Ethnic Diversity and Social Cohesion

Immigration, Ethnic Fractionalization and Potentials for Civic Action

Merlin Schaeffer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317140948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Exploring the debate within social sciences on the consequences of ethnic diversity for social cohesion and the production of public goods, this book draws on extensive survey data from Germany to engage with questions surrounding the relationship between ethnic diversity and issues such as welfare provision and the erosion of public trust and civic engagement in Europe. It moves away from the question of whether there is in fact a universal correlation between ethnic diversity and social cohesion in order to focus on the reasons for which people's reciprocity and trust might be reduced in more ethnically diverse areas. Drawing attention to the importance of peoples' perceptions of diversity in explaining levels of social cohesion, Ethnic Diversity and Social Cohesion shows how specific types of perceived diversity can help explain the reasons for which ethnic diversity is associated with declines in social cohesion, and the contexts and conditions in which this occurs. The book also outlines potential courses of action, revealing the important roles of residential segregation, children and interethnic partners in overcoming barriers of language, values and cognitive bias. A rigorous, timely study of ethnic diversity and its relation to liberal democracy as a form of deliberative conflict that requires certain levels of trust, shared values and engagement, Ethnic Diversity and Social Cohesion will be of interest to policy makers, sociologists and political scientists working in the fields of race and migration, ethnic diversity and community cohesion.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Over the past six decades immigration has made Western societies more culturally, religiously and phenotypically diverse. Today, foreign-born nationals constitute between 10 and 15 per cent of the population in Western European countries and the USA, and between 20 and 25 per cent in Canada and Australia (OECD, 2012). The percentage of foreign-born nationals is a crude measure of immigration-related diversity: it excludes the children of immigrants, does not differentiate between international immigrants and EU citizens who can move freely between member states, and is blind to religious, cultural or linguistic diversity. Nevertheless, this figure gives an impression of a growing demographic reality, which is by no means exclusive to Western societies (Castles and Miller, 2009).

It is only recently that this demographic reality has led some Western European countries to abandon their ethnically homogeneous self-image, even though guest-worker programmes and de-colonialization extend back to the early 1950s. In consequence, issues such as the extension of rights to persons of immigrant origin,¹ the incorporation and organization of non-Christian religions, most importantly Islam, and the socio-economic integration of immigrant youth have become central to the public discourse, and have developed into major fields of political contestation (Koopmans, Statham, Giugni, and Passy, 2005). These passionate debates about the legal, religious, political and socio-economic integration of immigrant minorities are met by xenophobic reactions of members of the native majority populations, who feel threatened, uprooted and disillusioned by the prospects of living in an increasingly diversified nation-state (Kriesi et al., 2008). New political parties such as The British National Party (BNP) and the Dutch Party for Freedom (Partij voor de Vrijheid; PVV), and social movements such as the US ‘Tea Party’, mobilize on these anti-immigrant sentiments (Mudde, 2010).

While immigrant integration and majority opposition to immigration are well-studied topics in the social sciences, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the question of what growing diversity means for the collective endeavour of living in a common society. To be sure, multicultural policies in Britain and the Netherlands, or the banning of symbols of ethnicity, race and religion from public life in France have been intended as policy infrastructure to ensure a diverse but socially cohesive society. But these policies tend to be evaluated against the standards of the socio-economic and cultural integration of persons of immigrant origin. There is good reason in doing so: situations such as the 2005 French, 2011 English or 2013 Swedish riots have shown that more than being an important normative goal in itself, reducing the impact of ethnic background on life chances is critical in securing social cohesion. But social cohesion is more than the absence of riots and anomie. Understood as feelings of shared commonalities, trust, reciprocity and solidarity that generate a social environment in which people produce and share public goods and undertake collective endeavours, social cohesion is an essential foundation for social welfare and assistance to the poor, for the funding of cultural institutions such as theatres and museums and a comprehensive educational system and, generally, for the maintenance of civic engagement in a rich public life. High levels of social cohesion and the associated public infrastructure are what characterize Western European countries. Are Europe’s high levels of social cohesion at risk?

