SOEP Brown Bag Seminar

Studies on ethnic diversity and social cohesion are predominantly crosssectional and assume linearity, i.e. a steady, constant decline of social capital as ethnic diversity increases. Relying on longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and applying a differences-in-differences design, the paper investigates how the event of moving to a more or less diverse neighbourhood affects people's opinions about immigration up until the fourth year after the move.
The results show that moving to diversity indeed results in more concerns about immigration and that the conclusion would actually have been the opposite if one had relied on a cross-sectional analysis of the data exclusively. Moreover, the effect of ethnic diversity lasts over time: even four years after moving people who moved to a more diverse neighbourhood remain more xenophobic. But people who move to ‘highly-diverse' neighbourhoods, i.e. one of Germany's 15% most diverse neighbourhoods, do not become more concerned. In contrast to assumptions on linear, constant effects of diversity, this shows that prejudice-fostering effects of diversity wear off at high levels of diversity, suggesting that frequent opportunities for personal intergroup contact begin to cancel out feelings of threat.