Abstract
Several scholars have concluded that ethnic diversity has negative consequences for social trust. However, recent research has called into question whether ethnic diversity per se has detrimental effects, or whether lower levels of trust in diverse communities simply reflect a higher concentration of less trusting groups, such as poor people, minorities, or immigrants. Drawing upon a nationally representative sample of the German population (GSOEP), we make two contributions to this debate. First, we examine how ethnic diversity at the neighborhood level–specifically the proportion of immigrants in the neighborhood–is linked to social trust focusing on the compositional effect of poverty. Second, in contrast to the majority of current research on ethnic diversity, we use a behavioral measure of trust in combination with fine-grained (zip-code level) contextual measures of ethnic composition and poverty. Furthermore, we are also able to compare the behavioral measure to a standard attitudinal trust question. We find that household poverty partially accounts for lower levels of trust, and that after controlling for income, German and non-German respondents are equally trusting. However, being surrounded by neighbors with immigrant background is also associated with lower levels of social trust.
Highlights
Over the last decade, scholars in political science, economics, and sociology have repeatedly debated whether ethnic diversity constitutes a threat to social cohesion
First we examine how ethnic diversity at the neighborhood level– the proportion of immigrants in the neighborhood–is linked to social trust focusing on the compositional effect of poverty
We expected to find a negative relationship between diversity and trust, and hypothesized that this relationship could be explained, at least in part, by two compositional effects related to the ethnicity and poverty of the people who live in diverse neighborhoods
Summary
Scholars in political science, economics, and sociology have repeatedly debated whether ethnic diversity constitutes a threat to social cohesion. While a few empirical studies have concluded that ethnic diversity has a negative effect on trust in the U.S [1,2], as well as in some European countries [3,4,5,6,7,8], this line of research has been challenged on both conceptual and methodological grounds [9,10,11,12,13]. First we examine how ethnic diversity at the neighborhood level– the proportion of immigrants in the neighborhood–is linked to social trust focusing on the compositional effect of poverty. We use a novel behavioral measure of trust from a trust game embedded in a large-scale survey with a representative sample of the German population
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