Does ethnicity affect normal people in non-political times? : a study that looks at the impact of ethnicity on peoples willingness to contribute to the funding of public goods in an ethnic diversified society

Abstract

The intention with this study is to contribute to the field of research that looks at the impact of ethnic divergence in a country. More specifically, I investigate social cooperation in an ethnic diversified society by mainly analyzing how people contribute to the funding of public goods through an economic experiment. By doing this, I want to be able to answer if “ethnicity matter for normal people in non-political times?” In the analyses, I have tried to invoke a co-ethnic bias in behavior both by letting players play identified games, where I changed the ethnic composition of the other group members, and by use of priming, intended to make different social categories more salient. The results shows that I do not find that people contribute more to the funding of public goods in a homogenous co-ethnic setting than in a mixed ethnic setting or that people is significantly affected by the treatment primes. I do not find any evidence in this study that people have co-ethnic preferences and that there is a negative effect of ethnicity on peoples willingness to contribute to the funding of public goods. Somewhat surprisingly I find that people contributes less in all games when primed with national identity treatment prime.