The shadow of peasant past: Seven generations of inequality persistence in Northern Sweden

• Main Authors: Hällsten, Martin, Kolk, Martin
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: Center for Open Science 2020
• Subjects: Northern Sweden
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/yjksz

We use administrative data linked to parish records from Northern Sweden to study how persistent inequality is across multiple generations in education, occupation, and wealth, going from historical to contemporary time. Our data cover seven generations and allows us to follow ancestors of individuals living in Sweden around the new millennium back more than 200 years, covering the mid-18th century to the 21st century. In our sample of around 75,000 traceable descendants, we analyze (a) up to 5th cousin correlations and (b) dynastic correlations over seven generations based on aggregations of ancestors’ social class/status. With both approaches, we find that past generations structure life chances many generations later, even though our results align with traditional stratification research in that mobility across multiple generations is high. However, when the ancestor held a high class position, mobility is much lower, suggesting that closure is more accentuated in top of society. Our results implicate that today’s inequality regime may have been formed many generations back.