Rising Ethnic Diversity Slightly Dents Collective Efficacy - A Longitudinal Study of Urban Neighborhoods

• In Event: Multidimensional Approaches to Studying Crime and the Intersections of Race, Ethnicity, and Community Characteristics

Abstract

In community research, longitudinal studies are still rare, and little is known about dynamic neighborhood change over time. As a natural experiment, the migration crisis of 2015/16 has led to a sudden yet uneven increase in ethnic diversity in many places in Germany. Ethnic diversity has been widely discussed as a detriment to neighborhood social capital, yet most evidence of this link remains cross-sectional. This paper looks at the development of collective efficacy and interethnic climate between 2014 and 2020 in a sample of 139 urban neighborhoods in Cologne and Essen (Germany), applying random effects within-between modelling of survey data (n = ca. 11,000). The longitudinal analyses show that while the between-neighborhood variation in social capital remained largely stable, an increase in ethnic diversity was associated with a significant but weak decrease in collective efficacy and interethnic climate. Cross-level interactions reveal that these effects were conditional on attitudes towards migration and other individual properties. The implications of these findings for research on neighborhood change are discussed.

Author

• Dietrich Oberwittler, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law, Freiburg/Germany