Comparative research into intergenerational social mobility has been typically restricted to a relatively small number of countries. The aim of this paper is to widen the perspective, and to provide an up-to-date account of rates of intergenerational class mobility for men across 30 European countries, using a newly-constructed comparative data-set based on the European Social Survey. Absolute mobility rates are found to vary quite widely with national differences in the extent and pattern of class structural change. As regards relative rates, countries are best seen as falling into groups within comparatively high and low fluidity sets, within which groups a high degree of cross-national commonality prevails. Further results indicate that country differences in relative rates play only a very limited part in accounting for country differences in absolute rates, confirming that the latter are primarily determined by class structural change. Based on our findings, we suggest a restatement of the FJHhypothesis to the effect that in societies with a capitalist market economy, a nuclear family system and a liberal-democratic polity, a limit exists to the extent to which relative rates of class mobility can be equalized, which countries may move closer to or, in the case of post-socialist societies, recede from.

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The objective of this article is to study status-seeking, defined as pursuit for elevated social status, and how it relates to income inequality. Building on sociological, psychological, and economic literature, we formulate two opposing hypotheses suggesting a positive and a negative relationship between income inequality and status-seeking. To test these hypotheses, we use repeated crosssectional micro-data from the European Social Survey, which was collected biannually from 2002 to 2014, and use it in combination with income inequality data from Eurostat. With this data we complement existing studies by focusing on both between-and within-country overtime variability in income inequality and status-seeking. We find evidence of a negative relationship between income inequality and status-seeking. This supports the hypothesis that with higher levels of economic inequality people have less incentives and less motivation to strive for heightened social status.

A body of academic research has shown a social class gradient in psychological well-being. Some recent work has also suggested that the gradient is worsening over time, though the evidence is mixed. We focus on two straightforward research questions: Is there a class gradient in mental health? Has this gradient changed over time? We answer these questions with attention to two specific causal pathways: employment status and unobserved heterogeneity. We use two data sources: repeated cross-sections from the Health Survey of England (HSE) and longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). The combination of pooled OLS regression (with HSE) and fixed effects analysis (with BHPS) allows for a robust analysis of the relationship between class and psychological well-being. We argue that employment status is a confounder in the analysis of class inequalities and show that, along with unobserved heterogeneity, these two pathways go a long way to explain the class gradient. The effects of employment status are substantive and, unlike social class, cannot be explained away by unobserved heterogeneity. We conclude that employment status deserves greater prominence in the debate as both a pathway by which the class gradient transpires, and as another 'dimension' of inequality in its own right. Our overtime analysis suggests that skilled and unskilled manual workers had higher psychological well-being in the 1990s but by 2008 were closer to the average. Class inequalities do not appear to be widening.

This study explores the relationships between intergenerational social class mobility and attitudes towards immigration. We interpret a failure to keep up with parental social class (i.e. downward mobility) as an indicator that individual's status achievements lag behind expectations and contribute to subjective feelings of loss and decline. An innovative feature of this study is that we investigate both whether individual's mobility experience-micro-level-and also whether opportunity structuresmobility on a macro level-are linked with attitudes towards immigration. In contexts with high downward-mobility, opportunities for moving up are limited and hence perceived economic decline and loss might lead to more hostility towards immigrants. We use the European Social Survey data (2002-10) and conduct analyses on 30 countries using diagonal reference models that allow the effects of individual mobility trajectory to be disentangled from origin status and destination status. Our results show that the working classes hold stronger anti-immigration attitudes and parental class continues to exert an effect on attitudes in adulthood even after accounting for individual's own social class position. Being downwardly mobile from parental class does not appear to be associated with more hostility towards immigrants, except in a few European countries like Italy, Poland, and Greece. Our random-effects meta-regression models show, however, that people living in contexts of high downward mobility are more hostile towards immigrants compared to people in contexts with high upward mobility.

In this article, we address two inter-related questions. Are there gender differences in the level and the pattern of intergenerational class mobility? If so, do these differences show up in a uniform fashion in Europe? To answer these questions, we use a newly constructed comparative data set that allows us to examine how far differences between men and women in absolute and relative mobility can still be characterized in the same way as in the last decades of the 20th century. We also examine the effects of women’s heterogeneity in terms of labour market attachment on their class mobility. Our results show that in most countries, women are more likely than men to be found in different class positions to those of their parents’. But we point out that the reasons for this might be quite different in the West and in the East. As regards relative mobility chances, we are able to underwrite the dominant finding of past research that women display greater social fluidity than men only in a certain group of countries. In most countries, we do not find any systematic and uniform gender difference between men and women in the level of their relative mobility rates. But, we do find significant and systematic gender differences in the pattern of relative rates: women’s class mobility appears to be more impeded by hierarchical barriers than by the propensity for class inheritance. And, in this regard, our findings point to a large degree of commonality across European countries.

Research has shown that workers' support for public unemployment benefits (UB) depends on their level of employment insecurity: the insecure workers are more supportive of benefits than the secure workers. It can also be hypothesized that this polarization in support for UB is increased or decreased by the institutional settings of a country. We are particularly interested in two types of institutional conditions: the level of employment protection and the generosity of unemployment benefits. We discuss how public provision of social protection in terms of job security and income might motivate the subjectively secure and insecure workers in different ways and thereby polarize or unite support for unemployment benefits. We find that protection of temporary job contracts and generous unemployment benefits bring the attitudes of the secure and insecure closer together. We argue that the convergence of attitudes can be explained by the distribution of underlying social risks and existing social norms about solidarity.

This study explores the relationships between intergenerational social class mobility and attitudes towards immigration. We interpret a failure to keep up with parental social class (i.e. downward mobility) as an indicator that individual’s status achievements lag behind expectations and contribute to subjective feelings of loss and decline. An innovative feature of this paper is that we investigate both whether individual’s mobility experience -- micro level -- and also whether opportunity structures -- mobility on a macro level -- are linked with attitudes towards immigration. In contexts with high downward-mobility, opportunities for moving up are limited and hence perceived economic decline and loss might lead to more hostility towards immigrants. By contrast, high upward mobility expands opportunities for all and as such might promote positive attitudes towards immigrants. We use the European Social Survey data (2002-10) and conduct analyses on 30 countries using diagonal reference models that allow the effects of individual mobility trajectory to be disentangled from origin status and destination status. Our results show that the working classes hold stronger anti-immigration attitudes and parental class continues to exert an effect on attitudes in adulthood even after accounting for individual’s own social class position. Being downwardly mobile from parental class does not appear to be associated with more hostility towards immigrants, except in a few European countries like Italy, Poland, and Greece. Our random-effects meta-regression models show, however, that people living in contexts of high downward mobility are more hostile towards immigrants compared to people in contexts with high upward mobility.