Explanations Of Poverty Research Articles

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

ABSTRACT 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 students' 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.

Social Work Students at the Border: Religion, Culture, and Beliefs about Poverty

Social work educators need to understand students' beliefs about poverty if they are to foster a commitment to economic justice. A survey of ninety-six Mexican American social work students revealed that those who were Catholic, those who had consulted a curanderola, and those whose parents or grandparents had been born in Mexico were more likely to agree with structural (rather than individualistic) explanations for poverty. The findings suggest that the respondents' beliefs about poverty were influenced by both the communal values of Mexico and the dominant U.S. ideology of “rugged individualism.” Social work educators should provide opportunities for students of all ethnic and religious backgrounds to identify the cultural roots of their own beliefs about poverty and to resolve conflicts that impede their commitment to social and economic justice.

Beliefs About Poverty and Opportunity Among Mexican Immigrant Farm Workers1

This study examined attributions for poverty and beliefs about upward mobility among 124 Mexican immigrant farm workers. The effects of gender and length of United States residency were also analyzed. Despite living in poverty and perceiving racism as a significant problem, respondents expected upward mobility for themselves and their children. Consistent with previous research on low-income and ethnic minority attributions (Bullock, 1999; Hunt, 1996; Kluegel & Smith, 1986), structural explanations for poverty were favored over individualistic causes, however, considerable support for individualistic causes was also expressed. Gender and length of residency were not predictive of immigrants’ beliefs about poverty. Implications for future research are discussed.

Poverty and Communitarianism: Toward a Community-Based Welfare System

This Article analyzes how communitarian political theory addresses poverty and impacts American social welfare programs. For several decades, communitarian and liberal philosophers have debated over how best to achieve justice through their competing notions of personhood. Whereas liberal theorists stress the values of individual autonomy and state neutrality, communitarians assert that people are socially constituted and that liberalism therefore pays too little attention to the value of community. Yet despite their attempts to articulate a superior form of justice, communitarian theorists either ignore or misunderstand issues related to poverty, as this Article explains. Nevertheless, their insights are helpful in thinking about combating inequity. Not only does communitarian theory support collective responsibility for alleviating economic injustice, but it also provides a framework for moving away from individual blame as an explanation for poverty. Current welfare law is based on the idea that individual behavior and choices cause poverty. As a result, welfare recipients are required to work without adequate social and economic supports to enable selfsufficiency, and most remain mired in poverty. By contrast, this Article describes an alternative, pragmatic vision for welfare that builds upon the social capital that exists within distressed urban communities as a way to improve individual outcomes.

The Indigenous Woman as Victim of Her Culture in Neoliberal Mexico

This article examines the appearance of an indigenous woman victim subject at the intersection of global and national rights discourses in Mexico. In the case of the rape of three indigenous women by the Mexican Army, in World Bank policy recommendations in which culture and gender are cast as 'impediments to development', and in everyday explanations for poverty, culture is cast as harmful to indigenous women. Structural violence and indigenous women's agency are obscured. This victim subject emerges to contest recent destabilizations of the meanings of gender and culture in the wake of indigenous women's militancy in the 1994 Zapatista uprising.

Will the Poor Always be with Us?

