F EW American historians of medicine and health care are as well known as Charles E. Rosenberg. Since his first book, The Cholera Years, appeared in 1962, the conceptual frameworks Charles (as everyone calls him) developed and refined in his many publications have formed the historiographic backbone of our field. His interests in history have been so catholic, and his personal support of indivi...

Popular elections are the central political act of democracies, and citizens in all advanced democracies organize their political competition through parties that compete in general elections. While political historians have studied parties for many years, it is remarkable that only in the last decade or so have there been serious attempts at abstract conceptualizations—that is, formal models—o...

Article history: Received 18 April 2005 Received in revised form 20 March 2008 Accepted 7 May 2008 Available online 24 May 2008 Which government functions should be decentralized (resp. centralized) once lobbying behavior is taken into account?We find that the answer largely depends on how the interests of the regional lobbies are positioned with respect to the function to be decentralized (res...

Social dilemmas arise when people follow their own best interests, yet the consequence of their separate choices is sub-optimal for all of them. Monetary payoffs, however, do not necessarily define best interests. “Best” is constructed and can depend strongly on social context. Two studies successfully manipulated and measured group affiliation. Increased saliency of the group and of social goa...

The growth of social networks such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter has provided us a great medium to communicate with many people across the world. However, as it turns out, behind a keyboard and a screen, not everyone is nice and not everyone shares our interests. Wrongly choosing people to interact may not only waste our time but can also negatively affect our habits, our emotion, our healt...

The main goal of my research project is to investigate the social and technological conditions for infrastructuring computer-supported collaboration with the aim to enhancing the life condition of low-income people living on Madeira island. The idea underpinning the project is to foster the connection between high and low-skilled people, trying to find common interests that could lead them to c...