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 Ameri-can 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 ap-praisals to a person’s explanation of poverty, racial inequalities and gen-der 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 theoreti-cians 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 ex-plores the welfare attitudes of college students from twelve randomly se-lected colleges (n = 575). In running a multivariate regression which explores the direct and separate contributions of each variable, the stu