Education and Social Fluidity in Contemporary Italy: An Analysis of Cohort Trends

In this chapter we assess whether changes in educational participation have fostered changes in social fluidity in Italy over the 20th century. By means of log-linear unidiff models and of multinomial logistic regressions, we show that a significant decline of schooling inequalities during the so-called economic miracle fuelled an increase in social fluidity, in a context where the association between education and class destinations weakened only slightly. Direct inheritance also declined to some extent in the post-war period. These equalising trends occurred for both men and women, but were stronger among women, and involved primarily, though not exclusively, the agricultural classes. However, all these trends have flattened out in the youngest cohorts, where social fluidity is highly inertial. Since the process of occupational upgrading has halted in recent decades, the recent stability of relative mobility involves also the stagnation of absolute mobility.