Multiculturalism and Welfare

...3. See the full version of this paper posted as Working Paper #33, School of Policy Studies, Queen's University (www.queensu.ca/sps/WorkingPapers/) . Due to a lack of data on social redistribution, Greece, New Zealand, and Portugal are excluded from the welfare state measures...

...Existing studies tell 62 n DISSENT I Fall 2003 us nothing about whether the adoption of multiculturalist policies increases the negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social redistribution, as the critics suggest, or mitigates it, as the defenders reply...

...Moreover, the three specific critiques of multiculturalism are themselves open to criticism...

...Rather they argue that even countries that had developed robust welfare states and then adopted strong multiculturalist policies are likely to have witnessed greater decline in levels of redistribution as compared to countries with weak versions of the same policies...

...Among countries that legally admit immigrants as future citizens, the main exception to the trend is France, which retains an assimilationist conception of republican citizenship...

...These are not the sorts of policies that our critics view as a threat to the welfare state...

...Is there...

...At the same time, however, they largely ignored huge budget cuts to the state educational system that were making it more difficult for minority students even to get to UCLA...

...We will refer to all policies of this kind as "multiculturalist policies...

...A second version of the misdiagnosis argument claims that the focus on ethnic or racial difference has displaced attention to class and thereby made pan-ethnic alliances on class issues less likely...

...Barry, for example, argues that "one of the most serious mistakes by multiculturalists is to misunderstand the plight of American blacks...

...Narrowing our sample to these four countries should, therefore, provide a good test of his theory...

...According to this line of argument, multiculturalist policies weaken pro-welfare coalitions by diverting time, energy, and money from economic "redistribution" to cultural "recognition...

...Demographic and cost pressures in major programs such as pensions and health care have offset retrenchment on this measure...

...He quotes Kwame Anthony Appiah's observation that it is not black culture that the racist disdains, but blacks...

...5) constitutional or parliamentary affirmation of multinationalism...

...At the beginning of the twentieth century, only Switzerland and Canada had adopted this combination of territorial autonomy and official language status for substate national groups...

...Moreover, where the group has a distinct language, this language is typically recognized as an official state language, at least within its federal subunit, and sometimes throughout the country as a whole...

...In particular, the United States is a complex case...

...It is true that countries in the "modest" category did not perform as well, a result driven primarily by experience in the United Kingdom and the United States...

...Because the complaint is an empirical one, our method is also an empirical one...

...As he puts it, "much of the popular energy and commitment it would have taken to fight for the preservation—let alone the improvement—of public education was channeled into acrimony amongst potential allies...

...2) official language status, either in the region or nationally...

...The assumption seems to be, again, that people's sense of justice is zero-sum: enhanced sensitivity to one form of injustice inevitably entails reduced sensitivity to other forms...

...In the past, ethnic diversity was often seen as a threat to political stability, and minorities were subject to a range of policies intended to assimilate or marginalize them...

...and the redistributive impact of government taxes and transfers (as calculated by the Luxembourg Income Study...

...Let's start with immigrant groups...

...These countries often contain large numbers of "foreigners," in the form of illegal economic migrants, asylum seekers, or "guest-workers," but these people are not admitted as part of an immigration policy...

...rule...

...This result should not be surprising...

...Conclusions flowing from cross-national analyses do not necessarily apply with equal force to each individual country...

...Second, we test whether the "strong" countries have fared worse, in terms of various welfare state measures, than the "modest" or "weak" countries...

...66 n DISSENT / Fall 2003...

...The evidence presented in this article suggests that debates over the appropriateness of multiculturalist policies as one response to this diversity should not be pre-empted by unsupported fears about their impact on the welfare state...

...Nevertheless, the preliminary evidence marshaled here is clear: the case advanced by the critics of multiculturalist policies is not supported...

...The growing ethnic diversity of Western societies has generated pressures for the construction of new and more inclusive forms of citizenship and national identity...

...4) the inclusion of ethnic representation/ sensitivity in the mandate of public media or in the criteria for media licensing...

...IF A COUNTRY had most or all of these policies in place for much of the period between 1980 and the late 1990s, we have categorized it as "strong...

...So the struggle for multiculturalist policies may actually have helped to reinvigorate the left...

...In these situations, multiculturalist policies cannot be the original cause of distrust or hostility...

...There is no conflict of visions between black and white cultures that is the source of racial discord...

...Multiculturalism erodes solidarity because it emphasizes differences between citizens, rather than commonalities...

