Test Case Poverty. On the Relationship Between Inequality Attitudes and Social Position

In contemporary social theory, it is often assumed that cosmopolitan attitudinal complexes are found in upper social strata, whereas lower social strata are characterized by communitarian values. This article focuses on the poor as the lowest segment of the social stratification structure in order to examine attitudes toward various social inequalities, using this group as a test case. Three socially controversial fields of social inequality, namely sexual diversity, migration, and social security, are integrated into an analytical context. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), it is shown that people in poverty are no more skeptical about homosexuals or transgender persons than nonpoor people are. However, people experiencing poverty are more likely to oppose migration movements. Skepticism about migration is greater among people in long-term and intense poverty than among people with discontinuous poverty histories. In the field of social security provision, people with experience of poverty prefer state security measures over private security. The test case of the poor shows that it is not possible to make general assumptions about attitudinal complexes in certain social positions; rather, attitude fields must be considered in a differentiated manner.