Intergenerational social mobility in Spain between 1956 and 2011: the role of educational expansion and economic modernisation in a late industrialised country

Abstract

This article explores intergenerational class mobility patterns and the role played by education in Spain usingcounterfactuals. Both men and women born from 1926 to 1981 are analysed, meaning the study covers a periodof profound economic and educational advances in a late-industrialised country. The results suggest that, amongthe cohorts born in the 1970s, men have experienced a slight increase in socialfluidity, while women haveexperienced a substantial increase that seems partially driven by their massively increased access to routine non-manual positions independent of their social origins. Inequality of educational opportunities and class returns toeducation have declined, whereas the direct effect of social origins (DESO) has remained constant for men andhas decreased considerably for women. The counterfactual analysis shows that the slight increase in socialfluidity for men is mainly driven by educational expansion. For women, theDESOand educational expansionaccount for a great share of increasingfluidity. Therefore, certain assumptions made by theModernization TheoryandGoldthorpe’s Theory of Social Mobilitycan be put into question