Ethnic Diversity and Support for Redistributive Social Policies

Scholars and public figures have drawn attention to lower social spending in more ethnically diverse countries, and explicitly or implicitly claimed that this resulted from a lack of public support for more generous social-spending policies in more diverse countries—despite the lack of empirical evidence on the topic. Such arguments ultimately hinge on how diversity is related to attitudes about distribution. However, empirical studies of the relationship between social-spending attitudes and diversity in cross-national perspective are scarce and limited in geographic scope, and have yielded inconsistent results. Through a study of individual-level attitudes in 91 countries in this paper, I explore the relationship between ethnic diversity and actual attitudes about social spending using two different cross-national public opinion data sets, and multiple approaches to measuring diversity. The results of 48 regression models show that ethnic diversity itself is not negatively related, and may even be positively related, to support for redistributive social spending, which challenges the prevailing assumption about the divisiveness of ethnic diversity. There is one exception—support for redistribution may be lower when there have been large increases in the size of the immigrant population in a country, but only in countries in which economic inequality is particularly acute.