What Influences Demand for Legal Aid? Logit Analysis with Use of Classical Model Averaging

Abstract

The aim of this paper to identify, by means of relevant literature survey, and then to quantify – using representative panel of individual questionnaire data and a logit model – the impact of relevant factors affecting demand for legal aid in Poland. The set of explanatory variables contains objective factors – such as income, age, education, gender, marital status, place of residence, occupational status – as well as subjective ones, such as personal attitude towards law, knowledge of law, social capital or social activity. It follows from the results obtained on a representative sample of adult Poles that the number of factors influencing the occurrence of a legal problem is large, the factors themselves being beyond the scope of direct and intentional impact of the state. Thereby, it seems reasonable to allocate the funds devoted to the funding and functioning of the reformed legal aid system in Poland on the basis of the population size criterion. In view of the relative scarcity of quantitative research into the issues raised in the paper frequentist model averaging method has been also used to confirm/reject the conclusions draw on the basis of the logit model. However, this has not altered the afore-mentioned conclusions in any significant way.