Who Do the Socially Mobile Vote For? A Longitudinal Analysis of Intergenerational Mobility and Political Preferences

John Jerrim and Neil Kaye
Additional contact information
John Jerrim: University College London, UK
Neil Kaye: University College London, UK

Sociological Research Online, 2025, vol. 30, issue 1, 22-42

Abstract: Social mobility has become a key public policy issue across the Western world. But who do the upwardly and downwardly mobile vote for? Does their voting behaviour remain the same as their peers in their social origin class, or does it quickly assimilate to mimic the behaviour of others at their social destination? This article presents new, longitudinal evidence on this issue, documenting how the link between social origin, destination and political voting behaviour varies during adult life. We find individuals who move up the social ladder are more likely to vote Conservative than individuals who remain in the same social class as their parents. Overall, an individual’s social origin and social destination seem to be equally important for how they vote. Yet we find no evidence that social mobility is associated with political voting preferences per se; rather upwardly mobile individuals’ greater propensity to vote for the Conservatives is driven by the joint impact of their social origin and destination.

Keywords: intergenerational associations; political preferences; social mobility; voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13607804241229009 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:socres:v:30:y:2025:i:1:p:22-42

DOI: 10.1177/13607804241229009

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Sociological Research Online
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().