Stratification Factors in Today's Russia

Abstract

Data from all-Russian surveys from the mid-1990s to 2013 have shown, as a result of the completion of the structural restructuring of the economy in Russia, an increase in the significance of stratification factors that foster intergenerational reproduction of classes, while the role of the factors linked to an individual's personal activity has diminished. The conclusion drawn is that the mechanisms of mobility that have emerged are leading the country farther and farther away from the meritocratic ideal of a society of equal opportunities.

Notes

English translation © 2015 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC, from the Russian text © 2014 “Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia.” “Faktory stratifikatsii v sovremennoi Rossii: dinamika sravnitel'noi znachimosti,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, 2014, no. 10, pp. 23–35. [Notes have been renumbered in this edition.—Ed.]

Natal'ia Evgen'evna Tikhonova is a doctor of sociological sciences, a research professor at the Higher School of Economics National Research Institute, and chief science associate at the Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences.

Translated by Kim Braithwaite. Translation reprinted from Sociological Research, vol. 54, no. 6. doi: 10.1080/10611428.2016.1258919.

^1. I use the term “factor” in its original meaning, from German Faktor, from the Latin factor, which means “doer, maker.” This means that in the article stratification factors are the characteristics that are external with respect to the individual, which proceed from the state of society or are personally inherent to him, and they influence the probability that he will occupy a particular place in stratification system. At the same time, I view stratification factors not from the position of rigid determinism but as a multicomponent system of interaction with feedback: not as the reasons that individuals occupy particular structural positions but as circumstances and characteristics in complex interaction with one another, which increase or reduce a specific individual's chances of ending up in a particular structural position in the system of stratification.

^2. A detailed analysis of the stratification factors during this period are found in my work (Tikhonova, 1999). In consideration of this, certain findings linked to the situation in the 1990s are presented only on the level of conclusions in the present article.

^3. The aggregate sample in all the surveys represented the adult population of the country, by region of residence (territorial and economic regions in accordance with Rosstat zoning), and, within them, by type of community, by gender and age. In different years the size of the sample ranged from 1,750 to 3,000, all age eighteen and older.

^4. At first glance, only the subjective status of the individual was measured in this way, but, as has been shown by comparison of these self-assessments with an individual's actual place in the stratification system when different models of it are used (Tikhonova, 2007), this indicates that it is sufficiently accurate and, at the same time, that it is convenient for statistical analysis.

^5. For a description of the CHAID program, which is one variety of regression models, see (SPSS 1993). The Tree-Select method was used.

^6. For more detail see Tikhonova (1999, ch. 4), “The Mechanism of the Effect of Basic Stratification Factors” [Mekhanizm deistviia osnovnykh faktorov stratifikatsii].

^7. For example, Spearman's coefficient for the relation between social status and lack of social capital—in other words, the lack of acquaintances who would be able to help the respondent find a good job, get into a good hospital, or see a good doctor, and help the individual's child to get into a good institution of higher learning or school, who could help the person in his career or at least offer him a loan of a fairly large amount of money—came to 0.321. A total lack of social capital (i.e., the absence, in a person's social networks, of someone who could help in dealing with at least one of these issues) characterized 61 percent of the members of the two lowest status positions and only 23 percent of the members of the top four status positions.

^8. In analyzing the 1990s, the questions used to serve as dependent variables for the purpose included how the respondent rated his family's material condition, what part of the population he assigned himself to in terms of level of material security, what characteristic was best-suited to define his material condition, and how he rated his material condition as a whole. In the 2000s and the 2010s, including the year 2013, the questions included what part of the population the respondent assigned himself to in terms of his level of material security, and how he rated his material well-being.

^9. Calculated according to Rossiiskiistaticheski ezhegodnik (2000, 2012).

^10. I formulated the Standard of Living Index in collaboration with N.M. Davydova. For more detail see Davydova, Popova, and Tikhonova (2004).

^11. Without counting the top strata and the “social lower orders” (the homeless, etc.).

^12. Data from a survey by the Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences, What Do Russians Dream of? [O chem mechtaiut Rossiiane]; for more details see Gorshkov, Krumm, and Tikhonova (2014). In constructing the classification, for singling out the destitute, a methodology was used that does not coincide with that used to single out the core. Strata 1 through 4 of this classification correspond to the poor who are singled out in accordance with the absolute approach and the deprivation approach to poverty.

^13. Representatives of this stratum are virtually absent in mass surveys, and for this reason the size of the stratum has been reduced in the data set used here. Totally absent in this classification are the representatives of the top 2–3 percent of the most prosperous population, who do not fall into the sample of mass surveys at all.

^14. In actuality, however, considering the difficulty of gaining access to the most prosperous strata of the population for interviews, this proportion was even higher.