Intelligence and social capital

Flickr photo by aylaujp

Jason Richwine had a recent post on The American blog (“A Smart Solution to the Diversity Dilemma“) suggesting that the answer to the short-term tensions Robert Putnam has observed, between diversity and immigration and levels of civic engagement, has a solution: admit smarter immigrants.

First, a clarification…Jason Richwine is incorrect in asserting that Robert Putnam was unclear about whether to share these findings.  We shared an early take on this finding immediately after we conducted the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey.

I disagree with Jason’’s conclusion;  since education is generally a stronger predictor of levels of civic engagement than raw intelligence, we could still admit less educated immigrants who got educated over time in the U.S.  and have the immigrants still be highly civicly engaged.  Moreover, the lower civic engagement that Robert Putnam discussed in “E Pluribus Unum” was not a compositional effect (a consequence of having more immigrants who were less educated), but a consequence of the diversity within communities, so admitting more educated immigrants wouldn’t have offset that effect.  Nonetheless, his blog post did surface some interesting papers that I hadn’t seen before.  Richwine asserts: “Various survey data indicate that IQ is an important and independent predictor of voting, membership in various social organizations, daily newspaper reading, and tolerance of free speech rights.”

The backup for his assertion comes from:

1)  Seth Hauser, “Education, Ability, and Civic Engagement in the Contemporary United States” Social Science Research 29, 556–582 (2000).  Hauser found a modest independent affect of ability on voting and social participation, controlling for levels of education in GSS and Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey data: He found no such finding in ANES (American National Election Studies) data but this data has much weaker and less objective data on intelligence. Hauser concluded that in general the bivariate impact of ability on civic engagement comes from ability proxying for levels of education ultimately achieved.  He also found that education was a stronger predictor of levels of civic engagement than ability.  For “ability”,  GSS had a measure of vocabulary; and WLS used Henmon–Nelson Test of Mental Ability.

2) Stephen Miller, ” Intelligence, Irrationality, and Civic Returns: Can Education Improve Democracy?” (Econ Dept., George Mason Univ.).  Miller also used GSS data and also found that both education and intellectual ability in GSS predict voting, daily newspaper reading and tolerance of free speech.  Ability did not have any independent effect on group membership and only had an effect through levels of education achieved.

Had the effect of intelligence on social capital been much stronger than education (even controlling for education), it would suggest that there is less that one can do to alter one’s baseline level of civic engagement, and head us to more Calvinist notions of predestined civic engagement.  But since education is the bigger driver in Hauser’s findings, it suggests that we are keepers of our civic fate: although we may begin with differential likelihoods of getting engaged, these can be more than offset through additional education (which both provides us with useful skills for getting engaged — like organizing others, running a meeting, writing persuasive materials, making a speech etc. — and will make others more likely to ask us to get civicly engaged).

Diversity impedes redistribution

(Flickr photo by Maistora)

It has long been noted that in more diverse countries, it is harder to sustain wealth redistributive efforts, and public support for such programs wanes.  It has always been hard to disentangle culture from national wealth and diversity in understanding what causes this. 

A recent paper by HKS colleagues Erzo Luttmer and Monica Singhal (using European Social Survey data) gains traction on this issue by looking at immigrants to developed countries and finds that immigrants bring with them their attitudes about redistribution.  So immigrants, controlling for their wealth, education, etc., and their receiving country’s attitudes towards redistribution are more likely to support redistribution if they country that they come from supports redistribution. 

As the Economist summarized this:

Even after controlling for income, education and other relevant economic and social factors such as work history and age, views about redistribution in an immigrant’s home country are a strong predictor of his own opinions. Indeed, this measure of “cultural background” explains as much as income levels, and three-fifths as much as income and education combined. These results hold even for immigrants who moved 20 years before they were surveyed; they cannot be attributed to people not having had time to adjust their views.

 

And the results can not be explained by self-selection — which immigrants choose to migrate as these impacts would favor immigrants moving to countries that are more similar to the immigrants’ own views about redistribution.

Luttmer and Singhal found that these differences fade over time: the culture of immigrants has only about 2/3 of the effect on second generation immigrants as foreign-born immigrants.

