Sponsored by:
It is often expected that the egalitarian welfare states have a high level of equality of opportunity, leading to a weaker importance of family background in socioeconomic attainment if compared to the other societies. However, the previous studies do not support the assumption (Beller & Hout, 2006; Bukodi, Paskov, & Nolan, 2020; Erikson & Goldthorpe, 1992; Hertel & Groh-Samberg, 2019). We argue that while egalitarian welfare states can equalise social influences related to family background, the impact of policies is harder to predict in the case of genetic influences. The impact can vary both according to the type of outcome and the type of policy involved.
We analyse register data on Finnish twins born 1975–86. The outcomes are: years enrolled in secondary education at age 16-20 (low education), the level of education at tertiary track (high education) and the number of years in lowest and highest income decile at age 28-32. Both educational outcomes are targeted with universal policies (e.g., free education for all at all levels of education), while income is targeted with redistributive policies (strong income redistribution from the wealthiest to the poorest). We use classical twin methods to decompose variances into the additive genetic (A), shared environmental (C) and non-shared environmental influences (E). We use gender to approximate twins' zygosity (Figlio, Freese, Karbownik, & Roth, 2017) and stratify models according to parental socioeconomic status (five quantiles).
We find that in the case of low education, genetic influences are stronger among the lowest SES group than among the others. In the case of higher education, the genetic influences are approximately at the same level across all SES groups. While the low-SES families cannot compensate for genetic risks in the case of low education, universal benefits do not lead to strengthening genetic influences throughout the strata.
Genetic influences for low income are small across the groups by parental SES. For high income the genetic influences are strongest among the high SES families. Thus, while an egalitarian welfare state can effectively reduce genetic influences leading to poverty, it can still allow strong genetic influences, even if redistrubution is substantial.