What are the Trends and Explanations of Perceived Social Mobility in Poland?

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in the subjective aspect of socioeconomic position and its implications for wellbeing across social science disciplines. One of the emerging dimensions of this scholarship is research on perceived social mobility, its determinants, and consequences. To date, most existing evidence in this area is based on cross-sectional data and corresponding methods, which are biased by the unobserved heterogeneity of individuals. The latter calls into question existing findings on the nature of perceived social mobility. To provide more robust estimates of trends over time and explanations of perceived social mobility, we explore two complementary datasets covering the period between the late 1990s and the late 2010s in Poland. Due to the major economic, political and social changes, exploring subjective perceptions of intergenerational mobility might be particularly important in post-communist settings. The analysis allows us to conclude that, over the last two decades, significant changes in perceived social mobility have taken place in Poland. In terms of the individual-level predictors of this trend, cross-sectional and random-effects analyses over-estimate the importance of certain characteristics, such as age, education, or size of locality, yet, based on the results from more robust fixed-effects estimates, we conclude that factors such as subjective social position, household income, and objective social mobility are important explanations as to why some people believe they are doing better or worse than their parents.