Universität zu Köln

Wittemann, Vanessa ORCID: 0009-0008-8500-9405 (2025). Reframing Reproduction: A Prospective Approach to the Intergenerational Transmission of Educational Attainment and Political Orientation. PhD thesis, Universität zu Köln.

PDF Dissertation_Wittemann_KUPS.pdf - Accepted Version Download (6MB)

Abstract

This dissertation examines how social and demographic mechanisms jointly shape the intergenerational reproduction of social attributes, focusing on education and political orientation. Research on social stratification and value transmission has primarily relied on retrospective designs, analyzing existing parent-child pairs. Such approaches condition on fertility and overlook demographic processes such as childlessness, partner selection, and fertility behaviour. To address these limitations, the dissertation adopts a prospective perspective that begins with the reproducing generation, enabling a more comprehensive assessment of intergenerational transmission. This dissertation pursued three objectives: (1) to further develop and validate the prospective inferential method, (2) to advance the substantive understanding of educational reproduction through cross-national comparison, and (3) to extend the prospective perspective to the domain of political orientation. Three studies form the empirical core of this work. The first two, co-authored with Gordey Yastrebov, use comparative data from 12 European countries to examine educational reproduction. The third study is conducted in sole authorship and applies the prospective framework to the transmission of political orientations in Germany. Study 1 validates the method by demonstrating close correspondence between prospective and retrospective estimates and refines the decomposition of fertility and social transmission effects. Study 2 extends this framework by incorporating educational assortative mating as an additional demographic mechanism. Together, these studies reveal substantial cross-national variation in educational reproduction, even after disentangling underlying mechanisms. Study 3 shows strong intergenerational reproduction of political orientations, while fertility differences across orientations are small and insufficient to substantially alter the political distribution across generations. Overall, this dissertation advances research on intergenerational transmission by expanding the prospective framework across countries and applying it to another field of research.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD thesis)
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID ORCID Put Code Wittemann, Vanessa vanessa.wittemann@hotmail.de https://orcid.org/0009-0008-8500-9405 UNSPECIFIED
Corporate Creators:	Department of Sociology and Social Psychology (DSS)
URN:	urn:nbn:de:hbz:38-794318
Date:	2025
Language:	English
Faculty:	Faculty of Management, Economy and Social Sciences
Divisions:	Weitere Institute, Arbeits- und Forschungsgruppen > Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology (ISS)
Subjects:	Social sciences General statistics
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Keywords Language Prospective, Intergenerational Reproduction, Educational attainment, Political orientation, Transmission, Decomposition English
Date of oral exam:	8 December 2025
Referee:	Name Academic Title Leopold, Thomas Prof. Dr. Hank, Karsten Prof. Dr.
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/id/eprint/79431