Immigration, integration and cooperation

Experimental evidence from a public goods game in Italy

Bibliographic Data

ID3615752
AuthorsJohanna Gereke (0000-0002-1058-9651, Mannheim Centre for European Social Research, corresponding author), Melissa Schaub (0000-0003-2057-7002, WZB Berlin Social Science Center), Max Schaub, Delia Baldassarri (0000-0002-9264-035X, New York University)
Year2022
Volume48
Issue15
Pages3761-3788
Publication date2022-11-18
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew Community (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0047-9586 • E-ISSN: 1469-9451
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1369183x.2021.1949269
OpenAlexW3179588794
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited60

Immigration has rapidly changed the demographic profile of most Western European societies, increasing their ethnic diversity. Some cross-disciplinary literature comparing homogeneous and diverse communities provides observational evidence of a link between high levels of ethnoracial diversity and lower levels of public goods provision. While these results are often interpreted as driven by context/interaction effects, whereby individuals lower their cooperativeness in response to the presence of non-coethnics, they could also be explained by composition effects – immigrants having different baseline levels of cooperativeness, and thereby lowering average cooperation rates. To disentangle these effects, we conducted a lab-in-the-field experiment with a sample of Italians and immigrants from Morocco and the Philippines residing in Milan. In our public goods experiment, participants were randomly assigned to either homogeneous or ethnically mixed groups. We find that Italians behave similarly in both homogeneous and heterogeneous groups, thus contradicting arguments about the negative effects of diversity on the native population, while there are both compositional and interactional effects when considering the behaviour of Moroccan and Filipino immigrants, respectively. Moreover, differences largely disappear when we consider only the behaviour of more socio-economically integrated immigrants, highlighting the need for a more processual understanding of cooperation in multiethnic communities

Cooperativeness · Demographic economics · Economics · Ethnic group · Geography · Homogeneous · Immigration · Political science · Population · Public good · Public goods game · Sociology · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies · Demography · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies · Psychology · Social Psychology

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