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28 November 2005

PPBW: Hopkins on Diversity and Public Spending

This Friday the Political Psychology and Behavior Workshop features a paper by Dan Hopkins titled "The Diversity Discount: How Increasing Ethnic and Racial Diversity Dampens Support for Tax Increases." The paper shows that communities are less likely to be presented with public spending opportunities when they are diverse. This finding tweaks the simpler hypothesis that affluent majorities dislike diversity and vote against redistribution. Rather, elites appear to be driving (or at least co-piloting) the train by not offering proposals in diverse communities. Perhaps the abstract will entice you to read more:

Racial and ethnic diversity reduces U.S. municipalities' investment in public goods--or so recent research has argued. Yet this growing body of research suffers from key weaknesses: its theories are imprecise; its evidence only shows correlation, not causation; and it ignores the political processes that set levels of public investment. This paper addresses these deficiencies by studying the impact of changing racial and ethnic demographics on voter approval for property tax hikes in Massachusetts. Employing a variety of statistical approaches with time-series cross-sectional data, it contends that increasing diversity dampens municipalities' willingness to make long-term public investments. Departing from past literature, it concludes that increases in diversity, not its level, appear most influential. And the impact of those changes is marked: all else equal, if a
town diversifies, the probability that it holds a vote on a major capital project drops by 20%. Theoretically, these findings point us away from the dominant understanding of diversity as divergent preferences, and toward approaches that emphasize the disruption of existing political patterns and relationships.

Posted by Barry Burden at November 28, 2005 10:26 AM