Seminarium prowadzone przez Marcina Wrońskiego i Marię Jadwigę Minakowską

08 01 2026

Centrum Doskonałości w Naukach Społecznych zaprasza na seminarium prowadzone przez dr. Marcina Wrońskiego i dr Marię Jadwigę Minakowską.

Interdyscyplinarne Seminarium w Naukach Społecznych (ISESS) odbędzie się 14 stycznia (środa) o godzinie 13:15. Tytuł prezentacji to: „Intergenerational Mobility over Nine Generations: Evidence from Poland, 1800-1984”.

Biogram prelegenta, dr Marcina Wrońskiego: https://cess.idub.uw.edu.pl/en/isess/seminar/ 
Biogram prelegentki, dr Marii Jadwigi Minakowskiej: https://minakowski.pl/about/

Serdecznie zapraszamy do udziału stacjonarnego w Sali Komisji w Pałacu Kazimierzowskim (Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28). Sala znajduje się na III piętrze, w budynku znajduje się winda. Seminarium nie będzie transmitowane online.

Rejestracja nie jest wymagana. Seminarium będzie prowadzone w języku angielskim.

Abstrakt prezentacji [English version only]:

How persistent status at the very top when the surrounding institutions repeatedly break – paritions, wars, border shifts, then state socialism? The research design tackles that by combining a highly selective elite roster from the Polish Biographical Dictionary (PSB) – 18,800 individuals who died after 1800, about 0.01–0.02% of each cohort – with a curated genealogical database (Wielcy.pl; 1.2+ million records) that allows family reconstruction over two centuries. Elite “inheritance” and “transmission” are measured using kinship links up to the sixth degree, summarized as past kinship (ties to the previous elite cohort) and future kinship (ties to the next cohort), with explicit rules to prevent mechanically-created “reverse” links via later marriages and in-law chains. Match quality is unusually strong for historical data (fathers identified for 92% and mothers for 86%), and the PSB-based elite is benchmarked against a 1938 Who’s Who (Łoza): even with only ~1/3 overlap, persistence estimates are nearly identical.

The main empirical punchline is that standard two-generation approaches understate persistence because most relevant connections are not parent–child: first-degree ties make up only about 20% of all links within six degrees. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, persistence is high and remarkably stable—34–39% of elite members have at least one relative in the previous elite cohort—then mobility rises in the 20th century but not in a way that looks like a clean “reset” after major shocks: 31% in 1938 still have prior-elite kin, 28% in 1961, and 17% by 1984. Looking forward, roughly half of the 19th-century elite transmits status one generation ahead, but transmission collapses around the war and early socialist era. The correlation between past and future kinship also falls sharply over time (e.g., 0.70 in 1823 vs. 0.25 in 1961 for the count-based measure), pointing to a genuine long-run increase in mobility rather than pure compositional noise.

The paper’s contribution is to shift the mobility discussion from a narrow “parent–child transmission” lens to a broader view in which extended kinship and marriage structure access to top positions. Empirically, it shows that elite persistence is largely carried by distant relatives and maternal lines – exactly the channels that standard two-generation designs miss – so conventional estimates can systematically overstate openness at the top. The high society is a complex web of family relations, not a sum of patrimonial dynasties. Conceptually, it also reframes “big shocks” (WWII, socialism) as forces that weaken direct intergenerational transmission and change how elites reproduce (through institutions and careers), without implying a complete rupture in underlying family advantage. For the mobility literature, Poland becomes a clean, long-run test case: a society with repeated regime change still exhibits strong elite continuity for much of the period, followed by a gradual—not instantaneous—rise in mobility.