The Correlates of Ethnicity: Why the Ethnic Majority Expects That Ethnic Minorities Contribute Less to the Collective

Members of the ethnic majority tend to view immigrants and ethnic minorities as less willing to contribute to the collective. Why is this the case? I argue that in Europe, ethnic attributes signal citizens’ socioeconomic resources, cultural values, and norm compliance and that these factors, rather than ethnic identities per se, explain why citizens are expected (not) to contribute. Through a novel conjoint experimental design in Denmark that manipulated respondents’ access to information about these different mechanisms, the argument finds support. First, in information-sparse environments, ethnic majority members expect that minority members contribute substantially less to the provision of public goods than majority members. Second, this ethnic bias is reduced by each of the three mechanisms and explained away once information on all three is available. This demonstrates that negative expectations toward minorities operate through multiple, complementary channels and that stereotype-countering information can reduce the majority-minority expectation gap.