New Class, New Me? Class Mobility and Political Attitudes in Britain and Switzerland

The literature on occupational classes' political attitudes largely assumes socialisation effects. While self-selection into occupations and general tendencies towards attitudinal stability challenge this view, an emerging literature using panel data still finds small, but existent effects of class mobility. However, we argue that their framework does not correspond fully to socialisation. We propose a more appropriate one and study whether occupational socialisation affects socioeconomic and sociocultural attitudes through a two-way fixed-effects model with dummy impact functions. We use Swiss (SHP) and British (BHPS) panels, covering the periods 1999-2023 and 1991-2008 respectively, to unpack the evolution of these attitudes after vertical or horizontal mobility. We find that, despite clear between-class differences in socioeconomic and sociocultural attitudes, neither vertical nor horizontal class mobility is consistently associated with immediate or late-onset attitudinal changes. The lack of evidence for socialisation shows that this implicit assumption present in most research on classes' political attitudes should be reconsidered. Our results also show why using models that are well suited to socialisation is crucial.