Revisiting the FJH Hypothesis: New Data and New Measure for an Old Question on Social Mobility

Abstract This paper attempts to update one of the most entrenched controversies in the field of social mobility: the idea, as maintained by Featherman, Jones & Hauser (1974) in their well-known FJH hypothesis, that societies exhibit a fundamental similarity in social mobility rates. To do that, we exploit the main historical international database that allows a large degree of quality in the comparison due to standardization procedures. To achieve this goal, we utilize the main international historical databases (ISSP, EVS and ESS), enabling extensive cross-national comparisons. We use an alternative nonparametric approach based on the average of the global odds ratios (without requiring any statistical assumptions (as difference uniform). Our results confirm that there is no clear presence of distinct regimes of social mobility; rather, there is only a continuum with two breaking points above or below the threshold that includes the majority of countries. Those outside this threshold are few and are consistently recurrent.