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Intergenerational social mobility and the Brexit vote: How social origins and destinations divide Britain
Author(s) -
MCNEIL ANDREW,
HABERSTROH CHARLOTTE
Publication year - 2023
Publication title -
european journal of political research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.267
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1475-6765
pISSN - 0304-4130
DOI - 10.1111/1475-6765.12526
Subject(s) - referendum , brexit , voting , social mobility , politics , scholarship , destinations , political economy , political science , economics , demographic economics , sociology , economic growth , law , tourism , international trade , european union
To explain political divisions within British society, the current scholarship highlights the importance of the ‘winners’ and ‘left‐behind’ of political economic transformations. Yet, the impact of widespread absolute intergenerational social mobility in the past half century, which resulted in socio‐economic gains or losses for many, has not been systematically addressed. Our paper assesses how intergenerationally mobile voters’ positions in the Brexit referendum differ from their non‐mobile counterparts. We differentiate between the effects of social origins, social mobility and destination position. To do so, we model data from Understanding Society with a diagonal reference model. We show that origins are nearly as important as current socio‐economic positions for predicting the probability of voting to ‘leave’ or ‘remain’ in the Brexit referendum. We find that a first‐generation graduate would be up to 10 percentage points less likely to vote ‘Remain’ than a graduate whose parents also went to university.