Becky Blank has presented a valuable meditation on the nature of poverty. She offers the voice of a genuinely economist. The notion of a caring was not an oxymoron for me, at least not when I first came to economics as an undergraduate at Brown University in 1970. I have grown more cynical over the years, which makes me even more appreciative of the sentiment and ethics implied in the title of Professor Blank's talk. I want to pose a rhetorical question at the start of my remarks that will suggest the frame and motivation for my commentary: Can everyone escape poverty while we maintain the class differentiated system in which we now live (locally or globally)? The entry point for me as an economist was the question of poverty. As a child, I viewed people as being born into poverty: therefore, being poor was a matter of bad luck in the draw. Hence it was inherently unfair to be poor, and, so, something should be done about it. As I grew a bit older, I recognized that this form of unfairness was visited more frequently upon some groups of people than others. Since I never assumed that some groups were innately inferior to others, this reinforced my perception of unfairness and reinforced my belief that something should be done to eradicate poverty. I also assumed as a naive college freshman at Brown that economics necessarily is the field that will illuminate why poverty occurs and how it can be eliminated. I soon discovered that the answers I received were wholly unsatisfactory and the issues given greatest emphasis in some early economics courses were far removed from concerns about social inequality. Economics of the particular type I was taught--and I believe my experience was not (and is not) unique--was (is) geared toward explaining poverty based upon the individual defects of the poor themselves. In a different way the policy-poverty conjuncture that is the focus of Blank's analysis also narrows the way in which we look at poverty. A policy orientation sets boundaries on the discussion of poverty, limiting the exchange to the terrain of legitimate or safe discourse. Hence the very nature of the social system is not called into question. Solutions that are intrinsically non-revolutionary or non-radical are the only ones given consideration. There are strong echos here of political scientists' Bachrach and Baratz's concept of nondecisionmaking, the process of systematic exclusion of certain ideas and options from the arena of serious discussion. A policy orientation necessarily circumscribed by prevailing norms and rhetoric of legitimacy proposes ameliorative changes that leave the fundamental characteristics of the social tournament unaltered. Winners and losers are produced and reproduced--with the poor numbering among the losers. During disruption by major social transformations that are not managed effectively by the policymakers, the structure remains intact, with more or less rigidity. Unlike most economists and unlike those constrained by the terms of credible policymaking, sociologists who focus on social stratification are led to decidedly less safe answers. A useful distinction for me is the following: structuralist versus individualist explanations of poverty. The structuralist approach, drawn from the sociology of stratification, presumes there is a hierarchy of slots forming a social ladder (a deep structure). People then are fit, via processes that can include racism, sexism, casteism, inherited advantage or disadvantage, into the slots. The social system is seen as an engine for producing relative winners and losers. At the extreme among the losers, as noted above, are the poor. The individualist approach, represented well by conventional economics, posits that the hierarchy of slots is self-generated continuously by individual decisions (choices) and actions. Everyone potentially can be a winner if they acquire the right stuff by making the right choices. …

Chinese People's Explanations of Poverty: The Perceived Causes of Poverty Scale

Objective: Existing studies of lay explanations of poverty in the social work literature are plagued with methodological problems. The psychometric properties of the 13-item Chinese Perceived Causes of Poverty Scale (CPCPS), which assessed four categories of explanations of poverty, were examined. Method: Chinese parents and their adolescent children from 229 families experiencing economic hardship were asked to respond to the CPCPS. Results: Results consistently showed that four factors were abstracted from the scale: Personal Problems, Exploitation, Lack of Opportunity, and Fate. The four related subscales were also found to be internally consistent, and there was some support for their construct validity. Conclusions: The present study suggests that the CPCPS possesses sound psychometric properties. The findings also point out the importance of empirically demonstrating the existence of measures assessing different constructs when social work practitioners and researchers examine lay explanations of poverty.

STARTING WHERE THE STUDENT IS: ADAPTING SOCIAL JUSTICE CURRICULA TO POVERTY ATTITUDES

Consistent with the generalist social work perspective and values, many social work students appear to begin their studies believing that the causes of poverty are structural (due to societal factors) and not individual (due to individual defects). There is some evidence that social work curricula serve to confirm this perception. Existing research, however, also suggests that, along with a deepening structural understanding of the causes of poverty, these students may develop fatalistic attitudes about alleviating poverty. In response to this challenge to social work education, this pilot study explores the potential of a course devoted to reinforcing perceptions of the structural causes of poverty without instilling fatalism. Findings suggest that the participants in this introductory level social work course develop significantly stronger structural explanations for poverty without developing a fatalistic attitude towards solutions. Undergraduate student attitudes, implications for social work curriculum developments and potential evaluation methods are discussed.

Mother, Child, Race, Nation: The Visual Iconography of Rescue and the Politics of Transnational and Transracial Adoption

‘Third World’ poverty and hunger conjures up certain conventionalised images: thin children, with or without their mothers. This paper explores the genealogy of such images in the mid‐twentieth century, and shows how they mobilise ideologies of ‘rescue’ while pointing away from structural (political, military and economic) explanations for poverty, famine and other disasters. These images had a counterpart in practices of transnational and transracial adoption, which became the subject of debate in the USA during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and were at least as much about symbolic debates over race as the fate of particular children. Together, these visual and familial practices made US foreign and domestic poverty policy intelligible as a debate over whether to save women and children. When they cast the USA as rescuer, they made it all but impossible to understand what US political, military or economic power had to do with creating the problem.

Conceptions of poverty and wealth among schoolchildren

This research attempts to explore conceptions of poverty and wealth typical for Belgrade schoolchildren in two different ages: 13,5 years and 17,5 years (total N=222). We identified the content and the structure of conceptions, as well as the age differences for every conception element. The criteria for identification that younger children used were: possessing, appearance, psychical characteristic and specific social group affiliation, while older children demonstrated social schemes of larger complexity and stated: general needs, evaluation of life, different ways of becoming rich or poor, describing life-styles. Relations between various explanations of poverty and wealth revealed the existence of one homogeneous structural component (blaming the system) as well as the presence of conditional non homogeneous individualistic one. Schoolchildren with higher socioeconomic status prefered individualistic (positive) explanations of wealth in comparison with children that had lower socioeconomic status. At the same time, we found no difference in using structuralistic explanations of poverty between schoolchildren who had different socioeconomic status. Parental level of education turned out to be irrelevant for social criticism.

