![]() We find that the predicted probability of a mobile individual voting ‘Remain’ in the Brexit referendum is substantially different compared to that of non-mobile individuals. We use data from Understanding Society, a large annual panel survey in the United Kingdom, with more than 40,000 households (University of Essex, 2020). The DRM allows us to separate out the effects of one's origins and destination to mobility effects, which is not possible in conventional ordinary least-squares (OLS) models. It is based on a diagonal reference model (DRM), a model grounded in sociological theory, comparing mobile individuals to the immobile (Sobel, 1981, 1985). Our empirics confirm the need to differentiate between origins, mobility and destination effects to make sense of how socio-economic change has transformed the cleavage structure in Britain. First, does social origin affect the likelihood of one voting ‘Remain’ in the UK Brexit referendum? Second, does upward (downward) social mobility, over and above origin and destination effects, increase or decrease one's likelihood of voting ‘Remain’ in the UK referendum? This distinction is rarely made in political science where the literature tends to either focus on one's intragenerational experience of gain or loss (Ares, 2019 Burgoon et al., 2019 Margalit, 2013), or instead highlight the importance of socialisation (Neundorf & Soroka, 2018 O'Grady, 2019). A socially mobile individual may (1) relate to their destination position (assimilation) (2) relate to their origin position (socialisation) or (3) the experience of mobility itself could have an effect (mobility effect). We draw on theoretical and methodological contributions from political sociology that have studied the effect of intergenerational social mobility on political behaviour and voter preferences. Our paper's contribution is to identify how the positions of intergenerationally mobile voters in the Brexit referendum differ from those of their non-mobile counterparts. In most cases, individuals have been upwardly mobile, but a significant minority have experienced downward mobility. In the context of educational expansion and occupational upgrading, a large part of the population moved away from their parents’ positions in society (Bukodi et al., 2015 Buscha & Sturgis, 2018). However, it is unclear how absolute intergenerational mobility contributes to the structure of this cleavage. The political science literature has consistently shown that ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ in the context of structural change are strong predictors of one's position on Brexit (Adler & Ansell, 2020 Colantone & Stanig, 2018 Fetzer, 2019 Hopkin, 2017 Iversen & Soskice, 2019 W. It created new political identities that have entrenched the new cleavage in British politics and remain salient beyond individuals’ positions on Brexit (Hobolt et al., 2020). The 2016 referendum on the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union (the Brexit vote) exposed a new cleavage through a binary division of ‘Leavers’ and ‘Remainers’ (Evans & Tilley, 2017). The transformation of the British political economy over the past half century has changed society's cleavage structure (Ford & Jennings, 2020). 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. 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. ![]() To do so, we model data from Understanding Society with a diagonal reference model. We differentiate between the effects of social origins, social mobility and destination position. Our paper assesses how intergenerationally mobile voters’ positions in the Brexit referendum differ from their non-mobile counterparts. 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. To explain political divisions within British society, the current scholarship highlights the importance of the ‘winners’ and ‘left-behind’ of political economic transformations.
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