Ekonomisk-historiska seminariet: Jaakko Meriläinen

Den 11 november gästas Ekonomisk-historiska institutionsseminariet av Jaakko Meriläinen, docent och lektor i nationalekonomi vid Handelshögskolan i Stockholm. Meriläinen kommer presentera ett papper medförfattat med Torun Dewan (LSE), Christopher Kam (University of British Columbia), och Janne Tukiainen (University of Turku), "Class, Social Mobility, and Voting in Democratizing and Industrializing England". För abstract and länk till en WP-version av pappret, se nedan.
 

Jaakko Meriläinen -- personlig hemsida

Torun Dewan, Christopher Kam, Jaakko Meriläinen, and Janne Tukiainen
"Class, Social Mobility, and Voting in Democratizing and Industrializing England"
Aboa Centre for Economics Discussion paper No. 179
March 2026
ABSTRACT
"To what extent did class shape political behavior during early democratization and industrialization, and did class voting reflect economic interests or durable political identities? We use newly collected individual-level panel data from open-ballot elections in the nineteenth-century England—around 130,000 recorded vote choices linked to voters’ occupations across elections—to provide evidence on the class-basis of voting. Voting was strongly structured by occupation: skilled workers and the petite bourgeoisie disproportionately supported Liberals and their free-trade agenda, while the gentry, farm workers, and unskilled workers leaned Conservative. Exploiting within-voter mobility, we show that these alignments reflected durable political identities rather than contemporaneous economic interests: Although socially mobile voters resemble their destination class in cross-sectional comparisons, within-voter estimates show that individuals did not systematically change their vote choice when their class changed. Class-based
political alignments were thus behaviorally durable at the individual level, even though the Industrial Revolution profoundly transformed society."

Pappret finns tillgängligt på denna länk.