Hunkering down as disruption of community cohesion: Municipal-, neighbourhood- and individual-level effects

In this article Putnam’s claim, that persons in the US living in areas with high concentrations of ethnic minorities hunker down, is investigated in the Netherlands. Hunkering down is conceptualized and operationalized as: avoiding public spaces, refraining from social contacts and evaluating the neighbourhood unfavourably. Using multi-level modelling based on a representative sample of almost 60,000 persons, individual and contextual characteristics on three levels are linked to three dimensions of (lack of) community cohesion. We found more significant effects of contextual characteristics at the level of neighbourhoods than at the level of municipalities. We found that the concentration of ethnic minorities in the neighbourhood contributes to the explanation of these three dimensions of community cohesion, however, these effects are relatively minor. Moreover, we found that indicators of economic poverty in the neighbourhood similarly determine these dimensions of hunkering down. © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Hans Schmeets/ Rik Linssen , Department of Political Science, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, the Netherlands