Mobility and Preference Formation

• In Event: Political Behavior, Geography and Socialization

Abstract

We study mobility experiences as a key element of people’s socialization into politics. We argue that different mobility experiences play an important role in shaping preferences, in particular party preferences and support for redistribution. We argue that mobility experiences shape not only perceptions of merit and views about deservingness, as argued in the extant literature, but also attitudes towards risk and other regarding preferences and as such moderate the influence of current income and wealth on political preferences. We focus on both class and spatial mobility and their combination. The former examines the moderating role of individual mobility trajectories. The latter focuses on the impact of growing in different types of local economic environments (stagnant, declining, rising). To explore our theoretical claims, we exploit 36 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (1984--2019).

Authors

• Pablo Beramendi, Duke University

• Daniel Stegmueller, Duke University

• David Rueda, University of Oxford