| Summary: | There is little consensus in past research regarding the sources of cross-national variation in
relative rates of intergenerational class mobility. We argue for the importance of distinguishing
between ‘primary’ factors that explain why inequalities in relative chances of mobility exist in
the first place, and ‘secondary’ factors that explain variation in these chances. Our main aim is
to identify primary factors. We follow Erikson and Goldthorpe (1992) in developing a
topological model of the endogenous mobility regime which we then apply to class mobility
tables for 30 European nations. The model claims that inequalities in relative class mobility
chances derive from three kinds of effect: those of class hierarchy, class inheritance and status
affinity. When applied to all nations together, the model accounts for the very large part of the
total association between class origins and destinations. Clear differences, however, show up
between the mobility regimes of men and of women: gender is a secondary factor. When the
model is applied separately to nations in the high fluidity and low fluidity sets that we
distinguish, we find that the effects of the primary factors identified by our model strengthen
in a consistent way from the former set to the latter, although it seems likely that different
secondary factors may operate in offsetting ways. Finally, when the model is applied to the
groups of nations that we distinguish within the high and low fluidity sets, few differences in
the strengths of the various effects show up, but those that do are highly concentrated in postsocialist nations and can be related to secondary factors of a specific kind associated with
particular features of their transitions to some form of capitalist democracy.
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