Diversity, inequality and foundering public trust

previously published in the Terre Haute Tribune-Star, 28 January 2018

Last week I examined whether economic inequality could be undermining US democratic values and concluded yes.  Economic inequality, however is a liberal concern.  This week I examine a conservative concern, the growing diversity of the population.

Last October Pew Research Center published a 38 nation study on support for democracy (http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/10/16/globally-broad-support-for-representative-and-direct-democracy/).  The US data suggests that Americans overwhelmingly support representative democracy, bolstering the claim that this is an America value.    However, only 51 percent of Americans indicated they trusted the national government to do what is right for the US and even fewer, 46 percent, are satisfied with the way democracy is working in the United States. 

Seventeen countries are considered high-income by Pew so I focused my comparisons there on economic inequality and will use that same subset to look for any relationship with cultural diversity.  I am eliminating Chile because its overall support for representative democracy is only 58 percent, about 20 points less than the next lowest.

I am using two similar indices of cultural diversity, one that focuses on different languages and then another that focuses on other features of a society.  The two indices vary from 0 to 1, with coefficients closer to one indicating greater diversity and those closer to 0 less  Both the indices and background on them can be found here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_ethnic_and_cultural_diversity_level

The first thing that stands out is that the US is not the most diverse country on the list, which is probably contrary to what most believe.  We are second, after our neighbor to the north, Canada.   They edge us because Canada has more languages spoken than do we.  But North America is considerable more diverse than the other nations in the subset. 

Canada is more diverse but shows greater trust and confidence in its national government than the US.  The following countries show virtually no diversity, with indices at less than 0.1:   Greece, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, and South Korea.  If conservatives are correct, that higher levels of cultural diversity reduce social capital, and thus trust and confidence in government, we should expect those countries to show lower levels of trust and confidence in their national governments.  The Netherlands and Germany are not diverse but they show the highest trust and confidence in their national governments lending support to the conservative view.  However, except for them, the other non-diverse countries show rather low trust and confidence, with scores ranging from 13 to 57 percent.  The most diverse countries, Canada, France, Spain, UK, and US vary from very high trust and confidence (Canada’s high trust and confidence to Spain’s relatively low trust and confidence).  There does not appear to be any strong relationship between the diversity of a country’s population and the trust and confidence in its national government. 

These countries are in the top half of diversity of the 16 countries examined:  Canada, Spain, US, UK, France, Hungary, Sweden, and Australia.  From the same list, the top half of the countries in terms of economic inequality: US, Israel, Canada, UK, Greece, Poland, Spain, and Italy.  Canada Spain, UK, and US are on both lists.  Canada is the most diverse and tied for fourth most economically unequal but has the highest trust and confidence in its national government.  The US is the most unequal and third most diverse but only about half of its people trusting or having confidence in the national government.  The UK is fourth most unequal and the fifth most diverse and similar to the US in terms of its people’s trust and confidence in its national government.  Spain is the second most diverse and tied for fourth in terms of inequality but with very low trust and confidence in its national government (it is important to note that Spain was experiencing significant political conflict around the time these data were collected).  Ignoring Spain, you can see a pattern; high inequality and high diversity seem associated with lower trust and confidence in national government. 

Perhaps if cultural diversity appears to be a basis for inequality (racism) this contributes to lower trust and confidence in government.