Is the Japanese Mobility Pattern Consistent?: Educational Expansion and its Effects

Abstract Current empirical studies on social mobility generally emphasize an invariance of mobility pattern rather than variance. However, the industrialization thesis has not yet seriously been challenged by those researches, since they are only comparing different countries, not different developmental stages of one country. Besides, those researches have provided virtually no theoretical explanation for the invariance. This paper is an attempt to provide a longitudinal analysis of Japanese social mobility and to give an explanation for the consistency of mobility pattern found in that analysis. The key factor related to the consistency is the way education mediates the mobility. Our analysis presents a clear and exact picture of the longitudinal effect of educational expansion on the mobility pattern.