The relationship between political and ethnic identity among UK ethnic minority and majority populations

Abstract

The rise across Europe of political parties espousing an ethnic conception of the nation, explicitly opposed to immigrants and minorities, has brought into stark relief the politics of identity. Exploiting multiple identity questions in a large, nationally representative UK survey, this paper investigates the drivers of ethnic and political identity and the extent to which they are similar. It does so for both the ethnic majority and ethnic minorities. Locating our analysis within social identity theory, we consider the role of observed characteristics, including party affiliation, the experience of harassment, and political context in shaping ethnic and political identities. We also show that there are unobserved factors jointly implicated in individuals' political and ethnic identities, which we interpret as providing suggestive evidence of more general political mobilisation of ethnicity. Although individual characteristics have largely expected associations with identity, we find that the local share of UKIP/BNP voters heightens ethnic but not political identity among both majority and minority populations. By contrast, harassment and discrimination shapes minorities' political but not ethnic identity. Contrary to expectations, both political and ethnic identities are stronger among secondgeneration compared to immigrant minorities.

Ethnic diversity in the UK: new opportunities and changing constraints

“…Both proponents and critics of multiculturalism, have located such ethnic polarisation in the nature of immigration and integration policies and forms of reception (Koopmans 2013). In this issue, Nandi and Platt (2020) address such politics of identity across the majority and minority populations.…”

“…However, the substantial body of work on ethnic identity and intergroup relations has tended to neglect other aspects of identity that may inform minority and majority social interactions, and facilitate intergroup contact (Moody 2001). In this issue, Nandi and Platt (2020) evaluate the salience of, and factors shaping, political and ethnic identity for majority and minority groups. These identities may themselves have their roots in earlier direct political commitment and affiliations, the subject of Martin and Mellon's (2020) paper.…”

“…Such external data sets, include the decennial Censuses for the UK, area level employment and benefit data, the local area Indices of Multiple Deprivation (Noble et al 2006), as well as more specialised data such as those on environmental air quality (Knight and Howley 2017) or housing markets (Bayrakdar and Coulter 2018). Articles in this issue (Luthra, Nandi, and Benzeval 2020;Nandi and Platt 2020) include area level characteristics, such as level of deprivation, and proportion of UKIP/BNP voters, in their analyses. The interaction between neighbourhood, often understood as community, inter-ethnic relations, and ethnic minority 'integration' has shown itself to be of enduring policy as well as academic interest (Finney and Simpson 2009;Casey 2016;HMG 2018).…”

“…These questions are analysed by some papers in the issue (e.g. Luthra, Nandi, and Benzeval 2020;Nandi and Platt 2020).…”

“…In this special issue, papers take different approaches to the construction of ethnic groups. For example, Li and Heath (2020), Longhi (2020), Nandi and Platt (2020), and Luthra, Nandi, and Benzeval (2020) use the 2011 census ethnic group categories to identify ethnic groups. They also split the groups into 1st generation if born outside the UK, 2nd and higher generation if born in the UK.…”