...Our second measure, which compares inequality in market incomes and inequality in disposable incomes after taxes and transfers, is the most direct indicator of the redistributive role of the state...

...Dominant groups felt threatened by minorities, superior to them, or indifferent to their well-being, and so attempted to assimilate, exclude, exploit, or disempower them...

...Their claim is not about differences in absolute levels, but about changes in levels over time...

...What are the specific policies that reflect this shift in approach...

...There are in fact different dimensions on which ethnic groups can face injustice—including race, class, and culture— and groups may fare better on some dimensions than others...

...Today, however, all the countries mentioned above have accepted the principle that these substate national identities will endure into the indefinite future and that the sense of nationhood must be accommodated in some way...

...These changes have occurred, to varying degrees, in most of the traditional countries of immigration...

...It is difficult to answer this question in the abstract, because different groups seek different policies...

...Testing the Complaint How then can we test the critique...

...Thus, our definition of multiculturalist policies focuses on policies that go beyond the non-discriminatory enforcement of the traditional civil and political rights of citizenship for the individual members of ethnic groups...

...Perhaps the real challenge is to get people to believe that their activity can make a difference on any issue worth fighting about and then to involve themselves in politics...

...This argument comes in two different versions...

...Ranking Change in Change in Social Spending Redistribuas % of GDP Live Impact Canada +35.3 +23.0 Australia +57.5 +7.5 United Kingdom +35.7 -9.1 United States +11.2 -3.8 I N SHORT, there is no evidence of a consistent relationship between the adoption of multiculturalist policies and the erosion of the welfare state...

...The critics themselves do not cite any empirical studies that show a correlation or causal connection between the adoption of multiculturalist policies and the erosion of the welfare state...

...But overall, there is no evidence of the systematic relationship that critics of multiculturalism have predicted...

...Critics worry that such policies erode the interpersonal trust, social solidarity, and political coalitions that sustain strong redistributive policies...

...KEITH BANTING is professor of policy studies and WILL KYMLICKA is a professor of philosophy at Queens University in Kingston, Canada...

...1. Brian Barry Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism (Polity, 2001...

...The paradigm case of this, according to both Barry and Gitlin, is the misdiagnosis of the situation of African Americans, for whom issues of race and class are much more salient than cultural recognition...

...The misdiagnosis argument, then, claims that multiculturalist policies lead people to minimize the salience of the race and class dimensions of inequality and to exaggerate the salience of the cultural dimension...

...In reality, however, these "culturalist" solutions will be of little or no benefit, because the real problems lie elsewhere...

...Yet, as the critics themselves acknowledge, the main reason why issues of redistribution have been occluded is that most people, including most leftists, have become fatalistic about economic inequalities...

...But maybe political mobilization is not zerosum...

...The list includes the adoption of autonomy for the Swedish-speaking Aland Islands in Finland 64 n DISSENT / Fall 2003 after the First World War, autonomy for South Tyrol and Puerto Rico after the Second World War, federal autonomy for Catalonia and the Basque Country in Spain in the 1970s, for Flanders and Wallonia in Belgium in the 1980s, and most recently for Scotland and Wales in the United Kingdom in the 1990s...

...The word "multicultural" is sometimes used in a purely demographic sense to refer to high levels of ethnic or racial diversity...

...Countries that are more racially homogenous, or that admit few immigrants, are said to have an easier time constructing a welfare state...

...When critics argue that there is a correlation between multiculturalist policies and the erosion of the welfare state, they are not arguing that only weak welfare states adopt these policies...

...The first is a philosophical critique, which argues that they are inherently inconsistent with basic liberaldemocratic principles...

...So our immigrant categorization includes a fourth category: DISSENT / Fall 2003 n 63 MULT ICULTURALI ST POLICIES Weak/Modest: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Norway Sizeable national minorities: The second trend concerns the treatment of substate, minority nationalisms, such as the Quebecois in Canada, the Scots and Welsh in Britain, the Catalans and Basques in Spain, the Flemish in Belgium, the German-speaking minority in South Tyrol in Italy, and the people of Puerto Rico under U.S...

...It is a different story in those countries that do not legally admit immigrants, such as most countries of northern Europe...

...We therefore have to find a way of illuminating this issue more directly...

...So the question naturally arises whether there is any causal connection between the enactments and the retrenchments...

...Citizens have historically supported assistance for their disadvantaged co-citizens because they viewed these co-citizens as "one of us," bound together by a common identity and sense of belonging...

