Chapter 6. Ethnicity matters 125 practices. This line of reasoning is also substantiated by the results of chapter 4, which demonstrate that outgroup homogeneity does not drive member turnover. The constriction principle Instead, I found that in addition to a low ingroup size, the ethnic fractionalization of the outgroup leads to more member dropout. This finding adds to a longstanding debate about the relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and social cohesion ever since Putnam (2007) posited that ethnic heterogeneity by itself erodes social connectivity (e.g. see Koopmans et al., 2015; Van der Meer & Tolsma, 2014). In the past, the existence of such an inverse relationship has repeatedly been questioned and sometimes dismissed as dwarfed by, or an artefact of socio-economic deprivation (Gesthuizen et al., 2009; Letki, 2008; Morales, 2013). Additionally, Van der Meer and Tolsma (2014), made a valid point when asserting that if ethnic heterogeneity’s effect can be explained as merely an aggregated effect of homophily, it is not a true heterogeneity effect. More recently, however, a growing body of evidence has suggested that Putnam may have been right after all (Dinesen et al., 2020; Jennissen et al., 2018). This dissertation further contributes to these findings by demonstrating that ethnic heterogeneity, when operationalized as outgroup fractionalization and controlled for ingroup size, still has a substantial effect on such an important behavioural outcome as member dropout. A further important contribution of this dissertation to the literature is that it sheds more light on the importance of ethnic background for tie-formation’s less studied counterpart, tie-dissolution. As one of the only studies on this topic that focuses on voluntary associations, Wiertz (2016) has suggested that Dutch voluntary associations’ ethnic composition primarily matters for if and where citizens with particular ethnic backgrounds become a member, but once the initial hurdle of membership has been taken, it no longer plays a significant role. However, using more detailed and accurate data on ethnic background and membership, my research shows that this does not hold true for the Netherlands’ most popular voluntary association and that the interaction between the ethnic composition of an association and the ethnic background of standing members has important ramifications for membership dynamics. This finding aligns well with McPherson’s ecological model of affiliation which assumes that organizational competition over membership is a neverending phenomenon and suggests that compositional change is driven by both
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