Welfare-Spending Judgments Through Class, Race, and Gender Lenses: Exploring the Influence of Stratification Beliefs, Racial Attitudes, and Gender Norms

As politicians in the 1990s shrank welfare appropriations and tinkered with eligibility rules, many researchers examined American welfare attitudes. In doing so, separate lines of research argued that welfare-spending inclinations can be swayed by a person’s class, race and gender statuses. Moreover, different studies connected welfare appraisals to a person’s explanation of poverty, racial inequalities and gender hierarchies. As these inquiries provide critical insights these insights were hampered by a lack of theoretical breadth since they coalesced around a small set of independent variables. In effect, while theoreticians have linked class, race and gender matters, published quantitative works have routinely focused on only one set of class, race, or gender variables (i.e., numerous researchers consider welfare preferences in light of class and race interpretations as they neglect gender matters, or vice versa). In realizing that welfare attitudes probably emerge from all of these factors, this paper incorporates class, race and gender variables into a single explanatory model. With such a synthesis, this paper explores the welfare attitudes of college students from twelve randomly selected colleges (n = 575). In running a multivariate regression which explores the direct and separate contributions of each variable, the stuEric Swank is affiliated with Morehead State University. Journal of Poverty, Vol. 9(4) 2005 Available online at http://www.haworthpress.com/web/JPOV © 2005 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1300/J134v09n04_04 49 dents’ demographic affiliations seem to play a minimal role. Instead, attitudinal measures presented some significant results (especially the acceptance of modern racism, feminism and the belief of an open employment system). Thus, it seems that welfare antagonism was not contingent upon membership in certain race or gender groupings. Instead, welfare judgments were shaped by the perceived legitimacy of conventional class, race, and gender arrangements. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: Website: © 2005 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]