...For some groups, issues of class are less significant than cultural recognition...

...Our analysis has obvious limits, and we hope it stimulates further research...

...The answer is clearly no...

...1. The crowding out effect...

...28-33...

...6) acceptance of international personality (allowing the substate region to sit on international bodies, for example, or sign treaties, or have their own Olympic team...

...Hence our test, too, focuses on the size and direction of changes in social spending and redistribution between the early 1980s and the late 1990s...

...SINCE THE LATE 1960s, however, we have seen two dramatic changes: first, the adoption of race-neutral admissions criteria, so that immigrants to these countries are increasingly from non-European (and often non-Christian) societies...

...It is an indisputable fact that the enactment of multiculturalist policies has coincided with a period of retrenchment in many social programs...

...To identify these policies more precisely, it is useful to distinguish different categories of ethnic groups and to see how Western states have accommodated them (or not...

...This was reflected in laws that barred Africans and Asians from entering these countries for much of the twentieth century (or from becoming citizens...

...Let's turn now to national minorities...

...So far, we have been looking across the broad sweep of the Western democracies...

...Ranking Change in Change in Social Spending Redistribuas % of GDP tive Impact Strong +38.1 +12.2 Modest +27.9 -5.4 Weak +36.5 +11.4 Once again, there is virtually no evidence of a connection between the adoption of multiculturalist policies and changes in the welfare state...

...The paradigm case, historically, is Marxism, which was ideologically committed to the view that class inequality was the only "real" inequality, and that sexism and racism were epiphenomenal and would disappear with the abolition of classes...

...Have countries that have gone furthest in accommodating minority nationalisms had a harder time sustaining their social policies than countries that resisted acknowledging their "nations within...

...Multiculturalist Policies and the Welfare State For evidence of changes in the strength of the welfare state, we rely on two measures: social spending as a proportion of gross domestic product (as reported by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development...

...It is important to emphasize that our focus is on multiculturalist policies...

...Among the Western democracies with a sizeable national minority, the main exception to this trend is France, although it too is negotiating autonomy for its main substate nationalist group in Corsica...

...Moreover, as Barry writes, this "despair at the prospects of getting broadbased egalitarian policies adopted" pre-dated the rise of multiculturalism rather than being caused by it...

...This claim is central to recent critiques of multiculturalism by Brian Barry, Todd Gitlin, Alan Wolfe, Jyette Klausen, and others.' Our goal is to test this second critique...

...Multiculturalism is said to challenge this overarching identity by telling citizens that what divides them into separate ethnocultural groups is more important than what they have in common...

...MULTI CULTURALIST POLICIES Immigrants: In the past, traditional countries of immigration (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States) encouraged immigrants to assimilate to the pre-existing society, with the hope that over time they would become indistinguishable from native-born citizens in their speech, dress, recreation, and way of life generally...

...Although Barry does not provide a systematic ranking of countries, he does say that Canada has "gone farther down the [multiculturalist] path" than the United Kingdom and the United States, and he implies that Australia is closer to Canada in this regard...

...No amount of knowledge of the architectural achievements of Nubia or Kush guarantees respect for AfricanAmericans . . . culture is not the problem, and it is not the solution...

...3. The misdiagnosis effect...

...This accommodation has typically taken the form of "multi-nation federalism": that is, creating a federal or quasi-federal subunit in which the minority group forms a local majority and so can exercise meaningful forms of self-government...

...and second, the adoption of a more multicultural conception of integration, one that expects that many immigrants will visibly and proudly express their ethnic identity, and that accepts an obligation on the part of public institutions (police, schools, media, museums, and so on) to accommodate these identities...

...This is not our main focus, nor is it the main focus of critics of multiculturalism...

...Today, many Western democracies have adopted a more accommodating approach...

...Let's take them one by one...

...Since the mid-1990s, however, this philosophical debate has been supplemented by a second argument: namely, that they make it more difficult to sustain a robust welfare state...

...They go beyond the protection of the basic civil and political rights guaranteed to all individuals in a liberal-democratic state to extend some level of public recognition to ethnocultural minorities and some level of support for the maintenance of their identities and practices...

...It should he clear that this debate cannot be resolved by more armchair theorizing or by simply trading anecdotes...

...7) the funding of ethnic organizations or activities...

...If we compare these four countries, the stronger pair has done better than the more modest pair, especially on redistribution, which is Barry's main concern...

