Intergenerational Social Mobility in Twentieth-Century Spain: Social Fluidity without Educational Equalization?

This chapter studies long-term trends in intergenerational class mobility in Spain across the twentieth century drawing from a large pooled dataset (n = 81,475). From the 1960s, Spain underwent a late but intense economic, cultural, and political modernization process. During this period of far-reaching institutional change, men and women experienced a significant increase in upward mobility rates and social fluidity: steady and substantial for women, more modest for men. We disentangle different pathways driving this change in social fluidity using counterfactual simulations. The main drivers of the observed equalization of opportunities were the educational expansion and the direct effect of social origins. We argue that women were particularly benefited from dramatic structural changes in labor force participation, occupational upgrading, and educational expansion in which more room at the top allowed disadvantaged social classes to depart from their origins.