This article investigates which socio-economic and ideological factors make individuals support the normative principles of the welfare state. Two principal theoretical perspectives, relating to self-interest and the political ideology, respectively, have been proposed in the literature as causal explanations. However, as most studies utilize solely cross-sectional data, causal interpretations of which factors make people express support for the welfare state have so far been hard to sustain. This article, using panel data from the Canadian ‘Equality, Security, and Community’ survey and an extended random-effect model, exploits the longitudinal nature of the data and econometric methods to provide a more accurate analysis of the extent to which self-interest and political ideology actually determine support for welfare state principles. The empirical analysis indicates that both self-interest and political ideology variables to some extent are significant predictors of support for welfare state principles. In addition, the article discusses several avenues for future research.
This article provides new estimates of the causal effect of cultural capital on academic achievement. The author analyzes data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-Children and Young Adults and uses a fixed effect design to address the problem of omitted variable bias, which has resulted in too optimistic results in previous research. After controlling for family and individual fixed effects, the author reports that (1) six indicators of cultural capital have mostly positive direct effects on children's reading and math test scores, (2) the effect of cultural capital is smaller than previously reported, and (3) the effect of cultural capital varies in high and low socioeconomic status (SES) environments. Results mostly support cultural reproduction theory (cultural capital more important in high SES environments) for cultural capital indicators capturing familiarity with legitimate culture and mostly support cultural mobility theory (cultural capital more important in low SES environments) for indicators capturing ''concerted cultivation.''
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