Does local area social mobility affect political alienation?

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

October 11, 2024

Summary:

While existing research has considered how individual-level social mobility experiences affect a person’s political outlook, less attention has been paid to how historic levels of social mobility in local areas influence political attitudes and political behaviour. We link individual-level data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study to small area estimates of social class mobility derived from the decennial census. We find that living in a low absolute social mobility area was associated with a higher probability of voting ‘Leave’ in the 2016 UK European Union membership referendum. However, we find no evidence that historical social mobility rates in the local area predict abstention in general elections or attitudinal indicators of political alienation. Given declining rates of upwards mobility, and increasing levels of downwards mobility, our results have important implications for understanding geographies of political discontent.

Published in

Political Studies

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1177/00323217241283930

ISSN

00323217

Subjects

Notes

Online First

Open Access

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

#578394

News

Latest findings, new research

Publications search

Search all research by subject and author

Podcasts

Researchers discuss their findings and what they mean for society

Projects

Background and context, methods and data, aims and outputs

Events

Conferences, seminars and workshops

Survey methodology

Specialist research, practice and study

Taking the long view

ISER's annual report

Themes

Key research themes and areas of interest