The findings are consistent with some research done by John Helliwell about immigrants and their levels of social capital (social and civic engagement).
Helliwell describes the fact that trust levels are lower among Canadian immigrants than non-immigrants and that these differences persist even controlling for factors like education, income, time in community, etc. Tom Rice and Jan Feldman have noted the importance of immigrants’ home country trust in setting their trust levels when they emigrate. ["Civic Culture and Democracy From Europe to America" (1997).] Using this framework, Helliwell finds that these trust differentials disappear in Canada when one controls for average trust levels in the home country of the immigrants. Helliwell also asserts that contrary to the “footprint of imported trust” which lasts for many generations in the U.S., there is starting to be evidence in Canada that this it may disappear within one generation. Helliwell thus asks whether there are generalizable lessons about the win-win benefits to integrative governmental attitudes toward immigration in promoting better inter-racial attitudes and higher trust.

These findings are also broadly consistent with work done by Daniel Elazar on political culture in American states (in American Federalism: A View From the States), where he found, remarkably, that differences in “moral political culture”, especially in the upper midwest, were explained by broad migratory patterns of immigrants decades earlier from highly civic and trusting Scandinavian countries.

See “In the Blood: Attitudes towards redistribution have a strong cultural component” (Economist, June 4, 2009)

And Culture, Context, and the Taste for Redistribution by Erzo Luttmer and Monica Singhal, May 2009

Netherlands study also finds diversity challenging for social capital in short-term

Confirming one portion of Robert Putnam’s much discussed *E Pluribus Unum* study, a researcher (Jaap Dronkers, Chair of the Social Stratification and Inequality Program at the European University Institute in the
Department of Political and Social Sciences, Italy) found similar results to Putnam’s in the Netherlands — that diversity poses challenges for social capital. [Putnam's *E Pluribus Unum* article also discussed the manifold benefits of diversity and discussed strategies for building stronger bonds over the longer-term through this diversity and optimism that we could do so.]

Abstract of paper: “Putnam (2007) claims that in the short run ethnic diversity tends to reduce solidarity and social capital: in ethnically diverse neighborhoods, residents of all ethnicities tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even in one’s own ethnic group) is lower, altruism and community cooperation is more rare, friends fewer. This study replicates Putnam’s analysis for a West-European country. Furthermore, by including the ethnicity of the respondent’s neighbors, a sub-neighborhood level measure of ethnic diversity is added to the analyses. With data from the Netherlands (N=5,757), using multi-level regression, we confirm Putnam’s claim and find that both for immigrants and native residents 1) neighborhoods’ ethnic diversity reduces individual trust in neighborhoods; 2) those with neighbors of a different ethnicity have less trust in neighborhoods and neighbors 3) a substantial part of the effect of neighborhoods’ ethnic diversity on individual trust can be explained by the higher propensity of having neighbors of a different ethnicity. We conclude that ethnic diversity can have a negative effect on individual trust. However, we do not find these negative effects of neighborhoods’ or neighbors ethnic diversity on inter-ethnic trust.”  Jaap Dronkers et al. focused on Netherlands since these were the only data within the European Union that they knew of that contained both a measurement of individual trust and the zip code or census tract of the respondent.

Here is direct link to the paper “Ethnic diversity in neighbourhoods and individual trust of immigrants and natives: A replication of Putnam (2007) in a West-European country.”

While we have not seen the results, we have been told that UK data from the Home Office Citizenship Survey (now called the Citizenship Survey) also shows a strongly significant relationship between respondent’s trust of neighbors (regardless of their race) and ethnic diversity of the neighborhood, controlling for all the standard controls at the individual and neighborhood level.

Note: some European studies recently assert to find contrary findings to Putnam’s “E Pluribus Unum” article, but are completely inapposite. Since information on the diversity of various neighborhoods is very hard to come by, many studies erroneously simply substitute a “national” level of diversity. See: Marc Hooghe et al (Ethnic Diversity, Trust and Ethnocentrism and Europe. A Multilevel Analysis of 21 European Countries“) or the erroneously titled “‘Ethnic diversity and social capital in Europe: tests of Putnam’s thesis in European countries” (Forthcoming in Scandinavian Political Studies) by Dutch sociologists Peer Scheepers, Maurice Gesthuizen and Tom van der Meer (Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands). The problems in the Hooghe and Scheepers papers of using “national level” diversity as the control variable can be seen when applied to the U.S. context. It would be like assuming that South Dakota, Spanish Harlem, Houston and Beverly Hills all have equal levels of neighborhood diversity in the U.S. Since many countries exhibit different patterns of micro-level integration or segregation one can understand how the national average is an extremely noisy measure of neighborhood diversity. And it seems quite likely that the true relationship between social capital and diversity can’t be seen through all the noise of the resulting national measure. These papers may have interesting things to say, but they can’t have meaningful things to say about whether the “E Pluribus Unum” findings apply to other European countries, which is why the above paper on the Netherlands by the Italian researchers that is referenced at the top of this post is far more relevant to this debate.

