Intergenerational Social Mobility, Political Socialization and Support for the Left under Post-industrial Realignment.

This article investigates how class of origin and intergenerational social mobility impact left-wing party support among new and old core left-wing electorates in the context of post-industrial electoral realignment and occupational transformation. We investigate the remaining legacy of political socialization in class of origin across generations of voters in the UK, Germany and Switzerland. We demonstrate that part of the contemporary middle-class left-wing support is a legacy of socialization under industrial class-party alignments, as many individuals from working-class backgrounds - traditional left-wing constituencies - have a different (post-industrial) class location than their parents. These enduring effects of production worker roots are weaker among younger generations and in more realigned contexts. Our findings imply that exclusively considering respondents' destination class underestimates the relevance of political socialization in class of origin, thereby overestimating electoral realignment. However, these past industrial alignments are currently unparalleled, as newer left-wing constituencies do not (yet) demonstrate similar legacies

Opposing Forces? Intergenerational Social Mobility and the Transmission of Political Ideology

This study investigates the consequences of intergenerational social mobility for the transmission of political ideology from parents to adult children, taking the parental ideology explicitly into account. Analyses using German and Swiss household data show that especially the vertically upwardly mobile are less influenced by the parental ideology. However, longitudinal analyses do not indicate causal effects, but a self-selection mechanism into social mobility. These findings have consequences for the perception of social mobility effects