Change or continuity? Intergenerational social mobility and post-communist transition

Abstract

Regime change experienced in post-communist societies is of great significance for research in social stratification and mobility. Nonetheless, the existing literature does not provide a clear answer if cross-national differences in social mobility are determined by communist legacies or by the divergent paths these countries followed in their transition to the capitalist system. It is hypothesised that higher income inequality and an overall decline in material wellbeing would increase the importance of parental economic capital, whereas the relative role of parental cultural capital in offspring’s life chances would decline. For 24 societies in Central and Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus, I find evidence on the decisive role of social origins, particularly parental education, in predicting individuals’ educational and occupational attainment. However, significant and systematic changes in intergenerational social mobility from pre- to post-transitional cohorts are not observed. The derived findings are robust to alternative specifications of social origins and destinations. Arguably, differences in intergenerational links between parents’ and offspring’s socio-economic status resulted from historical discrepancies in the communist period rather than the consequences of idiosyncratic developments in post-communist transition.