The context of togetherness

It is argued that on the individual level of manifestation, in criteria like sentiments and beliefs (attitudes and orientations), social cohesion can be best assessed as an outcome of both contexts and individual-level factors. The individual orientations conducive to cohesion are imbedded and formed in this broader ecology. Factors pertaining to this context are defined, ranging from affluence and modernity, inequalities, quality of governance, diversity, culture, and values, to demography. The statistical tests are carried out using multilevel regression models, always including the overall score of the SCI and its three dimensions. The most important findings as relevant to salient discussions in the literature are: affluence of a society, research investments, levels of education, and organizational occupation that all contribute positively to orientations of cohesion. Socio-economic inequality increases the overall entropy of social cohesion and decreases orientations at the individual level. The quality of governance as measured by "voice and accountability" and "control of corruption" has a substantial positive impact on cohesion orientations. Not all post-materialist attitudes, as claimed in some current studies, are conducive to cohesion; universalism has the strongest positive impact and religiosity the strongest negative impact. Most importantly, results on migration and ethnic diversity uncover findings that challenge a dominantly held view, namely that ethno-cultural diversity (i.e. heterogeneity) is a threat to cohesion (e.g. Putnam). A variety of parameters such as the share of migrants, the number of incoming refugees in a given year, the share of ethnic minorities, and the historical fractionalization index are investigated and found to have no negative implication for cohesion whatsoever. The share of foreigners in a society is, in fact, found to have a beneficial impact on orientations of openness. Still, minority populations in many societies show a lower overall degree of social cohesion than majority populations. Results also show that discriminated persons score lower on the SCI on all three dimensions. It is suspected that such grave dissimilarities of cohesion orientations across groups constitute instances of latent conflict within societies, with the potential of eroding overall societal cohesion. This chapter focuses on the contextual predictors of individual orientations of social cohesion within the respective societies. It is