Trust and White Ethnic Diversity in Small Town Iowa

Voluntary Association Participation and White Ethnic Diversity in Rural Iowa Communities

“…This study dovetails with previous work that documents that White ethnic diversity is associated with lower levels of important social goods within communities including trust, community attachment, friendliness, supportiveness, and involvement (Flagg & Painter, 2019;Painter & Flagg, 2021;Rice & Steele, 2001). Furthermore, this study also reflects a part of a larger body of work that finds that racial/ethnic heterogeneity, at least in the United States, is negatively associated with these same outcomes (the study by Abascal & Baldassarri notwithstanding).…”

“…Essentially, I hold racial status fixed while allowing the ethnic composition to vary, which is important because examining larger racial or panethnic diversity may be painting with too broad strokes as these wider categories (i.e., European Americans) may be masking interesting variation. In this way, I add to a cluster of research that has examined the effects of White ethnic diversity on community attachment (Flagg & Painter, 2019; Rice & Steele, 2001), involvement and suspicion (Rice & Steele, 2001), and trust (Painter & Flagg, 2021). Altogether, this line of research documents that White ethnic diversity is associated with lower levels of these social goods within communities, a pattern that is also reflected within part of the larger body of research on racial/ethnic diversity and voluntary association participation.…”

“…To make these contributions, I use the 2004 Iowa Community Survey (ICS) and the 2000 U.S. Census. The ICS is a cross section of small Iowa towns that have been used to study both White ethnic diversity (Flagg & Painter, 2019; Painter & Flagg, 2021; Rice & Steele, 2001) and voluntary association participation (Painter & Paxton, 2014). Notably, the Painter and Paxton (2014) article replicated their ICS-based analyses with data from the General Social Survey and found similar patterns present.…”

Minority Groups as Socio-Economic Development Factor of the Emerging EU Region in the Opinion of Regional Authorities: Evidence from Poland and the German Minority

“…Ethnic diversity is found to have an impact on trust (Bram and Dronkers, 2011;Ayob, 2018;Painter and Flagg, 2020) and social solidarity (Putnam, 2007;Fieldhouse and Cutts, 2010;Noja and Andrei, 2016), as well as on conflict prevention (O'Reilly et al, 1997) on the provision of public goods (Alesina and La Ferrara, 2005;Chakravarty and Fonseca, 2014;Gisselquist, 2016) and the labor market (Oezdemir, 2013;Heath and Martin, 2013;Cheung, 2014;Tonini and Peng, 2018;Noja, 2018).…”