Diversity and the Law/Diversity and Human Resources

We’ve previously posted various posts on Robert Putnam’s research on diversity, immigration and social cohesion.  The paper is (“E Pluribus Unum“) and prior posts about the research can be read here.

I recently came upon an interesting paper by D. Benjamin Barros called “Group Size, Heterogeneity, and Prosocial Behavior: Designing Legal Structures to Facilitate Cooperation in a Diverse Society”. He analyzes how group size and group heterogeneity affects the ability of the group to cooperate, self-police or be civicly engaged and suggests how laws and legal structures might encourage this collaboration in the face of greater diversity. Draft of paper available here.

Also, a Human Resources Journal had an interesting article on this diversity research called Diverse and Disengaged? by Scott Flanders (Human Resouce Executive Online, 9/24/07)

Two recent summaries of Putnam diversity research; Putnam article available free until year end

So diverse, yet adverse to reaching out (Houston Chronicle, Lisa Gray, 8/30/07)

More Bowling Alone in America (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Richard Handler, 8/22/07) and follow-up article here.

And, good news, Blackwell Synergy Publishing has agreed to make Robert Putnam’s E Pluribus Unum article (from the June 2007 Scandinavian Political Studies Journal) available for free download through December 31, 2007 to enable more people to read the original article about the connection between diversity and community cohesion.

Other posts on this topic here.

Putnam discusses his diversity study

Harvard Professor Robert D. Putnam discussed his research on the relationship between immigration, diversity and community cohesion on KQED yesterday (8/20/07). There is a feed for the radio show, the Forum with Michael Krasny, here.

You can see my earlier posts on Robert Putnam and diversity here. 

2 other interesting pieces on Robert Putnam and diversity

I’ve posted earlier on Harvard’s Robert Putnam and diversity.  You can see the earlier blog posts here.  But here are some later pieces of interest that have crossed the transom.

Robert Putnam did a blog interview on this Open Left blog site.

There’s a good blog summary of the finding on Eternity Road.

And the Ottawa Citizen had an Op-Ed (Diversity causes short-term social pain, long-term human gain; Multiculturalism’s impact on communities not as rosy as advertised, studies find by Dan Gardner, 8/18/07), which misattributed Robert Putnam’s take on diversity (since Putnam himself in his E Pluribus Unum article talks about the benefits of diversity), but cites the interesting study of Matt Costa/Dora Kahn on the benefits of diversity in the Civil War.

Blog rebuts WSJ’s misclaims on Putnam and diversity

This blog chronicles Daniel Henninger’s mis-use of Robert Putnam’s diversity research and rebuts his misassertions in his 8/16/07 Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal.

And this ABC News piece (People ‘Hunker Down Like Turtles’ in Diverse Communities, 8/15/07) describes how the conservatives more generally are distorting Putnam’s findings.

Other posts about this Putnam diversity research on this blog here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Further discussion of Robert Putnam’s diversity research

Harvard Professor Robert Putnam discussed his research on the impact of diversity on community cohesion yesterday on Tell Me More (8/14/07).  [I mentioned earlier that he discussed these on the radio show *On Point* with Tom Ashbrook, Lani Guinier and Pat Buchanan on 8/9/07.]

There were also some interesting Op-Eds on this research in the Los Angeles Times on 8/14/07 (Gregory Rodriguez) and the Chicago Tribune on 8/15/07 (Clarence Page).

Previous posts about this research on this blog here, here, here, here, and here.

Putnam and Diversity (IV)

There have been a lot of posts in the blogosphere about Harvard Professor Robert D. Putnam’s the recent finding that diversity (at least in the short to medium-term) challenges community cohesion.  The underlying well-written article that caused all thus controversy is available here.

There are some very interesting blog posts on these two sites.

International Herald Tribune comments
Sepia Mutiny blog

Robert Putnam discussed these issues further with Lani Guinier and Pat Buchanan on Tom Ashbrook’s On Point radio show (8/9/07).

And while there has not been much scholarly critique of Putnam’s findings, one outspoken academic critic is Steven Durlauf who claims in a letter published on a blog post that the low social capital folks moved to the places with greater diversity (a self-selection argument that seems rather counter-intuitive, i.e. that the least trusting move to the places with greater diversity and the most trusting leave for places with greater homogeneity).