ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book describes social scientists about the consequences of ethnic diversity for levels of social cohesion and the potential for collective action. Ethnic diversity has been proposed as one of the reasons for stagnation and corruption in the developing world and as an explanation for the absence of a European-style welfare state in the United States (US). The book analyses the German sub-set of the Ethnic Diversity and Collective Action (EDCA)-Survey, which was explicitly designed to study questions of ethnic diversity. It shows people's perceived otherness and their estimates of intergroup conflict to be highly significant predictors of all investigated measures of cognitive social cohesion. The book also shows that it is in the more segregated cities and regions, where we find that same level of ethnic diversity is associated with even lower levels of trust and neighbourhood satisfaction, and more reported neighbourhood problems.
