The effect of classroom diversity on tolerance and participation in England, Sweden and Germany

many scholars (e.g Heyd, 1996, Walzer, 1997). The other items can also be said to
represent ethnic tolerance to the extent that the latter is understood as including the
principle of civic equality - i.e. accepting cultural others as fundamentally equal and
entitled to the same rights and opportunities. Theoretically it seems plausible to assume
an intimate connection between notions of acceptance and civic equality. After all,
expressing disagreement with the items on civic equality implies privileging the native
majority over immigrants, a mindset which intuitively goes together with racism,
ethnocentrism and prejudice - the very antonyms of ethnic tolerance. I thus assume the
five-item index to be a good proxy of ethnic tolerance. The higher the values on this
index, the more the respondent agrees with the five statements and the more tolerant I
consider him/her to be.

I further note that our measure of tolerance is likely to have tapped ethnic
tolerance among native majority respondents only since the object of the five items
(immigrants) clearly represents the out-group for this group of respondents. More
specifically, immigrants can be understood as the generalized out-group for ethnic
majority respondents: in line with the contact hypothesis we would assume that inter-
ethnic contact not only fosters positive out-group feelings of ethnic majority respondents
towards their ethnic minority classmates (i.e. individual members of the out-group) but
also towards immigrants more generally (i.e. the entire out-group). It is important to
distinguish between the two forms of out-groups, as one may assume that societal-level
conditions, including those rooted in distinct political traditions, have a stronger impact
on generalized out-group feelings than on the attitudes towards members of out-groups
with whom people are in direct contact. In a sense, therefore, using this generalized out-
group measure of tolerance makes the test of the contact perspective even more
demanding.

Descriptive statistics

Table 1 provides the descriptive statistics of all variables. If we compare the minority to
the majority group a remarkable consistent pattern emerges across the three countries. In
all countries minority students appear quite a lot more tolerant and more willing to

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