Inter-generational Occupational Mobility and Legislative Voting Behavior

Few efforts have been made to investigate the effects of upward occupational mobility on the values and attitudes of political leadership groups. This study of 94 of the 100 members of the 1957 session of the Wisconsin State Assembly, the lower house of that state's legislature, provides somne support for the hypothesis that the upwardly mobile political leader tends to be more conservative in his voting behavior than are politicians whose occupational statuses do not differ substantially from those of their fathers. It has beconme commonplace in sociological analysis of status discrepancies not only to measure the extent of social mobility in societies, but also to assess the effects or consequences of occupational-status movement in terms of differential psychic adj ustment, attitudes toward minority groups, involvement in labor unions, political values, and so forth.' The political sociologist is particularly interested in the social origins of political decisionmakers, in their occupational patterns and mobility, and in the consequences of occupational mobility for their political belhavior.2 There is considerable empirical evidence to support the notion that, in the electorate at large in the United States, those on the move upward occupationally are inclined to be more politically conservative than those whose occupational status remains relatively stable. Lipset and Bendix, using data from a 1952 survey of the national electorate, have shown that "in America the successfully mobile members of the middle class are more conservative (that is, nmore often Republican) than those class members who are in a social position comparable to that of their parents."3 Based upon a sample of young adults in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1952 presidential election, Maccoby and her associates found that upwardly mobile youth were more Republican than the class from which they came.4 Data from a sample of business leaders in the United States indicated that those who had moved into business leadership from lower status occupations were less likely to be Democrats than those who were the sons of upper and middle class parents.5 And Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee found that, in a sample of voters in Elmira, New York, during the 1948 election, "children who have 'moved up' in the world are more likely to vote Republican than those who have remained roughly in their father's social strata."6 To what extent does an association between occupational mobility and political ideology hold true for political leadership groups as well as for population samples in general? Janowitz has suggested that "the conlsequences of mobility for political behavior should affect not only behavior and attitudes of various broad strata but also the political behavior of leadership I For example, in Seymour M. Lipset and Reinhard Bendix, Social Mobility in Industrial Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960) ; Leonard Reissman, Class in American1 Society (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1959), pp. 293-374; Peter M. Blau, "Social Mobility and Interpersonal Relations," Americant Sociological Review, 21 (1956), pp. 290-295; Seymour M. Lipset and Joan Gordon, "Mobility and Trade Union Membership," in Bendix and Lipset, Class, Status and Power (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1953), pp. 491-500; and Bernard Barber, Social Stratificationt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1957), pp. 356-477. 2 E.g., Donald R. Matthews, The Social Background of Political Decision-Makers (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday and Company, 1954). 3 Social Mobility in Industrial Society, op. cit., p. 66. 4 Eleanor E. Maccoby, Richard E. Matthews, and Anton S. Morton, "Youth and Political Change," Public Opinion Quarterly, 18 (1954), pp. 23-39. 5 Lipset and Bendix, Social Mobility in Industrial Society, op. cit., p. 67. 6 In Votintg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), p. 90. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.113 on Sun, 15 May 2016 05:56:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms INTER-GENERATIONAL OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY 91 groups."7 The Americain legislature is an ideal context for an examination of the hypothesis that upwardly mobile political leaders tend to be more conservative than those who have been occupationally immobile. American legislators tend very heavily to be recruited from middle and upper occupational strata, and are probably uniformly more mobile than their constituents.8 And social status has, at least in one American legislative body, been shown to have had some independent effect on legislative votes.9 The present findings came from occupational and voting data for 94 of the 100 members of the 1957 session of the Wisconsin Assembly, the lower house of that state's legislature. Intergenerational assessments of mobility had to be used; each member's principal occupation, and hiis father's principal occupation were scored using the North-Hatt-Reiss rating schedules.10 If the discrepancy between member's and father's occupational score equaled ten points or more, the member was classified as "mobile"; other members were classified as "stable" occu-