explanatory power either. The varying effect of diversity on ethnic tolerance across the
three countries thus remains a mystery.
The results for participation also present a remarkable pattern of cross-country
variation (see bottom half of Table 3; Model III was omitted because the theory does not
make specific claims about the ethnic majority). This time it is only in Sweden that
heterogeneity shows a distinct link to the outcome of interest: while heterogeneity is
unrelated to participation in Germany and England, even in Model I, it shows a positive
and significant relation in Sweden in Models I and II. Ethnic proportion shows an even
stronger relationship in Sweden with a coefficient more than three times as large as its
standard error (see footnote in Table 3). In other words, taking into account all controls at
the individual and classroom level, students in Sweden express a greater willingness to
participate later in life, the more diverse their classrooms are. Evidently, the
aforementioned causal mechanisms proposed by Mutz - that of conflict avoidance in
diverse micro-level settings dampening participation - and Campbell - homogenous
settings being conducive to participation because they enable strong shared norms of
civic engagement to develop - do not apply in the Swedish case. The Swedish result,
moreover, is in complete contrast to Campbell’s (2007) finding on the effect of classroom
racial composition on voting intentions among American students. Using the same Cived
data he found that the larger the proportion of white students is (i.e. the more
homogenous the class) the higher will be the stated intention to vote, controlling for a
range of individual and contextual level variables including classroom climate. The
unique results for Sweden, by comparison to both the United States and the two other
countries of this study, only reinforce the impression that country-specific factors prevent
diversity from showing a uniform effect across western immigration countries.
Conclusion
The findings lead me to formulate two broad conclusions. First, advocates of
desegregation will be pleased to hear that on balance I found more support for the contact
than for the conflict perspective. Ethnic majority students in Germany and Sweden turned
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