Status Attainment of Siblings during Modernization

Abstract

The modernization thesis claims that intergenerational social mobility increased over time due to industrialization and other modernization processes. Here, we test whether this is indeed the case. We study approximately 360,000 brothers from 189,000 families covering more than 500 municipalities in the Netherlands and a 70-year period (1827 to 1897). We complement these sibling-and family-level data with municipal indicators for the degree of industrialization, mass communication, urbanization, educational expansion, geographic mobility, and mass transportation. We analyze these data by applying sibling models, that is, multilevel regression models where brothers are nested in families, which in turn are nested in communities. We find that the total-unmeasured-family effect on sons' status attainment decreases slightly and is higher than that found for contemporary societies. The measured influence of the family, operationalized by father's occupational status, decreased gradually in the Netherlands in the second half of the nineteenth century. A substantial part of this decrease was due to some, but not all, of the modernization processes adduced by the modernization thesis.

The pattern of educational inequality - The contribution of family background on levels of education over time and across four countries

“…It is likely that in countries with higher participation rates in education, less stratified educational systems, and a more generous welfare state, siblings are less prone to be alike, and that modernization and institutional changes, such as educational expansion, decrease sibling similarity over time. A study of temporal changes in sibling similarity in occupational status suggests that modernization processes in the 20th century did decrease both the observed and unobserved influence of family background (Knigge et al, 2014).…”

Digital humanities and the history of working women: a cascade

“…For example, the influence of community characteristics on individual-level behaviour can be tested using multilevel regression techniques (Gelman & Hill, 2007;Hox, 2002;Snijders & Bosker, 1999). For some recent historical applications in which context is modelled specifically, see Knigge, Maas, van Leeuwen, & Mandemakers, 2014;Lippényi, Maas, & van Leeuwen, 2013b;Saatcioglu & Rury, 2012;Zijdeman, 2009Zijdeman, , 2010; as well as the articles by Schulz, Maas, and van Leeuwen (2014b) and Zijdeman et al (2014) in this issue. Of course, there are other methods as well that could be used.…”

SRRD_2016_10 Kolk & Hällsten Demographic and Educational Success of Decendants.pdf (Version: 1)

“…Previous research has tended to analyze these historical settings separately, and often with a two generational rather than multigenerational perspective (Mare 2011). We continue a limited earlier literature on social mobility during the industrial revolution in the Netherlands (Knigge et al 2014b;Zijdeman 2009), on prospective and integrated analysis of multigenerational social mobility and fertility in pre-modern China (Mare and Song 2014;Song et al 2015), and multigenerational studies of fertility in 20 th century Sweden (Goodman and Koupil 2009;Goodman et al 2012). We combine these approaches and we expand on them by linking historical and contemporary data.…”