A Note on Political and Social Differences among Ethnic College Graduates

Abstract

THE PURPOSE oF this essentially descriptive note is to report on data which indicate that even among young people with a college education, ethnic background continues to be a. strong predictor of attitudes and behavior. It is reasonably well known that religion correlates with attitude and behavior, even among the well educated; but in this note we will present evidence that there were wide divergencies among the ethnic groups within the Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish religious traditions, and that in many instances the differences among groups within the traditions are greater than the differences among the religions themselves. In the spring of 1968 the National Opinion Research Center, under commission of the Carnegie Foundation Commission on the Future of Higher Education, mailed questionnaires to the subsample of its June, 1961 College graduation class population. The response rate to the mail questionnaire was 81 percent (89 percent of those '61 graduates whose addresses could be located seven years after graduation). The sample was of such a size that 11 ethnic groups could be investigated within the respondent population. At the present time both our theory and methodology for the study of ethnic groups are not sufficiently advanced to enable us to do more than present the basic findings of differences across ethnic lines. But that the differences should persist, even among young college graduates, is, we think, sufficiently contrary to expectations to cause social scientists to re-examine their idea that ethnicity is no longer an important variable in American society. In the first table we observe that the blacks, Polish Jews, Irish Catholics, and Polish Catholics are the most likely to consider themselves Democrats, whereas Protestant Germans and Protestant Scandinavians are the most likely to describe themselves as Republicans; and German Jews most likely to think of themselves as political Independents. With the exception of the Polish Jews, religious differences seem to be more important than ethnic differences, with Protestants least likely to be Democrats and Polish Jews most likely among the white population. But if one turns to whether the respondents describe themselves as Liberals (Table 2), ethnic variations begin to be important. The blacks and the Jews are most likely to say they are liberals, with the Catholic Poles, Italians, and Irish following close behind. But German Catholics are the least likely of all to describe themselves as liberals, and, in fact, ally themselves in this respect with Protestant Germans, at the very bottom of the liberal rank order. On an item measuring attitudes toward race-the conclusion of the Kerner report that white racism is the cause of Negro riots in American cities-an