Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa 31905, Israel.
Soc Sci Res. 2012 May;41(3):527-38. doi: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2011.12.001. Epub 2011 Dec 27.
It is commonly argued that social mobility rates are influenced by economic and political conditions. Nevertheless, research on this issue has tended to be hindered by two limitations that make it difficult to draw strong conclusions about contextual effects: (1) seldom have country-level and individual-level influences been tested simultaneously, and (2) only rarely have data more recent than the 1970s been employed. We improve on previous research by employing multilevel models fitted to relatively recent survey data collected from 20 modern societies by the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) and national-level characteristics derived from various official sources. Our findings demonstrate systematic cross-national variation in the association between the occupational status of respondents and their fathers. Consistent with the industrialization thesis, this variation is positively associated with per-capita GDP, suggesting that more affluent nations are characterized by more open and fluid stratification structures. Our results also suggest the importance of political regimes and migration for social mobility. In contrast, economic inequality appears to explain very little of the cross-national variation in mobility rates.
人们普遍认为，社会流动率受到经济和政治条件的影响。然而，关于这个问题的研究往往受到两个限制的阻碍，这使得很难对背景效应得出强有力的结论：（1）很少同时测试国家层面和个人层面的影响，（2）仅使用比 20 世纪 70 年代更新的数据。我们通过使用多层次模型来改进以前的研究，该模型适用于国际社会调查项目（ISSP）从 20 个现代社会收集的相对较新的调查数据，以及来自各种官方来源的国家层面特征。我们的研究结果表明，在受访者及其父亲的职业地位之间的关联上存在系统的跨国差异。与工业化论点一致，这种差异与人均 GDP 呈正相关，表明更富裕的国家具有更开放和流动的分层结构。我们的研究结果还表明政治制度和移民对社会流动的重要性。相比之下，经济不平等似乎只解释了流动率的跨国差异的很小一部分。
