participate than majority students. As the ethnic tolerance measure reflects attitudes on
immigrants it is not surprising to find minority respondents showing higher levels of
tolerance. These higher levels are likely to be connected to an awareness among minority
students that they are themselves (descendents of) migrants and are seen as such by the
dominant group. They may in other words have identified with immigrants. Having
restrictive opinions on immigrants as a minority student would thus entail agreeing to be
placed in a subordinate position with respect to the ethnic majority, which,
understandably, few minority students would find appealing. Thus, as noted above,
‘immigrants’ are likely to be the in-group for ethnic minority students while they clearly
constitute the out-group for the native majority. I further note that the two outcome
measures are strikingly uncorrelated to one another in all three countries (England r
= .059; Germany r = .055; Sweden r = .026). This confirms the observation of the
aforementioned studies that civic attitudes do not form a coherent set of dispositions.
Consequently, I will analyze the outcomes separately.
Table 1 about here
With regard to the independent variables the cross-country pattern is also fairly uniform.
In all three countries minority students have a lower score on civic competence, are from
more modest social backgrounds, and are enrolled in lower status classes than majority
students. Nonetheless, the difference between the minority and majority varies between
the countries. In England minority students have almost the same score on civic
competence as majority students, while in Sweden minority students lag on average as
much as 14 points behind majority students. This undoubtedly reflects the better
command of the dominant language by the minority groups in England in comparison to
their Swedish and German counterparts. Also on social background and class status the
differences between minority and majority students are smaller in England.
With mean values close to zero, the three diversity measures are all skewed
towards the homogenous ethnic majority end in the three countries. Because there are few
classrooms where one single ethnic minority makes up the majority, heterogeneity and
ethnic proportion are unlikely to diverge strongly. Indeed, the two measures are strongly
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