EKH Seminar: Jaakko Meriläinen

On 11 november the Economic History department seminar hosts Jaakko Meriläinen, Associate Professor of Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics. Meriläinen will present a paper co-authored with Torun Dewan (LSE), Christopher Kam (University of British Columbia), and Janne Tukiainen (University of Turku), "Class, Social Mobility, and Voting in Democratizing and Industrializing England". For abstract and link to a WP version of the paper, see below.
 

Jaakko Meriläinen -- personal website

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."

The paper is available from this link.