Examining the Relationship between Intergenerational Mobility and Social Inequality in 11 Countries

Background/Purpose: Extant scholarship on social mobility and the welfare state suggests that social mobility has stagnated or declined in most advanced welfare states in an era of increasing inequality since the early 1980s. Regarding the inequality-mobility link across welfare states, the Great Gatsby Curve (GGC) is a well-established phenomenon, suggesting that higher income inequality is associated with lower intergenerational mobility. Although a number of scholars have examined the relationship between intergenerational mobility and economic inequality, their findings are still conflicting and inconclusive. Thus, the purpose of this study is to empirically examine the relationship between intergenerational mobility and social inequality in 11 countries.

Methods: Using data from Social Inequality V Module in 2019 International Social Survey Program, this study conducted multilevel logistic regression analysis to deal with the dichotomized outcome as well as controlling for both individual- and country-level variables. Social mobility was conceptualized as intergenerational class mobility, referring to the relationship between social class of adult children and their parents. The dependent variable was the presence/absence of upward mobility. By applying 5 class schema suggested by Oesch (2006) to the International Standard Classification of Occupations 2008 (ISCO-08), occupations were categorized into five classes: 1) high-grade service class, 2) lower-grade service class, 3) small business owners, 4) skilled workers, and 5) unskilled workers. Distances in class for parent-child dyads were computed and dichotomized: upwardly mobile or not. The individual-level independent variable was income deciles of adult children. Control variables included age, gender, marital status, education, employment status, and having union membership. Country-level variables were Gini coefficient and welfare state regimes (liberal, conservative, social democratic, Eastern European, and East Asian). The analytic sample was 10,369 individuals aged 15 and over among eleven countries.

Results: Descriptive results showed that 40.4% out of the sample experienced upward intergenerational social mobility. For the random intercept model, the variance of random effect was 0.013 [95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.004, 0.041] and the intraclass correlation (ICC) was 0.004 [95% CI = 0.001, 0.012], indicating that 2-level model is more appropriate to fit the data. To find the best model, BIC value was used for the goodness-of-fit test. The lowest BIC of our unrestricted model (13598.48) suggested that it was more improved compared to other two restricted models. Results indicated that compared with the top income group, the bottom income group had less chances for upward mobility (OR = 0.48; p <.001). Individuals with college education or more were higher in their chances of upward mobility compared with those with less than high school graduation (OR = 2.78; p <.001). Most importantly, Gini coefficient was negatively associated with the chances of upward mobility (OR = 0.97; p <.01).

Conclusions/Implications: Consistent with the negative inequality-mobility hypothesis suggested by GCC, findings suggest that income inequality was negatively associated with the chance of upward mobility. This study provided insight into the core question of why and how governmental social welfare provisions to reduce social inequality are important in promoting the chances for upward social mobility.