173members, especially to those who are unemployed. However, despite the
strong family obligations, informal support is still unequal along social
differentiation lines associated with gender, social class, and life cycle
positions (Wall et al. 2001 ). Of course, family obligations in southern
European countries do not only depend on the organisation of their wel-
fare states but rather on a larger series of macrostructural conditions, such
as the low level of wealth of society and high levels of unemployment
(Widmer and Ganjour 2017 ).
Lithuania has followed yet another path. A widely developed national
social protection system covers schemes from various welfare regimes:
social-democratic, conservative, and liberal. Some of these schemes take
the structural or economic situation of families into account (for instance
benefits to large families with children or reimbursement of payments for
communal services for low-income households), whereas others only
reflect individual circumstances (in particular sickness allowance and
unemployment benefits). However, in overall terms, the support pro-
vided by the social protection system of Lithuania is in many cases insuf-
ficient to provide individuals with a socially acceptable standard of living.
Even employed individuals sometimes lack crucial resources necessary
for personal maintenance. These weaknesses of the social protection sys-
tem mean that individuals are likely to accumulate social capital
unequally, according to wealth, the presence of children, and their level
of education. Because the welfare state of Lithuania is so heterogeneous
in its principles, and so modest in its means, we expect no strong effect
of such a system on personal networks. On the other hand, family soli-
darity traditions are deeply rooted in the agricultural past of the country
and its Catholic values, even though these have been diluted by the social
and cultural environment created by the earlier totalitarian communist
regime in Lithuania. Alienation and distrust towards non-family mem-
bers, and sometimes even among kin, forced individuals to be cautious
in personal relationships. The latter condition implies that individuals
mostly rely on long-lasting and well-known relationships, which are
likely to be members of the nuclear family and a few close kin or non-
kin. Thus personal networks dominated by bonding social capital may be
expected in Lithuania, with some variations depending on the stages in
the life course.
Understanding Personal Networks as Social Capital