Intergenerational Mobility and Populist Attitudes in Latin America

This paper examines the relationship between intergenerational educational mobility and populist attitudes in Latin America, a region characterized by low levels of intergenerational mobility and a long-standing presence of populist leadership. In contexts where social origin strongly predicts individual outcomes, perceptions of unfairness may create fertile ground for populist narratives. Using harmonized microdata from 18 waves of the Latinobarómetro survey covering individuals born between 1940 and 2000, we document a robust negative association between intergenerational mobility and populist attitudes across multiple indicators, including anti-democratic attitudes, support for military governments, anti-immigrant sentiments, and institutional distrust. These results hold when using a relative mobility measure that captures pure positional change net of structural trends, and at the cohort level when exploiting standard mobility measures from the literature. Cohort-level estimates further reveal that the effect of persistence is amplified in high-inequality contexts, suggesting that immobility and contemporaneous inequality act as complements in shaping political discontent. Decomposing inequality into opportunity and effort components, we find evidence suggesting that populist attitudes are mostly driven by inequalities of opportunity. These findings suggest that the persistent emergence of populist leadership in Latin America is linked to the region’s stubbornly low intergenerational mobility and unequal access to opportunities.