Will We All Hunker Down? The Impact of Immigration and Diversity on Local Communities in Spain

This article engages with the scholarly debate on the supposed negative effect of immigration and diversity, and analyses its effect on two different forms of trust - community trust and generalized trust - in Spain. Our contribution is twofold. Firstly, with census section level data of representative samples of all the Spanish municipalities, we test the propositions that relate greater ethnic diversity to social trust. Secondly, we address the limitations intrinsic to the crude measurement of diversity of the Herfindahl index with a systematic consideration of multiple alternative indicators of immigration-related diversity. We find evidence of a negative effect of diversity on community trust but none on generalized trust. Hence, our findings lend some support to the recent scholarship that questions that increasing diversity has a ‘hunkering down’ effect.