Some economists claim that ethnic diversity is one of the reasons for stagnation and corruption in the developing world (Easterly and Levine, 1997), and that it explains why the US does not have a European-style welfare state (Alesina, Glaeser and Sacerdote, 2001). For many social scientists, these concerns may sound like the reissue of a classical debate: for more than a century, scholars from many disciplines in the social sciences have studied the relations between various forms of socio-cultural heterogeneity and social cohesion. Classical political thought on liberalism, by scholars such as John Stuart Mill, developed in response to growing religious heterogeneity after the Reformation (Appiah, 2005: XV). From this perspective, growing ethnic diversity should not be a problem for liberal democracies, since these were designed as an answer to growing diversification in the first place. A liberal, democratic constitution is the answer to the question of how a common public life and collective endeavours are possible in plural, highly diverse societies:

Democratic institutions exist not to level out differences between citizens, but to find ways to bring competing needs to the table and make difficult decisions about the allocation of resources and the production of values. Democracy does not demand that citizens like each other. The process is supposed to be messy, conflictual, and difficult. (Walker, in Theiss-Morse and Hibbing, 2005: 237)

Similarly, classical sociologists such as Émile Durkheim and Georg Simmel forcefully argued that socio-cultural homogeneity is not a necessity for an integrated modern society. Urbanization, industrialization and rationalization of modernity do not only erode classical bonds, they also promote new forms of societal integration. The increased diversity and complexity of contemporary societies, as Talcott Parsons (1971) argued, are coupled with generalized or universal values that embrace strangers, thereby enabling large-scale solidarity and redistribution. The best and most wide-ranging examples are the establishment and enforcement of human rights. Others argue that modern societies merely depend on social ignorance – or a ‘blasé attitude’ as Simmel (1950 [1903]) called it – to be integrated: as long as we do not niggle about the lifestyle of others, modern societies show such a high degree of functional specialization that diversity does not pose a problem for social cohesion. We depend heavily on each other in our specialized roles as barbers, mechanics, pilots, farmers or nurses, and we get along well as long as we are indifferent about the others’ personal lifestyles:

In addition to more liberty, the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of man and his work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possible extent. (Georg Simmel, 1950 [1903]: 409)

Despite these classic responses, there is a rapidly growing literature attesting to the challenges associated with ethnic diversification. Most notable are findings suggesting that ethnic diversity reduces public support of the provision of public goods, a crucial foundation of any society. Liberal constitutions, generalized values, blasé outlook and functional specialization are not sufficient, it seems, to guarantee a high-level public goods production, with regard to such aspects of society as public education, support for the poor, infrastructure maintenance or anti-corruption measures – all of which have been shown to suffer from ethnic diversity. Moreover, the claim that ethnic divisions cause antagonisms, compromise solidarity and render collective endeavours unlikely has advocates no less prominent than the classical voices about the robustness of modern societies cited above. Karl Marx explained the inabilities of workers to unite and fight for their collective interest against the capitalist class with reference to ethnic divisions:

Every industrial and commercial center in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland. […] This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. (Marx, 1953 [1870]: 506)

Mostly ignored in the current debate on the consequences of ethnic diversity, Marx does an excellent job of presenting some of the core arguments put forward in the field today: threat of status loss, in-group favouritism and general prejudices compromise the willingness to share and engage in ethnically diverse settings.

The contemporary empirical debate began to receive widespread attention only after a study by economists Alesina, Baqir and Easterly (1999), who showed that the proportion of tax money spent on education, trash disposal and welfare decline as racial diversity increases in US metropolitan areas. Such findings seem to be particularly relevant for European countries, which try to maintain high levels of welfare-state generosity while also facing growing ethnic diversification resulting from immigration. In line with such concerns, sociologist Eger (2010) provides evidence of less support for welfare-state generosity in ethnically diverse regions of Sweden, and political scientist Stichnoth (2012) shows similar evidence with regard to support for the unemployed in Germany. Burgoon (2012) offers evidence that conservative parties’ actually meet the voters’ demands: where levels of immigration are high, the manifestos of conservative parties are less favourable of welfare generosity.

