Comparative political economy and social stratification research: varieties of social mobility?

Gabriele Ballarino and Floriane Bolazzi

Chapter 25 in Handbook of Comparative Political Economy, 2025, pp 451-469 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter explores the relationship between comparative political economy (CPE) and social stratification research (SSR). It reconstructs the story of both research traditions, focusing on cross-country comparisons of inequality. While SSR has mostly focused on individual social mobility as the intergenerational association of occupational status, CPE has typically focused on macro outcomes and considered the distribution of income inequality as its key measure of inequality. Empirically, we calculate four measures of social mobility for 35 countries and check how they distribute over socio-economic clusters and how they correlate with indicators of production regime (market freedom) and welfare generosity. We find higher social mobility in Scandinavian and Anglophone countries than in Continental European and (particularly) Mediterranean ones. While this result is consistent with a number of previous studies, it is not consistent with the standard analyses of income inequality, which find higher inequality (as measured by the Gini index) in Anglophone than in Continental European countries.

Keywords: Social stratification; Social mobility; Comparative political economy; Relative mobility; Inequality regimes; Varieties of capitalism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035327775
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