The dialectic of development in US urban policies: an alternative theory of poverty

The spatial diffusion of poverty and the demographic profile of the “poor” in cities like Los Angeles, where 1.7 million residents of the greater metropolitan area qualify as such, suggest that poverty is neither a socioeconomic exception nor affiliated with a singular sociocultural or racial group. However, our policy discourse and solutions continue to suffer from a modernist/industrial era explanation of poverty and its spatial concentration. In this paper, I will offer an alternative interpretation of economic development in the 20th century and propose that development projects fit comfortably into the political philosophy of nation building and the social construction of citizenship. Under the umbrella of social justice and democracy, many regions of the world, including the inner city, have been envisioned as landscapes of social and political instability and targeted for development as such. Here, the equating of development with stability is examined theoretically to suggest that anti-poverty policies, both in the US and the UK, can be viewed as an extension of the 20th century modernist nation-building agenda.

Censored Quantile Regressions of Chronic and Transient Seasonal Poverty in Rwanda

It is crucial for social policy in Less Developed Countries to identify correlates of poverty at the household level. This has been done in the literature by estimating household poverty equations typically with Tobit and Probit models. However, when the errors in these equations are non‐normal and heteroscedastic, which is usually expected, these models deliver biased estimates. Using quarterly data from Rwanda in 1983, we reject the normality and homoscedasticity assumptions for household chronic and transient latent poverty equations. We treat this problem by estimating censored quantile regressions. Our results of censored quantile regressions and of inconsistent Tobit regressions are substantially different. However, in the case of chronic poverty the signs of the apparently significant coefficients are generally in agreement, while for seasonal transient poverty different variables have significant effects for the two estimation methods. Our second contribution is to study, for the first time, correlates of poverty indicators based on quarterly consumptions. Our results show that in Rwanda different correlates are significant for chronic poverty and for transient seasonal poverty. The effects of the main inputs (land and labour) are more important for the chronic component of poverty than for the transient one. Household location and socio‐demographic characteristics play important roles that are consistent with usual explanations of poverty in the literature.

Poverty attitudes and their determinants in Lebanon's plural society

This paper examines the causal attribution of poverty among Lebanese Christian and Muslim students through a pre-conceptualized scale along fatalistic, individualistic, and structural dimensions. Factor analysis results reproduced the factor dimensions reported by J. Feagin [Psychology Today 6 (1972) 101–129; Subordinating poor persons: Welfare and American beliefs. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1975] explanations for the causes of poverty were more structural than individualistic. The MANOVA regression analysis showed no significant differences between religious affiliations (Muslim and Christian) and students' subjective report of their parents' level of educational attainment (high, medium, low). However, significant mean differences ( F(3,200)=3.43, p=0.018) are found for class on the individualistic dimension. There was some suggestion that parents of students whose occupational status appeared higher were more likely to favor individualistic explanations for poverty. The high rating on the structural dimension of the poverty scale showed Lebanese student attitudes to the causes of poverty in a rapidly changing society. Recommendations are offered for further research on heterogeneous samples.

Public Beliefs in the Causes of Wealth and Poverty and Legitimization of Inequalities in Russia and Estonia

The article analyzes the attributions of the causes of poverty and wealth in Russia and Estonia in 1991 and 1996 and their determinants. Among the latter are the perceived actual justice of the society, the perceived size of the middle class, and the personal position in the system of inequalities. Despite the economic hardships and a rise in inequalities in both countries, individualistic explanations of wealth and poverty have increased over the 5 years between the surveys. At the same time respondents in both countries demonstrated a growing awareness of the importance of starting positions and connections to achieve wealth. The perceived middle class has a significant effect on attributions of poverty but not on wealth. Russians in Estonia have a particular bias against wealth, whereas non-Russians in Russia are more likely to justify wealth on the basis of individual merit. Explanations of poverty and wealth in Estonia are more rooted in the factors of socialization (age, education, and gender), whereas in Russia they are more rooted in the changes in the family financial circumstances between 1991 and 1996. There was a general increase in support for government intervention in distribution in both countries.

