Success Stories

Most of us are familiar with newspaper stories reporting declining fertility, or rising divorce rates and increases in the number of single parents. Of course, the potential impact of unstable families on children’s life chances makes it vital to understand these phenomena.

According to Prof Esping-Andersen, an ERC Advanced Grantee 2010, much research in demography sees these trends as the product of increased individual choice and self- realisation, accompanied by a decline in adherence to broadly shared social assumptions and guidelines — sometimes called the “post-modern” model.

“I’m sceptical,” he says. “The mistake is to see rises in divorce and declining fertility as ongoing. I argue that they are non-linear; these are just symptoms of a transitional phase from traditional family models to new ones that are increasingly premised on egalitarian and symmetric gender roles.”

Tipping points

For Prof Esping-Andersen the clues are in the figures: in several European countries, there is clear evidence that the “negative correlation between female employment and births is turning positive” and the “educational gradient of couple formation and divorce is turning upside down.”

In other words, whereas divorce and low fertility used to be more prevalent among highly educated women, these groups now see more stable couples and larger families. Meanwhile, in Denmark for example, it is less educated women who seem to have fewer children, experience higher rates of divorce and raise families as unmarried single parents.

To explain this, Prof Esping-Andersen proposes a new theoretical model: a “diffusion process” in specific groups within society whereby slow, gradual changes suddenly accelerate when a “critical mass” is achieved. “Danish men’s input to domestic work hardly changed at all between the 1960s and 1980s, but from the 1990s onwards they started sharing in it almost equally,” he says.

“The higher educated were at the vanguard of such changes,” he continues, as they were the first to embrace a gender-equal model for the family. Nowadays, it is university-educated women who are having larger families. “Trust and shared expectations are the key,” according to Prof Esping-Andersen, along with increased employment opportunities for women and affordable childcare.

Working with the best

The ERC grant will enable Prof. Esping-Andersen to test this hypothesis further. Since his grant began in June 2011, this research is still in its early stages. But the funding has already helped him gather a team to analyse data from some of the best resources in the world, such as the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) in the US and the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) in the UK.

“We need to use rich data that follows people over a long period of time,” he explains: data which looks at divorce rates, fertility, etc. across different countries. Having noted rapid changes in Scandinavia, France and Spain, he is now working on models that can explain striking divergences in social trends. “This was the first sign to me that I was on the right track,” he says.

In some countries, like Germany, couples based on traditional gender roles - with a male breadwinner and stay-at-home mother- are still the most stable, whereas in countries such as Denmark and Sweden these couples are the most prone to divorce. Prof Esping-Andersen sees this as evidence that the negative trends of previous decades can be reversed, beginning with the higher educated and eventually spreading to the rest of society.

It could be that low fertility and high divorce rates simply reflect an unstable transition period between traditional families and new dual-career models, rather than a permanent decline in family stability. His ERC-funded project will run until May 2016, so there is plenty of time for Prof Esping-Andersen to overturn some pessimistic assumptions about where the family is heading.

Further information:
Professor Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s website

For the first round of the French election on 22 April, 30% of voters claimed to have either made up or changed their mind on election day, many in the polling booth itself. The logic of these voters' choices remains very mysterious. Dr Michael Bruter's project aims to fill this gap in the literature. More broadly, his research examines the emotions, memories and images associated with the moment of voting - an “exceptional minute" which has been neglected by academia. Dr Bruter will place voters’ psychology under a virtual microscope in 15 countries - including Australia, Sweden and the UK in 2010, and France and the US in 2012.

A particularly innovative aspect of this project is its methodological approach, which combines surveys, interviews (including spot interviews), experiments, and direct observation. Dr Bruter’s surveys of 2000 nationally representative respondents are designed as panel studies, involving re-interviewing the same people multiple times over several months or years to track the evolution of citizens’ electoral psychology over time.

For France's presidential elections, Dr Bruter and Dr Sarah Harrison have introduced two new and unconventional fieldwork elements to complement the project’s methodology: "election diaries" and "polling station observers." The ambition is to gain unprecedented insight into the coherence of voters' behaviour. Around 100 French families were selected to keep an "election diary": each day they write about any thoughts and feelings connected with the election, and record any discussions about the campaign. "In surveys, many people rationalise or feel constrained about their answers, whilst direct observation in people's homes would be too intrusive. So we had the idea of using personal diaries to act like "flies" in people’s houses. This will allow us to figure out what their state of mind is throughout the election period. We ask them questions like "have you thought or talked about the elections today?" or “what were your reactions and discussions during election night?” In addition, Dr Bruter works with 50 official polling station observers who collect impressions and anecdotes for the project, recording whether voters come to the station alone, in couples or with children or neighbours; what they say or ask; whether they seem happy, sad or nervous.

