Intergenerational social mobility and the Brexit vote: How social origins and destinations divide Britain

Abstract

To explain political divisions within British society, the current scholarship highlights the importance of the ‘winners’ and ‘left-behind’ of political economic transformations. Yet, the impact of widespread absolute intergenerational social mobility in the past half century, which resulted in socio-economic gains or losses for many, has not been systematically addressed. Our paper assesses how intergenerationally mobile voters’ positions in the Brexit referendum differ from their non-mobile counterparts. We differentiate between the effects of social origins, social mobility and destination position. To do so, we model data from Understanding Society with a diagonal reference model. We show that origins are nearly as important as current socio-economic positions for predicting the probability of voting to ‘leave’ or ‘remain’ in the Brexit referendum. We find that a first-generation graduate would be up to 10 percentage points less likely to vote ‘Remain’ than a graduate whose parents also went to university.