Heterogeneity in Cultural Threat and Social Trust

It is hard to negate that even in democratic societies an extensive disagreement within the mass public about vital principles can cause conflicts, in particular, if the disagreement concerns fundamental questions of identity. In Europe, questions of how to handle the floods of refugees and how to integrate non-European migrants are omnipresent, and the perception of whether immigrants threaten the receiving society’s culture seem to vary widely. The paper explores how heterogeneity with regard to the perception of cultural threat affects the social integration. To do so, using data drawn from the European Social Survey (ESS), fixed effects macro regressions are conducted to analyze whether the regional variance in cultural threat perception is associated with social trust. Focusing on Nuts2 regions, we find that regional variance seems to have a robust negative association with social trust, indicating that public opinion diversity has the potential to subvert social cohesion.