The Effect of Racial Heterogeneityon Electoral and Non-Electoral Political Participation in AmericanCities.

This paper analyses the effects of racial diversity on political participation in American cities. A number of recent studies argue that political participation will be lower in more diverse areas (Alesina and La Ferrara 2000; Costa and Kahn 2003). In contrast to these and others, the paper argues that incentives for participation are greatly reduced by homogeneity. It is argued that heterogeneous places are characterized by more conflict over resources and more mobilized groups, leading to higher levels of political participation. First, I provide evidence in support of a group conflict theory of racial attitudes. Second, I test the implications of this theory for political engagement in American cities with varying degrees of racial diversity. In order to test this argument I use data from the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey. Respondents to the survey were matched with data on their place of residence from a number of sources, creating a unique dataset of close to 15,000 respondents nested in 690 cities. Because of the hierarchical nature of the data, I employ multilevel modeling techniques in the analysis. Preliminary results indicate that racial diversity is overall negatively correlated with participation; that is, the more diverse a place one lives in, the less likely it is that one will take political action. However, specifying a model where the individual effect of race is allowed to vary randomly across cities uncovers different results which remain “hidden” by the more crude specification of previous models. In this model, racial heterogeneity becomes a strong predictor of participation for members of minority groups while the participation of whites remains negatively related to diversity. The paper aims to make several contributions to the literature. First, by using multilevel modeling – a method not widely applied in political science research – the study is able to tease out interactions between individual race and the racial environment previously undetected. Second, with a few exceptions, past work in this area has tended to concentrate on black-white race relations and voting; this paper broadens the focus to include other racial groups as well as non-electoral forms of political participation. Finally, the paper provides evidence of the consequences of group conflict motives for citizen engagement in politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]