Trust, Democracy, and Multicultural Challenges by Patti Tamara Lenard

Author:Patti Tamara Lenard [Lenard, Patti Tamara]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Globalization, Democracy, Political Ideologies, Social Science, Political Science, Anthropology, Cultural
ISBN: 9780271052533
Google: xkLf9eNyPicC
Goodreads: 13698522
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Published: 2012-04-10T00:00:00+00:00

Diversity, Political Representation, and Exclusion

As we saw in chapter 2, political representation in democratic communities functions best when citizens believe their representatives have their best interests in mind, and therefore trust them to behave accordingly. As I described earlier in this chapter, conditions of ethnocultural diversity may cause some members of the community to believe that those who operate the systems that govern their lives do not have their best interests in mind. They may come to believe that only members of their own group are concerned to promote their welfare; they may become suspicious of the political interests and motives of those they perceive to be outsiders. These beliefs are the product of weakened trust relations and often motivate political activities that serve further to undermine trust. Under conditions of diversity, these weakened trust relations can press in multiple directions: members of the majority group may turn to parties that they believe represent the best interests of their constituency, and members of minority groups may believe that representatives from within the majority group are unwilling or unable consider their interests.

The emergence of xenophobic political parties and actors across Europe, as well as the adoption by mainstream political parties of policies that make immigration (and integration) more difficult, is one increasingly frequent response to perceived threats to the public culture.19 These parties and representatives claim to speak on behalf of the best interests of the community at large, in ways that serve ultimately to produce policies that exclude or discriminate against newcomers in pernicious ways. The British National Party is just one example among many of parties that have adopted an anti-immigrant attitude in the name of “us.” As one British National Party supporter explains, for example, the party is “just for the people, that’s all; English people,” and not for those who arrive on English shores to destroy what Great Britain is all about.20 The public expression of these attitudes serves to weaken trust relations across cultural and ethnic lines.21

This exclusionary attitude has, in part, motivated a series of policies recently adopted in Arizona to combat illegal migration into the state from Mexico; among other things they give police the right to ask for identification from any resident they have reasonable suspicion to believe may be living in the state illegally. Opponents of these policies argue that they are objectionable for multiple reasons including, especially, the negative effects they will have on legal migrants and Hispanic citizens in Arizona. The repeated demand of legal migrants and Hispanic citizens that they produce evidence of their right to be in Arizona only serves to signal to them that they are not welcome in their own country; the demand therefore foments distrust in legal migrants and Hispanic citizens in response to policies that are borne from an absence of trust in them.22 Attempts to ban, and the banning of, full facial coverings in a range of public spaces demonstrate the same dynamic; they are policies that emerge from an absence of trust,

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