The Downside of Diversity

By Michael Jonas
August 5, 2007

Edited by Andy Ross

Robert Putnam

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings.

The study comes at a time when the future of the American melting pot is the focus of intense political debate, from immigration to race-based admissions to schools, and it poses challenges to advocates on all sides of the issues. The study is already being cited by some conservatives as proof of the harm large-scale immigration causes to the nation's social fabric.

Putnam gathered the initial raw data in 2000 and issued a press release the following year outlining the results. He then spent several years testing other possible explanations. When he finally published a detailed scholarly analysis in June in the journal Scandinavian Political Studies, he faced criticism for straying from data into advocacy. His paper argues strongly that the negative effects of diversity can be remedied.

Putnam is the nation's premier guru of civic engagement. After studying civic life in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s, Putnam turned his attention to the US, publishing an influential journal article on civic engagement in 1995 that he expanded five years later into the best-selling Bowling Alone. The book sounded a national wake-up call on what Putnam called a sharp drop in civic connections among Americans.

The results of his new study come from a survey Putnam directed among residents in 41 US communities, including Boston. Residents were sorted into the four principal categories used by the US Census: black, white, Hispanic, and Asian. They were asked how much they trusted their neighbors and those of each racial category, and questioned about a long list of civic attitudes and practices. What emerged in more diverse communities was a bleak picture of civic desolation.

Putnam writes that those in more diverse communities tend to "distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television."

Growing up in the 1950s in small Midwestern town, Putnam knew the religion of virtually every member of his high school graduating class because, he says, such information was crucial to the question of "who was a possible mate or date." The importance of marrying within one's faith, he says, has largely faded since then, at least among many mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jews.

As for smoothing over the divisions that hinder civic engagement, Putnam argues that Americans can help that process along through targeted efforts. He suggests expanding support for English-language instruction and investing in community centers and other places that allow for "meaningful interaction across ethnic lines." In offering ideas for mitigating his findings, Putnam has drawn scorn for stepping out of the role of dispassionate researcher.


Michael Jonas is acting editor of CommonWealth magazine, published by MassINC, a nonpartisan public-policy think tank in Boston.
 

Bowling with Others

By James Q. Wilson
Commentary, October 2007

Edited by Andy Ross

In his celebrated book, Bowling Alone (2000), the political scientist Robert D. Putnam argued that America has become increasingly disconnected from family, friends, and neighbors. After finishing his book, Putnam was approached by various community foundations to measure the levels of social capital within their own cities. He published the results this year.

In his new essay, Putnam argues that ethnic and racial diversity in neighborhoods is an important social asset, because it encourages people to form connections that can reduce unproductive forms of ethnocentrism and increase economic growth. In the short run, he is frank to acknowledge, his data show not positive effects but rather the opposite.

Diversity, Putnam concludes on the basis of his findings, makes us hunker down. Not only do we trust our neighbors less, we have less confidence in local government, a lowered sense of our own political efficacy, fewer close friends, and a smaller likelihood of contributing to charities, cooperating with others, working on a community project, registering to vote, or being happy.

Still, Putnam believes that in the long run ethnic heterogeneity will create new forms of social solidarity. He offers three reasons. First, the American military, once highly segregated, is today anything but that. Second, churches that were once highly segregated have likewise become entirely and peaceably integrated. Third, people who once married only their ethnic kin today marry across ethnic and religious lines.

But what authority or discipline can anyone bring to neighborhoods? They are places where people choose to live, out of either opportunity or necessity. Walk the streets of Chicago or Los Angeles and you will learn about organized gangs and other social risks. Even where everyone is equally poor or equally threatened by crime, people exhibit less trust if their neighborhood is ethnically diverse than if it is homogeneous.

Of Putnam’s three or four reasons for thinking that ethnic heterogeneity will contribute to social capital in the long run, only one is compelling: people are indeed voluntarily marrying across ethnic lines. But the paradoxical effect of this trend is not to preserve but to blunt ethnic identity, to the point where it may well reduce the perception of how diverse a neighborhood actually is. In any case, the fact remains that diversity and improved solidarity have gone hand in hand only in those institutions characterized by enforced authority and discipline.

Thomas Schelling, a Nobel laureate in economics, has shown that neighborhood homogeneity and even segregation may result from small, defensible human choices that cannot themselves be called racist. In fact, such choices can lead to segregation even when the people making them expressly intend the opposite. Schelling’s analysis casts doubt on Putnam’s own policy suggestions for reducing the disadvantages and stimulating the benefits of ethnic heterogeneity.

Whether we should seek to transform the situation Putnam describes is another question. People who celebrate diversity and multiculturalism are endorsing only one part of what it means to be a complete human being, neglecting morality and group and national pride. Just as we cannot be whole persons if we deny the fundamental rights of others, so we cannot be whole persons if we live in ways that discourage decency, cooperation, and charity.

In every society, people must arrange for tradeoffs between desirable but mutually inconsistent goals. When it comes to the competing values of diversity and the formation of social capital, as when it comes to other arrangements in a democracy, balance is all.


James Q. Wilson is the Ronald Reagan professor of public policy at Pepperdine University in California.