...Historically, however, Western states often adopted exclusionary or assimilationist policies precisely because there was so little trust or solidarity across ethnic and racial lines...

...Similarly, although there is no nationwide multiculturalist policy in Britain, many of the same ideas are pursued through a race relations framework...

...social policy was well established before the enactment of any multiculturalist policies, and it seems inappropriate to lay the blame for fragmenting the welfare coalition solely or primarily at their feet...

...2000), pp...

...It assumes that prior to the adoption of multiculturalist policies there were high levels of inter-ethnic solidarity, which are now being eaten away...

...However, we would advance two qualifications...

...The United States does not have a federal policy of multiculturalism, but if we look at lower levels of government, such as states or cities, we often find a broad range of multiculturalist policies in school curricula or in police and hospital programs...

...This is not surprising because, so far as we can tell, there are no empirical studies on this topic for critics (or defenders) to cite...

...This, in turn, led minorities to distrust dominant groups...

...First, the racialization of U.S...

...But the argument assumes there is a fixed amount of time, energy, and money that will be spent on political mobilization, such that any effort on one issue necessarily detracts from another...

...Alan Wolfe and Jyette Klausen, "Other Peoples," Prospect (Dec...

...Some of these countries have adopted aspects of a multicultural approach (Sweden and the Netherlands...

...Because this is the concern of critics, we will limit our analysis to such policies...

...What are the specific policies that are indicative of this shift...

...Unfortunately, there is little readily available evidence...

...But what does it mean for public policies to provide "recognition," "support," or "accommodation" to ethnic groups...

...Since then, however, most Western democracies that contain sizeable nationalist movements have moved in the same direction...

...According to Wolfe and Klausen, for example, in the British welfare state of the 1940s and 1950s, "people believed they were paying the social welfare part of their taxes to people who were like themselves...

...On this view, people who are keenly sensitive to racism or sexism, for example, are inevitably less sensiDISSENT / Fall 2003 n 6 MULTICULTURALIST POLICIES tive to class inequality or cultural accommodation, and vice versa...

...Students of social policy established long ago that differences in social spending across welfare democracies are related to such factors as economic growth, the openness of the economy, unemployment levels, the age structure of the population, the religious complexion of the country, the strength of organized labor, the ideological position of historically dominant political parties, and the structure of political institutions...

...A third argument suggests that multiculturalist policies lead people to misdiagnose the problems that minorities face...

...It is important for people to consider the claims of various groups as they are raised and with an open mind...

...Using crossnational data, we aim to test whether countries adopting robust multiculturalist policies have fared worse on various measures of welfare provision than those countries that have fewer or no such policies...

...Our attempt involves two steps...

...This channeling is captured nicely in one of his chapter titles: "Marching on the English Department while the Right Took the White House...

...In the past, Western countries attempted to suppress these forms of substate nationalism by restricting minority language rights, abolishing traditional forms of regional selfgovernment, and encouraging members of the dominant group to settle in the minority group's traditional territory so that the minority will be outnumbered even in its home...

...Barry worries that this economic fatalism will become a "self-fulfilling prophecy" if people's energies are "dissipated" in struggles over multiculturalist policies...

...What is critical for our purposes, however, is that on both the spending and redistribution measures, countries with strong multiculturalist policies have fared better than countries with weak policies...

...experience to other contexts...

...They are only concerned with policies that go beyond the protection of traditional individual rights to provide some additional form of public recognition to ethnic groups...

...These studies are important, but are not directly related to our debate...

...Have countries that have gone furthest in accommodating immigrant ethnicity had more difficulty sustaining their welfare states than countries that have resisted accommodation...

...6) the allowance of dual citizenship...

...On its own, however, this measure says little about the extent of redistribution effected by these expenditures...

...Our focus is on change in social spending and redistribution from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, not on differences in the overall level of spending and redistribution...

...2) the existence of a government ministry or advisory board to consult with ethnic communities...

...This is reflected in the widespread adoption of multiculturalist policies for immigrant groups, the acceptance of territorial autonomy and language rights for national minorities, and the recognition of land claims and self-government rights for indigenous peoples...

...Perhaps...

...2. The UK is categorized as modest because the new assemblies for Scotland and Wales were not in place until the end of our period...

...Any groups that were seen as incapable of this sort of cultural assimilation were prohibited from emigrating in the first place or from becoming citizens...

...In short, none of the arguments for the alleged harmful impact of multiculturalist policies on the welfare state is self-evident...

