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In Diversity We Trust: The Positive Effect of Ethnic Diversity on Outgroup Trust

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Abstract

Most studies on ethnic diversity and social trust rely on the standard measure of generalized trust. This study complements existing work on this topic by examining the effect of diversity on trust toward outgroups. This innovation is motivated by two closely connected arguments: At first, most existent studies are conducted in the framework of intergroup contact and conflict theory. These theories directly allude to trust toward outgroups. Second, recent empirical studies show that the standard measure of generalized trust is much less generalized than theoretically assumed. Instead it is blurred by a great deal of particularized trust. Explicit outgroup trust therefore seems to be better suited to empirically testing the extent to which growing ethnic diversity influences trust toward people different from oneself. The cross-national analysis yields a positive relationship between diversity and outgroup trust, which is an interesting finding given the current debate dominated by conflict theoretical reasoning.

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Notes

  1. The reader should be aware of the fact that the items “trust in another nationality” and “trust in another religion” as indicators of outgroup trust bear the risk of being not equivalently understood by individuals across cultural contexts. In other words, as is the case with many other attitudinal measures in cross-national research, we cannot be ultimately sure that cross-cultural measurement equivalence can be guaranteed (but see Freitag and Bauer 2013). Nevertheless, these indicators are currently the best indicators available for cross-national research.

  2. For several countries of the former Eastern Bloc, there were no data on migration before 1990. Therefore, the period 1990–2005 was chosen to calculate the development of the share of migrants.

  3. For Japan, Iraq, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Iran, and New Zealand there were no differentiated trust questions available. Missing data on GDP and individual income prevent the inclusion of Taiwan, Andorra, Argentina, and Jordan. The following countries thus are included in the analysis: Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Cyprus, Egypt, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Great Britain, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia, Mali, Mexico, Moldova, Morocco, Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Poland, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, South Africa, South Korea, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Trinidad, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay, United States of America, Vietnam, and Zambia.

  4. Further analyses show that the findings are robust to alternative model specifications and the exclusion of outliers (not shown). Neither the degree of liberal democracy nor the religious tradition of a country changes the results substantially (Bjørnskov 2008; Delhey and Newton 2005; Tsai et al. 2010; Delhey et al. 2011). Linear hierarchical modeling also yields a positive relationship between ethnic diversity and outgroup trust. The exclusion of potentially endogenous individual variables such as “happiness” or “active organizational membership” does not change the results either (not shown).

  5. In order to save space only the effects of “trust at least somewhat” are provided. Results however do not differ in any substantive way when instead “trust completely” is used as the response variable.

  6. Consider Table 3 in the appendix for the coefficients of the model estimates.

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Acknowledgments

This article has benefited greatly from the comments and suggestions offered by Markus Freitag, the editors, and three anonymous reviewers. I wish to also thank Jennifer Shore and Wesley Dopkins for their linguistic assistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Political Science, University of Bern, Lerchenweg 36, 3012, Bern, Switzerland

    Birte Gundelach

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  1. Birte Gundelach
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Correspondence to Birte Gundelach.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.

Table 3 Ethnic diversity and outgroup trust (models with interaction between diversity and migration variables)
Full size table
Table 4 Summary statistics
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Table 5 Correlation individual variables
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Table 6 Correlation context variables
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Table 7 Operationalization and sources of variables
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Gundelach, B. In Diversity We Trust: The Positive Effect of Ethnic Diversity on Outgroup Trust. Polit Behav 36, 125–142 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-013-9220-x

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