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Evidence suggests that books in the childhood home impact children's educational and occupational attainments. Previous research finds this 'book effect' after conditioning on parental socio-economic status and national context. Human and cultural capital theories offer plausible explanations for this book effect. However, mechanisms underlying the book effect remain empirically illusory. Drawing on previous findings, the authors develop theoretical arguments that human and cultural capital are not the entire story behind the book effect. Designing a formal model of all these processes, the authors test their claims using immigration, language and country-context to adjudicate between mechanisms hypothesized by the theories. Using CILS4EU data in four countries and structural equation modeling to test these theories' models against the data, the authors find the direct effect of books does not differ between native and immigrant adolescents in predicting 9th grade language aptitude scores. Moreover, this effect does not vary much by country. Reading habits and primary language spoken at home explain only part of the effect suggesting the presence of books measures something operating independently and in addition to human and cultural capital. The authors suggest books create opportunities for children whose parents are unlikely to cultivate scholarly values on average. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing body of research connects diversity to anti-welfare attitudes and lower levels of social welfare expenditure, yet most evidence comes from analyses of US states or comparisons of the United States to Europe. Comparative analyses of European nation-states, however, yield little evidence that immigration-measured at the country-level-reduces support for national welfare state programs. This is not surprising, given that research suggests that the impact of diversity occurs at smaller, sub-national geographic units. Therefore, in this article, we test the hypothesis that immigration undermines welfare attitudes by assessing the impact of immigration measured at the regional-level on individual-level support for redistribution, a comprehensive welfare state and immigrant's social rights. To do this, we combine data from the European Social Survey with a unique regional dataset compiled from national censuses, Eurostat and the European Election Database (13 countries, 114 regions and 23,213 individuals). Utilizing multilevel modeling, we find a negative relationship between regional percent foreign-born and support for redistribution as well as between regional percent foreign-born and support for a comprehensive welfare state. Objective immigration, however, does not increase opposition to immigrant's social rights (i.e. welfare chauvinism). We discuss the implications of these results and conclude that traditional welfare state attitudes and welfare chauvinism are distinct phenomena that should not be conflated in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intersection of group dynamics and socioeconomic status theories is applied as a framework for the puzzling relationship of immigration and support for the welfare state in Western Europe. Group dynamics theories suggest that how individuals define their group boundaries moderates the impact of immigration on support for the welfare state. Immigrant presence should have the strongest effects for those with exclusive national group boundaries; weaker for those with conditionally inclusive boundaries based on reciprocity; and weakest or non-existent for those with inclusive group boundaries. Group boundaries should interact with material self-interest, leading individuals with less material security who are more likely to face social risks to be more supportive of the welfare state. Using data from the 4th European Social Survey linked to regional and national data, we find that group boundary salience plays a large moderating role in the relationship between immigration and native support for the welfare state, and that this role is intricately linked to material self-interest. Group dynamics should therefore be viewed in conjunction with existing structural welfare state theories as opposed to an alternative or isolated mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]