The Correlates of Ethnicity: Why the Ethnic Majority Expects That Ethnic Minorities Contribute Less to the Collective [2025]
British Journal of Political Science
Members of the ethnic majority tend to view immigrants and ethnic minorities as less willing to contribute to the collective. Why is this the case? I argue that in Europe, ethnic attributes signal citizens’ socioeconomic resources, cultural values, and norm compliance and that these factors, rather than ethnic identities per se, explain why citizens are expected (not) to contribute. Through a novel conjoint experimental design in Denmark that manipulated respondents’ access to information about these different mechanisms, the argument finds support. First, in information-sparse environments, ethnic majority members expect that minority members contribute substantially less to the provision of public goods than majority members. Second, this ethnic bias is reduced by each of the three mechanisms and explained away once information on all three is available. This demonstrates that negative expectations toward minorities operate through multiple, complementary channels and that stereotype-countering information can reduce the majority-minority expectation gap.
Link to the article here
Does Ethnic Similarity Increase Well-Being? [2025]
American Journal of Sociology
(with Thorbjørn Sejr Guul and Kristian Kriegbaum Jensen)
How do people react to ethnic (dis)similarity? Whereas prior studies on ethnic diversity and intergroup contact often focus on interpersonal outcomes such as prejudice and trust, we turn to an essential intrapersonal phenomenon: well-being. We argue that ethnic similarity in the local setting increases well-being for both the ethnic majority and ethnic minority but for theoretically different reasons. To test our argument, we combine Danish registry data with panel survey data from all fourth to ninth grade students in Danish public schools (N approx. 700,000). Across different identification strategies, we find that higher levels of classroom ethnic similarity increase well-being. Further, whereas being in a dominant position promotes well-being among the ethnic majority, simply having someone increases minority students’ well-being. This points to the complex nature of intergroup integration but also suggest that local settings with some minority members may foster minorities’ well-being without substantively reducing the well-being of the ethnic majority.
Link to the article here
Childhood Exposure to Co-Ethnics Increases Naturalization [2024]
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
In Europe, the tendency among immigrants and descendants to seek out and interact with other co-ethnics has raised concern for their integration as it can reduce contact with the ethnic majority. Though policy makers implement large-scale integration programs to counteract these trends, it remains empirically and theoretically ambiguous whether exposure to co-ethnic peers impedes integration, and causal evidence is more limited for the growing population of migrant children. In this article, I use high quality Danish administrative panel data over 28 years to investigate whether the ethnic composition experienced in childhood among immigrants and descendants with a non-EU background affects a core behavioral indicator of integration: naturalization. To isolate the causal effect of the childhood ethnic composition, I use the quasi-experimental assignment of siblings into different school grades in the same school. I find that being exposed to co-ethnic peers in the school grade increases the probability of naturalizing later in life. The main explanation is that exposure to some co-ethnic peers improves academic skills which are positively correlated with citizenship acquisition. These findings demonstrate the causal importance of non-EU migrant children’s social environment for their later integration into the national community showing that the modest presence of co-ethnic peers can be a precondition for, not a barrier to, integration.
Link to the article here
Citizens tend to be more solidary with ethnic ingroup members than ethnic outgroup members. As a result, increasing ethnic diversity is often found to impede solidarity. Although this perspective is well established, I present an alternative argument: Under circumstances that foster intergroup contact, increasing diversity promotes, rather than impedes, intergroup solidarity. To test this argument, I combine a survey experiment fielded among Danish students with quasi-random observational data on students' classroom ethnic composition. I find that ethnic-majority adolescents are on average more willing to support ethnic-majority recipients than immigrant and ethnic-minority recipients. Yet, although increasing diversity does not moderate the majority-minority solidarity gap, increasing diversity diminishes and erases the majority-immigrant solidarity gap. As further shown, one explanation is that immigrants in particular face strong stereotypes of being lazy and that ethnic diversity reduces this specific stereotype. These findings suggest that immigration and solidarity need not be incompatible. Under certain circumstances, ethnic diversity at worst leaves intergroup solidarity unaltered and at best improves such solidarity.
Link to the article here
Assessments of citizenship criteria: are immigrants more liberal? [2020]
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
(with Arnfinn H. Midtbøen, Grete Brochmann, Marta B. Erdal, Kristian K. Jensen, Pieter Bevelander, Per Mouritsen, and Emily C. Bech)
The literature on citizenship policies is flourishing, yet we know little of which naturalisation requirements majorities and minorities find reasonable, and how they view existing citizenship regimes. Drawing on original survey data with young adults in Norway (N =3535), comprising immigrants and descendants with origins from Iraq, Pakistan, Poland, Somalia and Turkey, as well as a non- immigrant majority group, this article examines whether perceptions of ideal citizenship criteria and assessments of Norway’s current rules differ between groups. In terms of ideal citizenship criteria, we find a striking similarity across groups when looking at six different dimensions of citizenship policy. When merged into an index and estimated in a multivariate regression model, we find that both immigrants and descendants are significantly more liberal than natives are, yet the differences are small. When assessing the semi-strict citizenship regime in Norway, we find that immigrants are significantly more positive towards the current rules than natives. The results lend little support to recent work on ‘strategic’ and ‘instrumental’ citizenship and point instead to a close to universal conception of the terms of membership acquisition in Norway. This suggests that states may operate with moderate integration requirements while maintaining the legitimacy of the citizenship institution.
Link to the article here