Class Mobility and Political Preferences: Individual and Contextual Effects

Abstract

The authors test several hypotheses about the impact of intergenerational class mobility on political party preferences. Tests using cross-national data sets representing Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States over the period 1964-90 suggest a process of acculturation to the class of destination. The authors hypothesized that a class with a high degree of demographic identity influences newcomers more than a class with low demographic identity does and that, the more left-wing inflow there is into a class, the more likely the immobile members are to have left-wing political preferences. The data did not confirm these hypotheses. A macro analysis does, however, show that the level of class voting is weakened by a compositional mobility effect.

Intergenerational Social Mobility and Popular Explanations of Poverty: A Comparative Perspective

“…Individuals acquire values and beliefs at a relatively young age when they are entering adulthood from the content of formal and informal education, the distinctive developments of their birth cohorts through peer group socialisation, and idiosyncratic historical experiences such as war, revolution, or mass migration (Jennings & Markus, 1984;Ryder, 1965). Nonetheless, socially mobile individuals, by virtue of moving to a higher or a lower social class, acquire new values and preferences similar to those of the destination class (De Graaf, Nieuwbeerta, & Heath, 1995). The field of social justice research would benefit to acknowledge that the values of intergenerationally mobile individuals are affected by interaction with individuals from the host class and reflect the values of this normative reference group (Heath, Jowell, & Curtice, 1985), but this acquisition is likely to happen gradually, in a process that Blau (1956) refers to as the ''pattern of acculturation''.…”

Educational Inequality and Family Relationships: Influences on Contact and Proximity

“…For estimating mobility effects, authors have also used diagonal mobility models (e.g. Weakliem, 1992;De Graaf et al, 1995). These models are less directly useful for making comparisons of the heterogeneous combinations to the homogeneous combination that contains the lowest level of the dependent variable.…”

Voto assimétrico, classes e mobilidade social no Brasil

“…Teorias mais recentes deram espaço para hipóteses mais específicas sobre os comportamentos individuais. Na literatura sociológica contemporânea há algumas hipóteses importantes sobre o comportamento individual de voto e sua relação com classes e mobilidade social (Sobel, 1981;Clifford e Heath, 1993;De Graaf et al, 1995;Nieuwbeerta et al, 2000;Ribeiro, 2009). As hipóteses que formulamos mais adiante são relevantes porque permitem um diálogo circunstanciado de duas teorias gerais sobre voto: a "teoria econômica do voto" e a "teoria dos grupos de referência" (ou expressive theory).…”

“…Clifford e Heath (1993) e De Graaf et al (1995) analisam uma série de modelos para votos categóricos binários considerando a posição dos eleitores no mercado de trabalho com base em suas localizações em tabelas de mobilidade social. Assim, os melhores modelos seriam aqueles que atribuem pesos às posições de origem e de destino de acordo com as diagonais das tabelas.…”

“…Indivíduos mais velhos experimentaram mobilidade social há mais tempo do que indivíduos mais novos. De fato, a literatura mostra (Goldthorpe, 1980;De Graaf et al, 1995) que o efeito da classe de origem (da mobilidade social) tende a ser mais evidente entre os indivíduos mais novos, que chegaram à classe de destino mais recentemente. Os indivíduos mais velhos estão mais "aculturados" em suas classes de destino e tendem a ter um padrão de voto mais semelhante ao de suas classes de destino do que aos de suas classes de origem.…”