Assessment of the extent of civilian casualties during times of conflict presents significant challenges in data collection, quantitative methods, interpretation, and presentation. In this article, we briefly consider the motivation and use of casualty accounting and review historical approaches to these questions with illustrative comments on the US Civil War, World War I, World War II, and other conflicts. We provide an overview of several accounting methodologies including excess mortality, epidemiologic surveys, direct and indirect counts, multiple list estimation, and crowdsourcing. We reflect on the evolution toward modern approaches to casualty assessments, permitted by both a deeper understanding of human rights and by contemporaneous technological advances in data collection techniques. Our goal is to introduce several areas of research that deserve attention from social science historians and statisticians.

Perceived threats to established social order can influence the willingness of those in authority to inflict punishments as well as the severity of those punishments. Our article explores that proposition in the case of summary punishment by flogging in the Royal Navy. In the Royal Navy commanders were given the power to inflict flogging for a host of offenses. Prevailing penal thinking emphasized general deterrence, whereby punishment of a few serious offenders would deter the body of seamen. Eighteenth-century reforms were intended to rationalize and normalize flogging and limit its severity. Qualitative evidence indicates that naval commanders saw the established order under attack after 1789 and, emphasizing moral offenses, imposed tighter discipline on their crews. The evidence we have assembled based on a randomly selected sample of ships between 1740 and 1820 shows that flogging aboard ships was moderate up until the “Age of Revolution” that began after 1789 but increased dramatically in its frequency and severity in the wake of the French Revolution. Multivariate analysis shows that greater penal severity is associated with several factors, including a period effect associated with the onset of the revolutionary age. Our findings are consistent with existing research that suggests that disorder influences the willingness to punish.

Throughout the nineteenth century, political parties attempted to mediate local, state, and national conflicts to forge a winning electoral coalition. The question here is whether party leaders felt that success depended on offering clear divergent positions to their voters. In other words, to what extent did the parties present alternative programs to the electorate—at any specific time or over time? This study examines the growth of the two-party system in nineteenth-century America by focusing on the interaction of the elites of the Democrats and Whig/Republicans in forging their electoral message. The methodology includes a content analysis of national and state party platforms during presidential election years 1840 through 1896 to show when and where parties emphasized certain issue proposals. Ultimately, this is a story of interparty polarization—over time, the two major parties tended to emphasize the same issues and offer divergent positions in their platforms.

This article uses Chile’s state milk program as a prism to map the trajectory of Chile’s social state through three combinations of political, economic, and welfare regimes. It traces the informal strategies deployed by citizens and local service providers and presents a historical typology of these encounters between 1954 and 2010, examining what commodification and decommodification mean to families in their everyday lives and discussing the implications of these findings to the literature on welfare regimes. The most important finding of this article is that regime type shapes but does not determine levels of provision. Welfare provision occurs in everyday interactions between state workers and citizens, and changes in regime type are filtered through and resisted through practices and strategies deployed in face-to-face encounters between local state representatives and citizens. There is often a large gap between central policy and these informal institutions that are created in everyday on-the-ground encounters between local state workers and citizens. Therefore, a second main conclusion of this article is that the informal institutions created at the local provision level coexist, compete, and clash with formal rules. A third conclusion of this article is that, to some extent, people who are regulated by the state also have some capacity to regulate their exchanges with the state, and, at the same time, state workers who organize and are organized by the state to distribute resources exercise discretionary power when implementing social programs.

In studying how to best understand social program introduction, political scientists have built up a laundry list of contributory factors. We suggest, however, that “objective” problem pressure has been incorrectly neglected by many scholars in recent decades—and the well-known case of Germany’s nineteenth-century introduction of social insurance legislation provides a clear illustration of this point. In explaining the origins and design of German social insurance, the interplay of three factors is key: first, exceptionally high problem pressure, connected to both labor market- and state-building processes; second, a fragile institutional context dominated by Prussia; and third, the party political constellation. In making this argument, we draw on “open functional reasoning” and extract implications from the case study to further refine the underlying theory. Specifically, we find that goal-oriented action may both be more common and more prone to compromise than the theory suggests. As such, we not only present an argument for considering the potential impact of problem pressure, but also lay out and refine an approach to doing so. In contrasting this approach to the problematic functionalism that initially inclined many scholars to neglect of problem pressure, we hope to help rehabilitate the concept—and in the process strengthen the explanatory power of research in sociology and political science.