...For example, some German politicians have invoked multiculturalist rhetoric to eliminate legal provisions that made it difficult for ethnic Turks to become citizens and to extend the scope of antidiscrimination laws to cover Turkish immigrants...

...9) affirmative action for disadvantaged immigrant groups...

...We consider the following six as emblematic of a multicultural approach to substate national groups: (1) federal or quasi-federal territorial autonomy...

...For example, Jews in North America, or Hong Kong immigrants, have higher than average levels of income and education, yet have faced criticism or disdain for their religious and cultural practices, stereotyping in the media, and greater vulnerability to violence...

...Certainly, we need to avoid these sorts of dogmatic presumptions...

...Here are the categories and countries: Strong: Australia, Canada, New Zealand Modest: Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, United States Weak: Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Spain, Switzerland We were not able to categorize with confidence several other countries in our sample that have sizeable immigrant populations, although we know that they all fall into either the "modest" or "weak" category...

...Indeed, by adopting them, the state is trying to encourage dominant groups not to fear or despise minorities, and minorities to trust the larger society, thereby helping to strengthen the solidarity needed for a strong welfare state...

...After all, the restructuring of the welfare state occurred throughout the Western democracies, affecting countries that strongly resist multiculturalist policies, such as France, as well as countries, such as Canada, that have favored them...

...In fact, their real need is for improved access to decent housing, education, and gainful employment— a need they share with the disadvantaged members of the larger society or other ethnic groups, which can only be met through a pan-ethnic class alliance...

...Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars (Metropolitan, 1995...

...Race has played a corrosive role in the politics of American social policy, and it is not surprising that many of the examples advanced by the critics come from American experience...

...Second, it is important not to generalize from the U.S...

...In Canada and Australia, the shift was formally marked by the declaration of a multicultural policy by the central government...

...The Case Against Multiculturalist Policies We begin by summarizing the three chief arguments advanced by these critics...

...Does multiculturalism discourage this open-minded approach to the salience of different forms of inequality...

...8) the funding of bilingual education or mother-tongue instruction...

...But in general, the trend is more pronounced in traditional countries of immigration...

...If, as critics fear, the adoption of multiculturalist policies has powerful crowding out, corroding, or misdiagnosis MULTICULTURALIST POLICIES effects, there should be a demonstrable linkage between the strength of multiculturalist policies and the weakening of the welfare state...

...Once they have this sense of political efficacy and are politically involved, they are likely to be active across a range of issues...

...The adoption of these policies has been controversial, for two reasons...

...He describes how left-wing students at the UniverDISSENT / Fall 2003 n 59 MULTICULTURALIST POLICIES sity of California-Los Angeles fought for a more "inclusive" educational environment, demanding greater representation of minorities in the faculty and curricula...

...It encourages the view that the problems are rooted primarily in cultural "misrecognition," and that the solution lies in greater state recognition of ethnic identities 6o n DISSENT / Fall 2003 and cultural practices...

...Gitlin gives an example of this...

...Several studies have explored the impact of ethnolinguistic or racial diversity per se on economic and social outcomes...

...For the purposes of this article, we will focus on the two most common types of ethnic groups: immigrants and national minorities...

...But the abandonment of the "long process of national homogenization" has led to growing "tax resistance"— for "if the ties that bind you to increasingly diverse fellow citizens are loosened, you are likely to be less inclined to share your resources with them...

...If it only adopted one or two, we have categorized it as "weak...

...In comparison with such core structural factors, it would be surprising if multiculturalist policies proved to be a powerful factor...

...3) guarantees of representation in the central government or on constitutional courts...

...Some people believe that ethnic diversity as such makes it more difficult to build or sustain a robust welfare state, whether or not the state actively accommodates this diversity...

...Finally, consider the misdiagnosis argument, which argues that multiculturalism blinds people to the salience of noncultural factors in explaining group disadvantage...

...But critics acknowledge that the relative salience of these factors differs across minority groups...

...These are the categories and countries: Strong: Belgium, Canada, Finland, Spain, Switzerland Modest: Italy, United Kingdom,' United States (with respect to Puerto Rico) Weak: France, Greece These categorizations are obviously open to refinement...

...AT FIRST GLANCE, these three critiques seem to have some plausibility...

...3) the adoption of multiculturalism in school curricula...

...As a result, perhaps the only country that remains strongly opposed to the official recognition of substate nationalism is Greece, where the once-sizeable Macedonian minority has now been swamped in its traditional homeland...

