Does the Experience of Intergenerational Mobility have Political Consequences? Evidence from the CUPESSE Survey

Political attitudes have many antecedents, such as the crucial role the family plays in shaping political attitudes. The experiences people have throughout their lifetimes, but particularly in their younger years, indeed imprint on their political opinions. Today we face a situation in which upward social mobility (i.e. achieving a higher socio-economic status than one’s parents) is no longer a given for many young people. In transitioning to adulthood, today’s youth are confronted with challenges such as alarmingly high youth unemployment rates, precarious work, and a heightened risk of poverty. What effect does coming of age in tumultuous times have on one’s political attitudes? In particular, how does the experience of social mobility (upwards/downwards) impact young people’s political attitudes? We address these questions using a unique dataset on young Europeans. Investigating the political correlates of social mobility can, for example, shed light on the mechanisms through which unemployment shapes political orientations. The study contributes to the theoretical and empirical literatures on political attitudes and social mobility by adopting a cross-national comparative perspective and applying state-of-the art methodology suitable for parsimoniously estimating the effect of social mobility over and above social origin and destination effects. We develop hypotheses on the moderating effects of welfare regimes and economic conditions and use diagonal reference models to estimate independent mobility effects. Preliminary results suggest that there is no relationship between the experience of upward/downward mobility and an individual’s political opinions beyond the effects of belonging to a higher/lower socio-economic position than one’s parents.