In the decades before World War I, the United Kingdom was the pivot of a significant migratory phenomenon. While great swaths of the population were going abroad, multiple movements from the European continent (mainly from Germany, Italy, and Poland) were arriving on the British shores. To reappraise the impact of migration into the United Kingdom, this article focuses on Edinburgh in 1911, with the aim of moving beyond the initial movement of people and toward an analysis of the longer-term demographic trends. The main sources are the 1911 Census Enumerators’ Books, which are also the basis of the official census report and contain a plethora of information that were previously unavailable. Using a methodology that has been developed specifically for this study, the migrants’ households and their familiar links have been completely reconstructed. Moreover, the various communities have been examined in relation with all the other migrant groups, as well as with the local Scottish population. The resulting quantitative analysis paints a surprising picture of their impact, with significant differences between the various migrant groups, and highlights how the role played by the migrants in the development of the United Kingdom has been underestimated.

The notion that government funding undermines the independence of nonprofit organizations is a prevalent theme in scholarship on state–nonprofit relations, social welfare policy, and the condition of American civil society. This article scrutinizes historical assumptions about community organizations that inform debates over the influence of government funding in the nonprofit sector. Drawing on long-standing organizational theory and a historical analysis of the Community Chest movement, this article highlights the tension between collaboration and independence inherent in the nonprofit organizational form as well as the implications of this tension in light of historical changes in the resource environment of voluntary human service agencies. This conceptual and temporal focus leads not only to an analytical reorientation but also to a historical revision: The influx of government funding in the American nonprofit sector in the 1960s promoted nonprofit independence by undermining the authority of local community institutions. In addition to complicating popular beliefs about charity in American civic culture, this article facilitates a more sophisticated understanding of community dynamics.

The devolution of tuition authority, or abdication of tuition-setting control from elected representatives to unelected university governing boards, is an instance of marketization in higher education. Except for New York and Florida, all states have moved closer to a market-priced ideal by “deregulating” tuition. In this article, I describe my analysis of these two negative cases and argue that preexisting higher education policies have lasting effects on the institutional logics to which policy makers and other stakeholders have access, leading to divergent outcomes. What policy makers deem appropriate policy in their local context is shaped by a history of education policy making that likely preceded their position in office. However, the structure of institutions and the founding ideas of those institutions—as preserved in planning documents and remembered by select institutional actors—perpetuate a commitment to a certain institutional logic. Specifically, Florida and New York policy makers were constrained in their decision making about tuition devolution at multiple points in time by a family of institutions logic that reinforced the importance of their state university systems’ lack of formal tiers and their commitment to price similarity. The state policies governing these state systems became politically consequential because policy makers invoked the system cohesiveness mandated by such policies as a principal reason for rejecting devolution proposals. This powerful narrative appears to have precluded the ideational change toward a market university despite a move in this direction in other states.

We analyze the effects of the Married Women’s Property Acts and Earnings Acts (EAs) on divorce rates in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States. We find that the property acts increased divorce rates, which is consistent with the predicted outcome, in household extensive bargaining models, of an increase in the married woman’s relative bargaining power. We also find some evidence that the EAs had a positive effect on divorce rates, though it is not statistically significant after accounting for the possibility that divorce rates changed prior to the enactment of an EA. To support our causal argument, we control for regional trends in the divorce rate and account for the timing of the laws’ effects. We also assess alternative explanations for the rise in divorce rates during the late nineteenth century, including age structure, divorce law, urbanization, economic development, and foreign immigration, and we find that only age structure and urbanization positively affected divorce rates along with the property acts. Finally, we provide support for our argument from court cases in which the acts were used to defend a woman’s property rights against claims from her ex-husband.