...The argument that multiculturalism corrodes inter-ethnic solidarity is also debatable...

...The multiculturalist approach encourages people to think that what low-income Pakistani immigrants in Britain need most is to have their distinctive history, religion, or dress given greater public status...

...4) public funding of minority language universities/schools/media...

...if only one or two, as "weak," and if in-between as "modest...

...First, we clarify what exactly we mean by multiculturalist policies and categorize Western democracies as "strong," "modest," or "weak" in their enactment of such policies...

...We take the following nine policies as the most common: (1) constitutional or parliamentary affirmation of multiculturalism at the central and/or regional and municipal levels...

...On this view, the real problem is economic marginalization, not cultural misrecognition, and the solution is to improve people's standing in the labor market, through better access to jobs, education and training, and so on...

...Undoubtedly there are circumstances where a fixation on one form of injustice can blind people to other forms...

...In Barry's book, for example, almost all the examples are drawn from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States...

...We need to look more closely at the evidence...

...In fact, the results are just the opposite...

...But we think they represent a reasonable starting point...

...They focus on ethnic diversity as a demographic phenomenon and are silent on the implications of our response to such diversity...

...Why would they have this effect...

...In all of these cases, we find a sizeable group (at least a hundred thousand people), regionally concentrated, that conceives of itself as a nation within a larger state, and mobilizes behind nationalist political parties to achieve recognition of its nationhood, either in the form of an independent state or through territorial autonomy within the larger state...

...THE CLAIM THAT multiculturalist policies "crowd out" welfare issues rests on the assumption that there would have been a sizeable coalition of politically engaged citizens willing to act to defend the welfare state, were they not distracted by cultural issues...

...If it falls in between, we have categorized it as "modest...

...There may be individual cases in which there is a tension between multiculturalism and the welfare state, and further research is needed to explore such cases...

...In some countries, the rhetoric of multiculturalism is advanced to defend such nondiscriminatory protection of the common rights of citizenship...

...We provide the details on the data and the measures elsewhere,' but for our purposes here, it is sufficient to compare the averages for groups of countries: Ranking Change in Change in Social Spending Redistribuas % of GDP tive Impact Strong +46.4 +15.3 Modest +10.4 -3.1 Weak +39.4 +10.9 Weak/Modest +25.7 +6.0 Some readers may be surprised that, despite decades of cuts in many countries, social expenditures have continued to rise as a proportion of GDP...

...Each of these measures taps a different dimension of the social role of the state...

...2. The corroding effect...

...Social spending as a proportion of GDP measures how much of the nation's resources are directed by government to social purposes...

...If a country had most or all of these policies in place during the 1980s and 1990s, we have categorized it as "strong...

...The first claims that the focus on cultural difference has displaced attention to race and ignored the distinctive problems facing groups such as African Americans...

...But there are good reasons for doubting this MULTICULTURALIST POLICIES connection...

...In DISSENT /Fall 2003 • 6 5 MULTICULTURALIST POLICIES fairness, it must be said that most critics are focused on a narrower set of countries, especially the "Anglo" countries...

...It is not the level of ethnic/racial diversity they are worried about, but rather government policies that officially recognize and accommodate this diversity...

...A society is "multicultural" in this sense if it contains sizeable ethnic or racial minorities, regardless of how the state responds to this diversity...

...Scholars in several fields—development economists, experimental economists, students of social policy in the United States, analysts of immigration and the rise of radical right parties in Europe—have argued that the welfare state may be more difficult to sustain in countries with high levels of ethnic and racial diversity...

...If his argument is correct, we should expect Canada and Australia to have fared worse on welfare state measures than the United Kingdom and the United States...

...5) exemptions from dress codes, Sundayclosing legislation, and so on (either by statute or by court decision...

...Indeed, social spending grew slightly faster and redistribution increased slightly more in "strong" than in "weak" countries...

...Another line of argument suggests that multiculturalist policies undermine the welfare state by eroding trust and solidarity among citizens, and hence weakening popular support for redistribution...

...One could argue that it has precisely the opposite effect: to supplement and improve our conceptual tools for understanding the full range of injustices faced by different groups in our society...

...It is not clear that the presence or absence of these policies was an important factor in whether or how the welfare state was restructured...

...This is just one example, they argue, of a more general tendency...

...People who would otherwise be actively involved in fighting to enhance economic redistribution, or at least to protect the welfare state from right-wing retrenchment, are instead spending their time arguing about multiculturalism...