Economic Theory and the Explanation of Poverty

Economic Theory and the Explanation of Poverty

Perceptions of Poverty and Wealth in Western and Post-Communist Countries

This paper analyzes the felt legitimacy of poverty and wealth in the United States, West Germany, The Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Russia. Several theories on poverty and wealth perception are discussed; of these, dominant ideology theory has been the most influential. This theory can predict the existence not only of a legitimizing ideology in a society, but also of challenging beliefs that incumbents of specific social positions hold. It is argued that poverty and wealth perceptions are more complex, however, involving at least three latent dimensions. Using data from the International Social Justice Project it is demonstrated that, regarding poverty, individuals distinguish between merited, unmerited, and fatalistic types of poverty. Merited poverty is poverty brought about by the individual's own doing or not doing, unmerited poverty is due to forces external to the individual, whereas fatalistic explanations attribute poverty to ascribed properties of the individual. For wealth also there are three causally relevant factors: in addition to merited und unmerited ones, a social capital factor that sees social contacts as a source for determining economic success. Using a structural equation approach and its group comparison option for comparing countries, the different explanations of poverty and wealth are translated into specific measurement models. Testing simultaneously with linear regression models show how preferences for particular explanations are shaped by stratification-related experiences and by the social position of an observer.

BLAME OR FATE, INDIVIDUAL OR SOCIAL?

This paper explores popular explanations of poverty. Based on existing theoretical and empirical studies, four types of reason for poverty are distinguished: (1) individual blame; (2) individual fate; (3) social blame; and (4) social fate. Data from the 1990 European Values Study surveys are used to describe and compare cross-nationally the proportions of people perceiving each of the four explanations as a main reason for people living in poverty. Further, it is explored whether or not differential patterns in these perceptions are related to types of welfare regime as distinguished by several authors. One of the main conclusions is that, contrary to prior evidence from Anglo-Saxon countries only, social blame is the most popular explanation of poverty in nearly all of the twenty countries studied. That is, the majority of people living in industrialized welfare states believe that poverty is the outcome of actions of social actors, rather than the inevitable result of individual or social fate. The idea that the poor are themselves to blame for their situation is on average more popular in Eastern European than in Western European countries, where the idea lost ground from the mid-1970s onwards. There is no relation between popular perceptions of poverty and type of welfare state regime. It is suggested that future research should narrow the focus on the relation between poverty perceptions and types of anti-poverty strategy.

The gender poverty gap in developed countries: Causes and cures

This article employs the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) to compare poverty rates for female-headed families and for other families in a number of developed countries. It then seeks to explain why, in some countries, poverty for female-headed families is so much higher compared to other families. The article finds that there is no single reason for this. Rather, there are many different reasons female-headed families suffer relatively greater poverty in some countries but not in other countries. One implication of this analysis is that it is less important what gets done to help female-headed families, and more important that some policy be employed to benefit female-headed families. The rest of this article is organized as follows. The first section describes the LIS. The next section discusses the problems encountered in measuring poverty, and computes poverty rates for female-headed families and for all other families using 15 countries in the LIS database. Theoretical explanations for poverty are presented in the third section. This discussio n emphasizes why poverty rates may differ based upon the gender of the family head. The following section tests the usual group of suspects that were rounded up in the previous section, and finds them all to be inadequate. The next section employs a more simple and direct approach to the problem. It examines countries individually in order to find out what they are doing to assist female-headed families and how this affects the national gender poverty gap. The final section concludes with some policy implications.

Dehumanization of modern civilization and a new, Schumpeterian explanation of poverty

The economic science is again in a crisis and a new solution prolegomena to any future study in economics, finance and other social sciences has just been published by the International Institute of Social Economics in care of the MCB University Press in England. The roots of the major financial and economic problems of our time lie in an open conflict between theory and practice. In the 1930s and before the conflict was between classical theory and given realities. In the 1990s the conflict appears between the now prevailing modern, Keynesian theory and the actual realities. In addition during the twentieth century a great argument developed between the two schools of thought, argument which is not yet settled. In one sentence, the prolegomena tried and was successful to solve the conflict between theory and practice and the big doctrinal dispute of the twentieth century. It was a struggle of research and observation over half a century between 1947 and 1997.

Lay Explanations for Poverty in Turkey and Their Determinants

The external and internal causal attributions for poverty in Turkey were examined in an exploratory survey. Factor analysis results confirmed Feagin's 3 conceptual categories (1975) of explanations for poverty, structural, fatalistic, and individualistic. Income, gender, age, and education were important determinants of explanations for poverty. All income groups favored structural (external) explanations. Poor persons preferred more tangible structural explanations, and nonpoor persons gave more abstract structural explanations. Poor persons also favored fatalistic (external) explanations more than higher income groups did. Women and older people offered individualistic and fatalistic explanations more than others. Men and people with higher levels of education preferred abstract structural explanations more than others.