Intergenerational objective and subjective mobility and attitudes towards income differences: evidence from transition societies

Abstract

This article explores the association between intergenerational social mobility and attitudes towards income differences in post-socialist societies. I hypothesise that based on the psychological mechanism of self-serving bias in causal attribution, those who experience upward social mobility are more likely to support greater income differences, and that subjective intergenerational mobility has stronger association with attitudes towards income differences than objective mobility because individuals filter their objective environment in order to derive their subjective perceptions of the world and their own experiences. The described hypotheses are tested with two cross-national data sets – European Values Studies and Life in Transition Survey. The derived findings are robust to alternative statistical specifications and indicate that individuals who perceive themselves as subjectively mobile have significantly different attitudes towards income differences in comparison to non-mobile groups, but that this effect does not manifest among objectively mobile individuals.

Keywords:

• Intergenerational mobility
• subjective mobility
• public attitudes
• income differences
• EVS
• LITS
• multivariate analysis

Acknowledgements

The author is thankful to Fabrizio Bernardi, Martin Kohli, Ellu Saar, Martin Whyte, two anonymous reviewers, the editors of Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy and the participants of the 11th Annual Conference of the Network for European Social Policy Analysis ‘Social Policy and Economic Development’ in Poznan, Poland, and the Inequality Working Group Meeting at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, for valuable feedback on an earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Alexi Gugushvili is a Research Associate at the Department of Sociology of the University of Cambridge. From October 2016 he will affiliated with the Department of Social Policy and Intervention and Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. Alexi’s research interests include social stratification and mobility, public opinion and attitudes, comparative welfare research, migration and citizenship studies, nationalism and national identity, and the social determinants of health and mortality.

Notes

1. The Soviet Union consisted of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Other post-socialist countries are Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Slovak Republic, Slovenia and Serbia.

2. Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan are not included in EVS data set and cannot be compared in terms of the implications of objective and subjective social mobility.

3. The central government's power in Bosnia and Herzegovina is highly limited because the country is effectively divided into two parts – Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, while the third region, the Brčko District, is governed locally.

4. EVS provides appropriate weights for country-specific characteristics, but the descriptive results reported in the empirical section of this article are substantively similar whether or not EVS weights are employed. The problem of over-representation of females and relatively older respondents in the multivariate analysis is addressed by means of controlling for respondents’ gender, age and labour market characteristics.

5. For EVS refer to www.europeanvaluesstudy.eu, and EVS refer to http://www.ebrd.com/news/publications/special-reports/life-in-transition-survey-ii.html.

6. Age squared variable enables the detection of possible curvilinear effects stemming from different age cohorts, while its division by 100 simplifies a comparison of the results with the main age variable.

7. The first group includes Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, the second group includes Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania and Serbia; while the third group includes the former Soviet Union republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Russia and Ukraine.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by the Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in South Caucasus Studies at the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre of St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, in association with the Academic Swiss Caucasus Net (ASCN) at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.