Abstract
AbstractThis article investigates the impact of ethnic diversity on individuals’ satisfaction with their neighbourhoods. It uses panel data and a variety of empirical methods to control for potential endogeneity of diversity and of location choices. We find that a higher white share raises overall satisfaction with the neighbourhood in our (overwhelming white) sample, but has no significant impact on generalised trust or other commonly used measures of social capital. We suggest that part of the impact of diversity on overall neighbourhood satisfaction may be through an effect on fear of crime, though we find no effect on actual crime.
Highlights
Sizeable parts of the population of most Western countries seem troubled by increased ethnic diversity in their societies
Using longitudinal data for the period 1991-2014 from the British Household Panel Study (BHPS) 1 and its successor Understanding Society (UKHLS)2, we investigate the impact of ethnic diversity on a wider range of measures of neighbourhood satisfaction than is common in most of the existing literature
We focus on ethnic diversity as our variable of interest, but we control for a variety of other neighbourhood characteristics
Summary
Sizeable parts of the population of most Western countries seem troubled by increased ethnic diversity in their societies. The most direct impact of these changes is felt in their communities and this paper is about how ethnic diversity within neighbourhoods affects a variety of measures of people’s satisfaction with their local areas. Some have argued that greater diversity erodes trust (Putnam, 2007; Dinesen and Sonderskov, 2012), lowers involvement in organizations (Alesina and La Ferrara, 2000, 2002; Costa and Kahn, 2003), lowers the level of social cohesion (see the survey by Van der Meer and Tolsma, 2014), lowers the level of public good provision (see Alesina, Baqir and Easterly, 1999; the review by Alesina and La Ferrara, 2005), lowers the quality of government (Alesina and Zhuravskhaya, 2011) or changes attitudes to redistribution (Dahlberg, Edmark and Lundquvist, 2012). Uslaner, (2012) argues that it is segregation rather than diversity that is important, while Tesei (2014) points to the importance of racial income inequality
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