Welfare states and social mobility: How educational and social policy may affect cross-national differences in the association between occupational origins and destinations

Cross-national differences in the association between origins and destinations correspond to differences in both welfare regime type and access to post-secondary education. Socialist and social democratic welfare regimes foster a weaker origin-destination association than liberal, corporatist, or mixed regimes do. Nations with better-educated labor forces tend to also be the nations where the association between origins and destinations is weakest. Furthermore, the social and educational policy interact so that the tendency for educational access to lower the origin-destination association is most pronounced in the liberal welfare setting where the association would otherwise be greatest. Greater access is not necessarily associated with greater equality of opportunity, and we find very weak evidence that equality of educational opportunity itself is a direct influence on equality of occupational opportunity (even though nations that have a strong origin-education association also have a strong origin-destination association).