More recently, scholars have started to investigate indicators of social cohesion such as civic engagement, levels of trust and generalized norms of reciprocity as mediating or intermediate factors helping to explain why ethnically diverse populations produce fewer public goods. According to this theoretical inclination, in ethnically divided populations the social radius within which people feel obliged to act reciprocally is smaller, probably narrowed to the people who fit the category of the own ethnic group. In return, people do not trust others to contribute to the general production of public goods that cross ethnic boundaries. Overall, this decline in social cohesion is seen as a decline in the potential for civic action and solidarity, and it is believed to result in lower levels of public goods provision. According to Putnam’s (2007) influential study, trust in neighbours, generalized trust, trust in people of other ethnicities and even trust in people of one’s own ethnicity are indeed lower in ethnically diverse populations. In such communities, he claims, people seem to ‘hunker down’, meaning that they withdraw from public social life. Newton (2007) hits the nail on its head, by calling the challenges associated with ethnic diversity the ‘New Liberal Dilemma’: while the key aim of liberal democracy is to accommodate diversity, that diversity seems to cause people to withdraw from engaging in public social life and thereby to erode the foundation of a well-functioning liberal democracy. Ethnic divisions seem to challenge the social foundations of liberal democracies, among them the willingness to engage, cooperate, share and deliberate.

These claims have not gone unchallenged. In fact, as I will show in Chapter 2, there are nearly as many studies rejecting the negative effects of diversity as arguing for them. It is not at all clear why the debate has produced such mixed results. To some scholars this is evidence of the spurious nature of any findings on negative ethnic diversity effects. In contrast, after engaging with the main lines of critique, I will argue that the mixed results suggest that negative effects of diversity arise from specific conditions that we need to identify. After all, such knowledge would help to suggest policy interventions that might ameliorate any negative consequences. There is also a body of literature discussing the benefits of diversification in terms of cultural, economic and scientific innovation (e.g. Page, 2008). For example, diverse groups have been shown to make better political decisions, because the different perspectives offered by people with diverse backgrounds balance the systematic biases and errors in reasoning. The potential challenges and benefits of ethnic diversity do not contradict each other. Neither do they need to be calculated against one another in any attempt to estimate the overall meaning of ethnic diversification for societal integration. In contrast, most scholars agree that, in the long run, benefits will prevail as soon as people adapt to ethnic diversity, as they did to industrialization and urbanization. In order to understand the conditions under which diversity negatively affects social cohesion, and second the conditions under which people adapt to ethnic diversity, we need to deepen our understanding of the underlying mechanisms: why should people’s trust and willingness to engage be reduced in more ethnically diverse areas in the first place and what can be done about it?

There are a number of theoretical approaches to explaining why ethnically divided populations are less cohesive. The majority of studies refer to theories of cognitive biases against out-group members that might be triggered in ethnically diverse populations. Network theory implies that if social relations are clustered along ethnic lines, then ethnic diversity might reduce the potential for social control. Social choice theory suggests that different levels of public goods provision might be due to a variety of competing preferences resulting from ethnic diversity. Finally, cultural theories highlight the coordination problems associated with a lack of shared language, meanings and practices as an important aspect affecting social cohesion.

In this book, I draw on all of these theories to shed light on the question of why people’s trust and engagement might be reduced in ethnically diverse contexts and what can be done about it. Chapter 2 begins by explaining the fragility of public goods production and social cohesion. It asserts that a wide range of public goods provision and high levels of social cohesion are not standard characteristics of modern liberal democracies. Instead, they are large-scale societal achievements, which are susceptible to external conditions – one of which might be ethnic diversification. The chapter continues with a quantitative review of the existing empirical evidence supporting the argument that ethnic diversity erodes social cohesion. Returning to the original question of why ethnic diversity should erode social cohesion, I systematize the different theoretical answers given in a comprehensive theoretical framework, which I outline in Chapter 3. Successful research needs to measure ethnic diversity in a way that relates to the proposed explanations. In Chapter 4, I thus present competing ways to measure ethnic diversity, and discuss how far these can be used to test the discussed theories against one another. Following from the arguments in Chapter 4, I argue in Chapter 5 that we need to consider people’s perceptions of ethnic diversity in understanding their motivations to ‘hunker down’. Following the classical Thomas Theorem – ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’ (Thomas and Thomas, 1928: 572) – it is exactly those actually perceived aspects of ethnic heterogeneity that are the most likely to have an impact on their attitudes and actions. Chapter 5 hence goes beyond measured facts and investigates the importance of perceptions of diversity in understanding why people ‘hunker down’. Such perceptions are not arbitrarily subjective, as I argue in Chapter 6. Quite to the contrary, contextual factors shape whether people categorize problem groups in their neighbourhood as ethnic minorities. Another classic insight concerning intergroup contact is Allport’s (1954) insistence that personal inter-ethnic contact positively shapes people’s perceptions of others. Chapter 7 reports how far personal intergroup contact mitigates tendencies to withdraw from public life in ethnically diverse societies and proposes that successful interventions should probably be located here. Chapter 8 summarizes the book’s lessons and discusses their implications in light of the existing studies on the impact of political conditions in levelling or strengthening ethnic diversity effects.

