SOCIAL-MOBILITY IN THE 1970S AND 1980S - A STUDY OF MEN AND WOMEN IN ENGLAND AND SWEDEN

Theories about change in social mobility regimes have been difficult to test because of a lack of genuinely comparable data for multiple time-points. This problem is overcome for two European nations, Sweden and England, by making use of eleven different data-sets with closely matched social class-codings, covering the period between the late 1960s and the late 1980s. Data on both men and women are used to investigate whether these two societies have become more open over the decades considered. A 'generic' hybrid linear-by-linear/topological log-linear model is introduced. It corroborates earlier findings that fluidity is higher in Sweden. When change in mobility parameters is tested for, some evidence of increased fluidity is detected, particularly for Swedish women in the late 1970s. There are also signs of increased fluidity characterizing the mobility regime of English men in the mid-1980s.