly political domains of social experience.

 ————— /|\

up

Teaching