Inter-ethnic Trust, Tolerance, and Patriotism: Student Friendship in Kenya

• In Event: Identity Politics: Ethnicity and Beyond

Abstract

The effects of intergroup contact and on trust, tolerance and citizen identity is a well-studied phenomenon in Western settings (Allport 1954; Pettigrew 1998; Pettigrew et al 2006; Pettigrew 2008; Paluck and Green 2008; Paluck and Green 2018). However, there is little rigorous experimental evidence on the effects of such contact, particularly in diverse and multi-ethnic states in sub-Saharan Africa (Paluck et al 2018). The Kenyan government has intentionally used schooling policy as a way to promote intergroup contact and build national unity. This paper leverages a exogenous change in Kenyan national school policy, which creates a set of national schools with quotas on student representation from all counties in the country to assess whether increased student body diversity is correlated with increases in trust, tolerance, and prioritized national identity among students. Using an expert matching methodology, we compare student-level outcomes in the newly diverse schools, with students in similar schools that do not have such representation quotas. We utilize an original survey of 984 Form 4 (grade 12) students in 5 Kenyan counties with histories of ethnic conflicts and compare students in 10 new national schools and 10 comparison schools. We demonstrate that new national schools are more diverse than comparison schools and that students in these schools are more likely to have a diverse friend group than students in comparison schools. We employ a mediation model to explore the relationship between friendships with ethnic outgroups and increased trust, tolerance and civic identity. We find that an increase in the diversity of a student’s friend group is correlated with increased trusting behaviors, as measured by reported lending of possessions; tolerance, as measured by a willingness to marry someone from another ethnic group; and national identity, as measured by a prioritization of national identity over more local identity indicators.

Authors

• Danice Guzman, University of Notre Dame

• Jaimie Bleck, University of Notre Dame

• Robert Dowd, University of Notre Dame

• Jackline Oluoch Aridi, University of Notre Dame