Apart of the quantitative literature review of Chapter 2, all reported empirical analyses rely on the German subset of the Ethnic Diversity and Collective Action Survey (EDCAS) (Schaeffer, Koopmans, Veit, Wagner, and Wiedner, 2011). With its history of hiring guest workers in the 1960s and its traditionally strong welfare state, Germany is a prime example for those European countries the debate focuses on. According to the Federal Statistical Office of Germany, today about every fifth person living in Germany has a migration background, meaning that either they themselves or one of their parents was born abroad. In order to guarantee a high level of general readability and a focus on the substantial arguments rather than methodological or technical particularities, I include little discussion of the statistical modelling strategies and underlying operationalizations of variables in the chapters. In other words, I report and discuss results of empirical analyses in the chapters, but try to keep research design and questions of statistical techniques at a minimum. Instead, a brief overview of these topics can be found in the Appendix. I believe this strategy to be reasonable, because the purpose of this book is to develop a substantial argument that spans over several chapters and that is of interest to a wider audience than quantitative social scientists. Readers who are interested in a more profound discussion of the underlying technical issues might want to consult my dissertation (Schaeffer, 2012).

1 I use the term people of immigrant origin to denote people who have been born abroad or have at least one parent who was born abroad.

Chapter 2
The Fragility of Social Cohesion in Ethnically Diverse Societies

Empirical Evidence or Spurious Correlation?

We tend to think of social achievements such as the welfare state, public education or measures to fight corruption as standard institutions of modern liberal democracies. Seen as such, it is indeed impossible to imagine that the range and even existence of these constitutive institutions could be tied to levels of ethnic diversity within a society. To understand why social scientists are concerned with how these achievements can be sustained in the face of growing ethnic diversification we must first recognize that they are everything but standard. They are large-scale outcomes of a remarkable human capacity: collective action.

The Fragile Nature of Public Goods Provision and Social Cohesion

In contrast to other forms of action, collective action is special because it results in goods that serve a group at large – that are in the shared interest of the group rather than individuals. Examples of such goods range from clean air to trade unions to public playgrounds. Many of these are characterized by the impossibility of exclusion, meaning that everyone can enjoy the good, once established. Clean air is perhaps the most obvious example. This universal access is what makes such goods, and the collective action that produces them, remarkable: narrowly rational individuals would not act toward a collective interest over their own, for the narrow interest is to enjoy the benefits of the public good while others produce it (e.g. Hardin, 1982; Olson, 1965). It would seem to make more sense to let the others pay taxes and still send one’s child to school and drive on public streets.

While this characterizes public goods as special, it also shows up a core dilemma faced by all societies. According to the so-called dilemma of collective action, no selfishly rational actor will engage for the group’s sake, even though it is in everybody’s interest. Some people break strikes even though they would benefit from higher wages, and others pay no taxes even though they enjoy high public security that the state enforces. Voting is another example, for it serves no individual interest: the impact of a single vote is negligible and does not outweigh the costs of participating in the elections. People who vote serve the public interest in a democratic government, rather than their own individual aims. The ability to overcome the dilemma of collective action is thus a core requirement of any society. Olson (1965), who first formalized this insight, aimed to update classical thought. Contra Marx, the working class will not rise up once people have recognized their shared interest in overthrowing capitalism. They are more likely simply to hope that others will do the overthrowing, and join them to ‘hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner’ (Marx and En...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Fragility of Social Cohesion in Ethnically Diverse Societies Empirical Evidence or Spurious Correlation?
• 3 Elements of a Theory on Ethnic Diversity and Social Cohesion Nothing but Group Threat?
• 4 Measuring Ethnic Diversity Competing Statistical Indices, Similar Results?
• 5 Beyond Measured Facts Perceptions of Ethnic Diversity and Social Cohesion
• 6 Perceptions are not Arbitrarily Subjective Blaming Ethnic Minorities for Neighbourhood Problems
• 7 The Dilemma of Inter-ethnic Coexistence Sources of Cohesion in Ethnically Diverse Neighbourhoods
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix: Research Design
• Bibliography
• Index