By Whom Do You Want Your Lost Wallet To Be Found?

• In Event: 294 - Regular Session. Social Capital and the Community

Abstract

By whom do you want your lost wallet to be found? The relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and trust in coethnic and non-coethnic neighbours in the Netherlands.


The claim that ethnic heterogeneous living environments drive down social cohesion has been empirically tested all over the globe. Meta-analyses suggest that ethnic heterogeneity does not erode social cohesion in general and is even positively related to interethnic ties. Relationships within the neighbourhood are more consistently undermined by ethnically heterogeneous neighbourhoods. These conclusions raise crucial new questions. First, does ethnic heterogeneity drive down trust in coethnic neighbours similarly as trust in non-coethnic neighbours? Second, is the administrative neighbourhood the crucial and only geographical area of which one would expect negative heterogeneity effects? This contribution sets out to answer these questions through analyses of the Religion in Dutch Society 2011-2012 dataset, supplemented with uniquely detailed GIS-data. Our dependent variables are so-called wallet-items, which we model through spatial and multilevel regression techniques. We demonstrate that both trust in non-coethnic and – especially – trust in coethnic neighbours are lower in heterogeneous environments. Trust in people outside the neighbourhood is not affected by heterogeneity. Measures of heterogeneity aggregated to relatively large scales, such as, administrative municipalities and egohoods with a 4000 meter radius, demonstrate the strongest negative relationships with our trust indicators, not the very local neighbourhoods.

Authors

• Jochem Tolsma, Radboud University

• Tom van der Meer, University of Amsterdam