Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust: a Discussion with Merlin Schaeffer

“Policies that try to tackle diversity problems make it always salient in people’s minds. And that can backfire, even if well-meant.”

Ethnic Diversity. The words will garner glee for some and dread for others. Whether ethnic diversity is already high within a country or in flux due to immigration, a top concern is how a nation addresses not the benefits but known problems that ethnic diversity can bring, as well as whether less diversity is better.

The logic of debate has balanced uneasily across the weighted shoulders of one prominent researcher. American political scientist Robert D. Putnam first published Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital in 1995, in which he concluded that more diversity in a community is associated with less trust. As Putnam said, in areas with high ethnic diversity, people tend to engage less in civic life, preferring to “hunker down.” Putnam’s research did not bode well for those aspiring to see ethnic diversity increase, especially through immigration.

The social science fields exploded with further research after Putnam’s formative work. Yet, over the following 25 years, as numerous as the studies were, they seemed inconclusive on whether Putnam was right or not.

This year, all that changed. Three researchers, Peter Thisted Dinesen, Merlin Schaeffer, and Kim Mannemar Sønderskov published a study that analyzed the vast pool of existing data and found the evidence was pointing toward an undeniable conclusion: Ethnic diversity does erode social trust.