Note that this article is from 2007 about a book published in 2000. I think it’s safe to say that whatever Putnam observed in the 90s is largely irrelevant today.
Edit: it may actually be referring to a study published in 2007. I can’t tell because the article doesn’t link the study.
diversity causes people to withdraw from society
…
Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam – famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement – has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects.
when you read this, there should be a 100 ft tall flashing red neon sign in your brain that immediately lights up saying “correlation is not causation”.
if you don’t have a neon sign like that, you should put some effort into getting better at media literacy. because this is like, importing lemons from Mexico causes fewer highway fatalities in the US level of bad analysis.
as one example, you might have a community with low civic engagement (for whatever reason). people tend to dislike living in such a community, so they move somewhere else. this drives down housing prices. that means people who are less wealthy move in to the community. those less wealthy people are more likely to be non-white, or recent immigrants, etc.
that’s a plausible explanation for the correlation, but with a causation that is in the exact opposite direction of what’s being claimed here - low civic engagement causing increased diversity.
There could also be an effect of loss fatigue at play. If a community is homogenous, it’s likely that elections are handing more people ‘wins’ each time, than if it’s very diverse and the minority groups whose priorities never win start to feel that civic participation is pointless.
Or it could also be an effect of the dominant group in a diverse area intentionally throwing up barriers in order to discourage civic engagement by minorities, i.e. voter suppression.
Both of those are things we’ve directly observed in US elections, and neither is an argument against diversity, it’s an argument against winner-take-all government.
This article is old enough to buy cigarettes. Others have cogently gone into issues with the study, but the data themselves are a quarter-century old. This is more of a historical question mark than politics.
