UCLA

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is the largest poverty alleviation program for American families, yet one in five do not take it up. Everyone who is eligible has a low income, so why are some people able to overcome structural and personal barriers to EITC access while others are not? Building on and beyond Bourdieu’s cultural capital, I argue for a dialectical, intersectional, and critical quantitative analysis that looks at structure, agency, and how they inform each other to study social (im)mobility through within-group differences. Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data from the 2018 panel covering 2017–2020, cultural capital as operationalized was not a significant predictor of uptake in the main structural model; however, citizenship is. Furthermore, gender is a significant modifier in exploratory moderation analysis, highlighting the need for further work on quantifying intersectionality; incorporating other Bourdieusian concepts such as habitus, shadow capital, and fields; and more asset-based capitals including community cultural wealth.