The impact of neighbourhood and municipality characteristics on social cohesion in the Netherlands

Up till now, a systematic test of the impact of theoretically relevant locality characteristics on social cohesion has been lacking in Europe. In this paper, we investigated the impact of a wide array of characteristics of Dutch neighbourhoods and municipalities on contact frequency with one’s neighbours, tolerance to neighbours from a different race, generalized social trust and volunteering. Based on the homophily proposition, we expected that ethnic and economic heterogeneity in Dutch localities negatively affect these indicators of social cohesion. We also expected that poor localities, lo... Mehr ...