Changes in social mobility in Hungary during the transition period

Abstract

The paper analyzes social mobility data for Hungary from surveys conducted by the Hungarian Central Statistical Office in 1983, 1992 and 2000. The main focus is put on testing Treiman’s modernization hypothesis that was posed in 1970 and is still widely cited today in the context of transition. The fitted models are graphical models based on directed acyclic graphs and the values of marginal log-linear parameters (as proposed in Rudas, Bergsma, 2004) are used to gain insight into the strengths of associations. The main findings include that the process of status-attainment seems to be basically unchanged for women, but some of the Treiman-like associations move toward greater social closure. That is, our findings do not support the hypothesis of a trend toward increasing social fluidity in Hungary between the early 1980s and 2000.