Intergroup Relations and the Foundations of Solidarity in Diverse Societies

What are the wellsprings of solidarity? What conditions nurture the willingness of individuals to support redistributive social programs that help the poor and the vulnerable? How far are individuals willing to extend and protect political rights and fight against inequality? This research program explores these questions in the context of the ethno-racial and ethno-national diversity that characterize many advanced industrialized democracies today. Anxiety about the impact of diversity on solidarity has been a recurring theme in both academic scholarship and public debates. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how individuals perceive the nature of group relations within their societies and when such perceptions can promote or erode a sense of inclusive community. Our guiding research question is to understand how attitudes toward others shape the social fabric in diverse societies and the obligations that we extend across lines of difference. Drawing on a mix of normative political theory, welfare state
scholarship, and political psychology, we build on past research that links discourses of deservingness to economic redistribution and argue that understanding solidarity in all its forms requires a deeper understanding of the content of intergroup attitudes across types of diversity and across country contexts. To do this, we propose an innovative, multimode approach that combines parallel cross-national survey experiments in Canada, the US, the UK and Denmark with lab experiments.