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AbstractI draw on the findings of a recently completed comparative research project to address the question: how did intergenerational social mobility change over cohorts of men and women born in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, and what role, if any, did education play in this? The countries studied are the US, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Notwithstanding the differences between them, by and large they present the same picture. Rates of upward mobility increased among cohorts born in the second quarter of the century and then declined among those born later. Among earlier born cohorts, social fluidity increased (that is, the association between the class a person was born into and the class he or she came to occupy as an adult declined) and then remained unchanged for those born after mid-century. The association between class origins and educational attainment followed much the same trend as social fluidity. This suggests that growing equalization in education may have contributed to the increase in social fluidity. In our analyses we find that this is so, but educational expansion also led to greater fluidity in some countries. There is also a strong link between upward mobility and social fluidity. Upward mobility was mostly driven by the expansion of higher-level white-collar jobs, especially in the 30 years after the end of the Second World War. This facilitated social fluidity because people from working class and farming origins could move into the service or salariat classes without reducing the rate at which children born into those classes could remain there. Educational expansion, educational equalization, and rapid structural change in the economies of the US and Europe all contributed to greater social fluidity among people born in the second quarter of the twentieth century. For people born after mid-century, rates of downward mobility have increased: however, despite the lack of further educational equalization and less pronounced structural change, social fluidity has remained unchanged.

In the analysis of cross-classified data, the quantities of interest are frequently odds ratios. Although odds ratios are functions of the interaction parameters in association models, the usual way of normalizing and identifying these parameters means that their relationship with the odds ratios of interest is indirect. This can lead to interpretative confusions. The author points to the benefits of defining the interaction parameters of a model to have a one-to-one relationship with the odds ratios of interest, thus overcoming problems of interpretation. Three examples are presented to illustrate the argument.

In all developed societies the class position that individuals come to occupy depends, inter alia, on their class origins, gender and ethnic group membership. It might be argued that these inequalities had 'meritocratic legitimation' if it transpired that they were largely the result of the differential distribution of merit across sexes, classes or ethnic groups. In this paper I address the question of how far Northern Ireland can be considered to be an educational meritocracy. In other words, to what extent might inequalities according to class origin, gender and ethnic group membership in the class positions that individuals attain be attributed, or legitimized, according to differences between classes, genders and ethnic groups in average educational attainment? The results suggest that in Northern Ireland, as in the cases of Britain (Marshall and Swift, 1993; Breen and Goldthorpe, 1999,2001) and the Republic of Ireland (Breen and Whelan, 1993), men and women and people from different class origins and ethnic groups experience different chances of gaining access to better class positions, even when they have the same level of educational attainment. In seeking to explain the results of the analyses I draw on recent work that discusses and illustrates some of the difficulties with the concept of 'merit' and with the attempt to equate meritocracy with a diminishing role for ascription.

It is widely accepted that survey data tend to underestimate the levels of support for political parties or other groups that are perceived to advocate 'extreme' views. In this note I propose the use of latent class analysis as a means by which this difficulty might be overcome, & I illustrate it by an application to the case of support within Northern Ireland for Sinn Fein from survey data & apply latent class analysis to a recent data set from Northern Ireland. The note concludes with some general remarks on the question of why surveys & elections disagree & the role of latent class analysis in explaining this phenomenon. 3 Tables. Adapted from the source document.