Working Together?

The ever-expanding literature on the effect of contextual ethnic diversity on generalized social trust has overwhelmingly focused on the neighborhood. In doing so, the literature has largely overlooked other social contexts in which individuals may be exposed to people of other ethnic background on a regular basis. In this paper we focus on one of these neglected contexts, namely the workplace. In the workplace individuals are consistently and, compared to many other social settings, less voluntarily exposed to people of different ethnic background, which makes it a highly fruitful setting for examining various theories of the role of contextual exposure to ethnic diversity on social trust. We analyze the effect of workplace diversity on trust by merging the five first rounds of the European Social Survey to elaborate register-data on workplaces (specific branches) in Denmark. Consistent with theories positing negative effects of interethnic exposure, we find a negative effect of ethnic diversity in the workplace on trust. Furthermore, this effect holds up in a number of robustness checks.