ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the recent scholarly findings suggest that amid diversity, social capital, the human bonds that enable communities to act collectively, may atrophy. The case of Lewiston, Maine, serves as a natural experiment testing the effect of racial diversity on social capital for residents who were not predisposed to live amid diversity. On the municipal and regional level, a marked increase in racial diversity is not associated with declines in social capital, although it is associated with some increase in anti-immigrant sentiment. At the municipal level, we do not see evidence of declining social capital. Taking into account patterns of social capital change elsewhere in the United States, the Lewiston area's only unique social capital change is an increase in interracial friendships. In a quantitative analysis of 172 studies on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social capital, M. Schaeffer (2014) argues that a negative relationship is more commonly found when ethnic boundaries are highly salien.
