Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust: A Narrative and Meta-Analytical Review

Associate Professor Merlin Schaeffer has contributed to Annual Review of Political Science with the review ‘Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust: A Narrative and Meta-Analytical Review’. There is open access to the review, which is co-written with Peter Thisted Dinesen, University of Copenhagen, and Kim Mannemar Sønderskov, Aarhus University.

The article asks the question if ethnic diversity erode social trust and reviews the literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust through a narrative review and a meta-analysis of 1,001 estimates from 87 studies.

The review clarifies the core concepts, highlights pertinent debates, and tests core claims from the literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust. The authors find a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust across all studies. The review concludes by discussing avenues for future research.

Read the full review on the website of the Annual Review of Political Science.