"By superimposing various methodologies, we get truly exciting results about voters' experiences. Some of our work has already shown that memories of first elections matter a great deal to voters: nearly 70% remember going to the polling stations as children with their parents, over 80% recollect their first election and 30% of French voters claim to have cried during or because of an election." One of his latest results is a confirmation of the legendary "cynicism of French voters": 70% of French respondents said that they regularly had to settle for the "least bad’" candidate in recent years.
The research team have added a number of "funky" questions to their work - asking people what animal, colour or drink they prefer or how they would rank the seven ‘deadly sins’ - in an attempt to understand more about the role of personality and emotions in electoral choice. The expectation is that the project will have a significant impact on our understanding of electoral decisions. Moreover, Dr Bruter and Dr Harrison conduct special research modules on the psychology of extremism, voters’ identity, and young people’s participation - all of which are proving uncannily topical in the context of the French 2012 election.

Dr Bruter emphasised that: “The ERC grant is fabulous and opens new doors for scientists, but central to its merit is the fact that it supports innovative research with the potential to produce unexpected results.” The €1.2 million ERC funding should help the team to establish a research structure, based in the UK and dedicated to electoral psychology. The focus will be on these crucial electoral moments, which Dr Bruter described as the “civic communion” of citizens with their political system.

Dr Bruter's CV
Press article

Silk worms, which were first domesticated in China as early as 3500 BC, have played a significant role throughout history – from the prestigious fabrics created from silk to the resulting boom in trade and cultural exchange along the Silk Road. Today, the global market for silk products is worth more than € 100 billion. The ‘Silks as Biomimetic Ideals for Polymers’ (SABIP) project is studying this naturally occurring thread. The aim of the research is to improve silk production and widen knowledge of silk's properties, to the extent that we can develop better industrial polymers.

“There are different kinds of silk, produced by several animal species such as silk worms, moth and spiders" explains Prof Vollrath from Oxford University, who heads the project. “Spider silks have evolved to absorb impact energy, whereas cocoon silks have developed to be integrated into a composite.”

The project is looking at the chemical make-up and genetic basis of different silks through ‘biomining’ and studying the correlations with their mechanical properties. “Biomining will help us to discover novel silks with interesting material properties and gene sequences, while studying them will allow us to discover novel principles of bio-polymer design,” says Prof Vollrath. “We are already beginning to understand what makes a good silk and the chemical signals that correlate to the quality of the silk,” he continues. “Silks are a type of protein called amyloid fibril. Inside the animal, water keeps the molecule in a temporarily stable condition, preventing the proteins from cross-linking. When the liquid silk is extruded, the water is eliminated and the mobile protein molecules link and fold more or less tightly, making the silk thread both tough and indigestible by fungi and bacteria. Silk needs the right combination of order and disorder: too much order and it is brittle, too little and it is weak. Spiders use the extrusion process to control the mechanical properties of the silk, which in turn allows them to tune their webs to the ambient conditions and types of prey available.”

These mechanisms have evolved independently in several different animals: some silk moths even have comparable silk DNA sequences to spiders. An understanding of these processes should enable the development of artificial polymers that replicate silk's properties of great strength and durability.

“It seems that silk production is about one thousand times more energy efficient than the production of synthetic plastics," says Prof Vollrath, “and we are beginning to understand how to learn from silks to create new, more effective artificial polymers.”

The project is also using molecular models in an effort to improve the researchers' understanding of the collected data. “We’re modelling from first principles,” explains Prof David Porter, who also works on SABIP. This approach allows the team to optimise test conditions to produce deeper insights. Previously, researchers have concentrated on silk worms, but worms spin their silk – making the process hard to study. Spiders, on the other hand, produce straight silk which can be spun in controlled conditions, collected and studied.

Prof Vollrath acknowledges that “The ERC Advanced Grant allowed us to tie these different project elements together and its generous funding made our team possible.” The team are also working on commercialising their technology and results. “We are talking to European companies using silk in textiles, bio-tech and medical implants – as silk is bio-compatible and can even be made biodegradable.” Other potential applications include establishing silk producing industries in new regions, such as Africa, adapted to the local moth species and native trees.

Professor Fritz Vollrath’s website 

As cultural diversity is increasing both within and outside Europe, some sort of institutional transformation is needed. The world beyond the European frontiers is full of exciting experiences and innovative ideas which may be key to reinforcing well-established European traditions – including democracy, social cohesion and human rights. This ERC-funded project aims to demonstrate that these alternatives, however, cannot be made credible and significant if Europe continues relying on the theoretical and political thinking that has dominated so far.

