Social Mobility in Chilean Youth and Their Parents: A Generational Analysis from the Perspective of Social Reproduction

• Date: 01 November 2021
• Author: Mauricio Oyarzo,Luis Miguel Rodrigo
• Published date: 01 November 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20939103
• Subject Matter: Other Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X20939103

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 241, Vol. 48 No. 6, November 2021, 120–142

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20939103

© 2020 Latin American Perspectives

120

Social Mobility in Chilean Youth and Their Parents

A Generational Analysis from the Perspective of Social

Reproduction

by

Luis Miguel Rodrigo and Mauricio Oyarzo

Recent studies on Chile agree that the country’s youth enjoy greater social mobility

than previous generations. This has been attributed either to their greater access to higher

education or to life-cycle effects on occupation. A test of these two hypotheses by estimat-

ing the socioeconomic positions of four generations of Chileans using a model of analysis

based on the social reproduction paradigm shows that younger generations of Chileans

have a lower level of social inheritance than the rest of the population only during their

initial years in the labor market. Therefore, the greater social mobility observed in them is

temporary and is explained by life-cycle effects on occupation.

Estudios recientes sobre Chile coinciden en que la actual juventud chilena goza de una

mayor movilidad social que las generaciones anteriores. Esto se ha atribuido a su mayor

acceso a la educación superior o a los efectos del ciclo de vida en la ocupación. Aquí se

examinan estas dos hipótesis a partir de una aproximación en torno a las posiciones socio-

económicas de cuatro generaciones chilenas. Se utiliza un modelo analítico asentado en el

paradigma de la reproducción social, el cual nos muestra que las generaciones más jóvenes

tienen un grado de herencia social más bajo que el resto de la población tan sólo durante

sus primeros años como participantes en el mercado laboral. Por lo tanto, su mayor movi-

lidad social es temporal y se explica a partir de los efectos del ciclo de vida en la ocupación.

Keywords: Reproductive model, Social inheritance, Labor trajectory, Bourdieu

Various studies on Chile have shown that the income and therefore the

socioeconomic status of a younger generation of workers are less determined

by social characteristics such as social class of origin, gender, spatial position,

and ethnicity than those of previous generations (Núñez and Miranda, 2007;

Núñez and Risco, 2004; Rodrigo, 2015; Sapelli, 2009). This would suggest that

we are at the onset of a period of greater social fluidity in a society that has

historically been characterized by rigidity (Espinoza, Barozet, and Méndez,

2011; Espinoza and Núñez, 2014; Salazar and Pinto, 1999a; 1999b; 2002).

However, so far there has been little clarity regarding the lower social

Luis Miguel Rodrigo is a professor of sociology in the Department of Economics of the Universidad

Católica del Norte in Antofagasta, Chile, and director of the Regional Observatory of Human

Development. Mauricio Oyarzo is a professor of economics in the School of Business

Administration of the Universidad de Concepción Campus Chillán and a research associate at the

Instituto de Economía Aplicada Regional of the Universidad Católica del Norte. Funding pro-

vided by CONICYT FONDECYT No. 11150703 is acknowledged and appreciated.

939103LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X20939103LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVESRodrigo and Oyarzo / SOCIAL MOBILITY IN CHILEAN YOUTH AND THEIR PARENTS

research-article2020

Rodrigo and Oyarzo / SOCIAL MOBILITY IN CHILEAN YOUTH AND THEIR PARENTS 121

deter mination of Chilean youth. Previous results have been explained in terms

of either the human-capital (Núñez and Risco, 2004; Sapelli, 2009; 2016) or the

life-cycle (Rodrigo, 2015) hypothesis. The human-capital hypothesis is that

younger Chileans enjoy greater access to higher education, a condition that will

not only facilitate greater intergenerational social mobility but also bring about

a permanent change in the structure of opportunities within the country. The

life-cycle hypothesis is that workers of all generations will be less affected by

their social origin at the beginnings of their career paths than in the subsequent

stages of each trajectory and therefore access to higher education has not

resulted in a change in the structure of opportunities in Chile.

This article tests these two hypotheses in order to understand whether we

are at an inflection point in terms of social fluidity in Chile. In order to do this,

we estimate the socioeconomic positions of four generations1 of Chileans

through a set of socio-statistical models based on the social reproduction para-

digm. The National Socioeconomic Characterization Survey (CASEN, 2015) is

used to track the labor trajectories of four generations of workers over nine

years (2006–2015). It is critical to understand how socioeconomic position is

achieved in Chile and particularly to what extent it is inherited and to what

extent socially determined. The prevailing belief of the population is in a meri-

tocratic society with high levels of social mobility, this being one of the main

pillars of the neoliberal model currently in place (Mayol, Azócar, and Azócar,

2013; Rodrigo, 2013). This academic discussion will therefore have obvious

political repercussions, as it is difficult to justify a socioeconomic model char-

acterized by inequality if social status is in fact inherited.

The article is divided into six sections. The first discusses our theoretical

framework. The second covers the literature regarding social mobility between

generations. The third reviews the literature on generational differences and

the level of social determination in Chile. The fourth section presents our ana-

lytical model and reviews the databases and socio-statistical models. The fifth

section shows the different levels of social determination for each generation

and the effects of each of the social characteristics considered. The final section

interprets our results.

THE THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The present work can be considered an extension of Rodrigo’s (2015) study for

the case of Chile, in which a model of analysis based on the social reproduction

paradigm and especially on the theories of Bourdieu (1998; 2001; 2003) was pro-

posed. “Social position” is here understood as location in the social structures of

domination, especially within socioeconomic (social class), sociocultural (gender,

race/ethnicity), and spatial (center-periphery) relationships. Bourdieu (2001)

understands “social class” as the amount of capital—economic, cultural, social,

and symbolic—that a family has. Although one’s social class is affected by the

whole of one’s social position of origin (the one that one had during childhood-

adolescence), its principal determinant will be the social class of one’s parents.

For Bourdieu, the school system, by means of a series of operations, trans-

forms part of a family’s capital into the educational capital of its children, thus