The Political Consequences of Social Mobility

Abstract

SUMMARY This paper examines the effect of social mobility on voting behaviour by using diagonal reference models. The EM algorithm is used to fit the models. Asymmetrical mobility effects are found on voting for the Labour party, the downwardly mobile from the salariat being more likely to retain the voting patterns of their class of origin than are the upwardly mobile into the salariat. It is suggested that this asymmetry can be explained by countermobility. The effect of social mobility on political behaviour has long puzzled sociologists and political scientists. That people's current social class affects (or at least is associated with) their voting behaviour is one of the best established propositions in political sociology. But researchers have often suspected that downwardly mobile individuals did not behave entirely in the same way as the intergenerationally stable members of their classes of destination. More specifically, data from five industrial nations suggested to Lipset and Bendix that, although the upwardly mobile tended to conform to the patterns of their class of destination, the downwardly mobile tended in contrast to retain the patterns of their class of origin: 'The majority of the men who rise to middle-class status become politically conservative (more in America than in Europe but still a majority on both continents), while a large minority of those who are reduced to working-class status in the United States, and a majority of men mobile downward in Europe, remain adherents of conservative movements'