Cultured Means Connected? The Effect of Cultural Tastes on Social Capital

Theory proposes that more legitimate cultural tastes can be converted into social capital. Yet, existing research is ill-suited for supporting a causal interpretation of the effect of cultural capital on social capital and often measures social connections (whom you know) rather than social capital (the resources you can extract from the people you know). To address these limitations, we use three-generation data from Denmark, three complementary identification strategies, and data that capture directly the resources individuals can extract from social connections (e.g., help finding a home or a job). Across all three identification strategies (controlling for observables, comparing siblings, and an instrumental variable design), results show that more (highbrow) cultural consumption has a positive effect on individuals' access to valuable resources embedded in social networks, a result consistent with what we label the "Cultured means Connected" hypothesis. We end by considering the implications of our results for research on the role of cultural tastes in accessing resources and shaping inequality.