THE POLITICAL ORIENTATION OF THE SOCIALLY MOBILE IN ITALY: A RE-EXAMINATION.

This paper examines the data analysis and conceptual assumptions of some recent work on the political orientation of the socially mobile in Italy. Whereas the previous research relied on separate cross-tabulation analyses of the upwardly and downwardly mobile respectively, this paper (utilizing the same data) specifies additive and interactive models of origin and destination effects for both directions of mobility and concludes, contrary to previous research, that mobility per se does not appear to affect the political affiliation of the socially mobile in Italy. The paper concludes with a discussion of the lack of correspondence between key theoretical concepts and their empirical indicators in the data and suggests that the previous research can be questioned on conceptual grounds alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]