In order to do so, Prof de Sousa Santos and his team will mainly focus on four interconnected topics: democratising democracy; transformative constitutionalism, interculturality and State reform; alternative economic models; and human rights. This means addressing matters such as the expansion of citizenship rights to non-nationals and immigrants; the European identity-national identities dichotomy; the governments’ response to environmental issues, and the status of the social wellbeing model including, among others, the human right to health care.

For each area, Prof de Sousa Santos and his team will assess the experience of five non-European countries (Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, India and South Africa) in relation to the themes described. The insights and questions emerging from this study will be applied to current situations in four selected countries within Europe (France, Italy, Portugal, and the United Kingdom) with the aim of enriching the European debate.

The methodology in use includes new approaches to traditional social sciences’ techniques, such as focus groups or workshops, detailed comparative case studies and the development of novel modes of producing and disseminating collaborative knowledge, via for instance the participation in public debates and the involvement of international circles of journalists. The new discourses enlightened by Prof de Sousa Santos’ project, from which the diversity of practices can be appreciated and learnt, may provide the knowledge necessary for Europe’s potential to transcend its past.

Website of the Project
CES, University of Coimbra
Researcher’s website

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) causes more than half of the cases of blindness in the developed world. This condition does not only have physical consequences – it has profound social and psychological consequences for sufferers, such as loneliness and depression. Around 15 million Europeans have AMD today, and this number is projected to double over the next decade as Europe’s population ages.

The problem largely stems from deterioration in the central part of the retina, called the macula. As we age, our eyes’ cells accumulate damage from the effects of oxidising chemicals, such as free radicals, and from blue light. There is now growing evidence that a lack of macular pigment (MP) in this part of the eye is associated with more retinal damage from these sources, and a correspondingly increased risk of AMD.

“The question we are asking is how to optimise this pigment at the back of the eye,” explained Dr Nolan, Principal Investigator at the Waterford Institute of Technology’s Macular Pigment Research Group in Ireland. “Our approach is to optimise nutrition for the eyes, which we hope will protect the retina through the ageing process – and even produce improved ‘super-vision’ for those with normal eyesight.”

Sunscreen for the eye

Chemicals called carotenoids are key, 60 of which are found in the typical Western diet. Only three of them, however, occur in MP in the retina – lutein (L), zeaxanthin (Z) and meso-zeaxanthin (meso-Z) – and the concentrations of these pigments vary from individual to individual.

As well as contributing to retinal damage, blue light is also the part of the spectrum most subject to scattering – which causes glare. To combat this, the yellow pigments, which absorb blue light, act “like sunscreen for the eye,” according to Dr Nolan.

“Our study will enrich MP through diet and supplements, and then measure the impact on improving vision. These pigments are also antioxidants – so increasing them could potentially have a double protective effect.”

Part of the challenge is to measure any improvements in eyesight: “We know the way vision is measured today is limited.” ERC funding has already helped Dr Nolan to assemble a specialist team and the advanced equipment needed for new tests. “These will go beyond familiar opticians’ tests designed to assess the need for corrective lenses.” Dr Nolan explained that the standard tests use white backgrounds and black letters, which are not sensitive enough to measure improvements in young people's eyesight and for those with normal vision “but we will look into effects from colour and contrasts.”

There could be significant economic benefits: not only from a reduction in the incidence of impaired vision in older people, but also from improvements for all those who depend on good eyesight for their work, and better testing techniques for other vision problems. ERC support has also attracted the funds needed for a new Vision Research Centre at the Waterford Institute of Technology, which was recently opened by Ireland’s Prime Minister, Mr Enda Kenny.

Dr Nolan expects to have established the initial baseline comparisons by the end of summer 2012, with the project’s first publications following soon afterwards. Full results should start to become available in around three years’ time.

For further information

Website of Dr John Nolan’s Macular Pigment Research Group

ERC Highlight: Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn met five ERC grantees in Dublin (23 September 2011)

Glossary

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) – a loss of vision in the centre of the visual field, due to damage to the retina, which usually affects older people.

Antioxidant – a molecule able to inhibit oxidation of other molecules. Oxidation can be damaging to living things and oxidative stress appears to be a contributing factor in many human diseases.

Carotenoids – there are over 600 known carotenoids, organic pigments that occur naturally in plants to protect them from photo-damage and absorb light for photosynthesis. Many of them are antioxidants.

Free radicals – atoms, molecules, or ions featuring unpaired electrons, giving them an important role in many chemical processes in living organisms.

Macula – a yellow-pigmented oval-shaped area, approx. 5mm across, near the centre of the human retina. Damage to the macula leads to macular degeneration, impaired vision and blindness.

Macular pigment – due to its yellow colour, it absorbs excess blue and ultraviolet light, protecting the central part of the retina, which is responsible for high-resolution vision.

Retina – the light-sensitive tissue lining the inner surface of the eye which enables us to see. Light striking cells in the retina initiate nerve impulses to the visual centres of the brain.