Ethnic Agenda: Relevance of Political Attitudes to Party Choice

Abstract

This article deals with the controversial ethnic agenda debate, over whether or not visible ethnic minorities in Britain share a common and distinct set of political attitudes. It uses the 1997 British General Election Study, which included an ethnic booster sample, to test four main hypotheses generated by the literature on the ethnic agenda: relative proximity of ethnic minorities’ political orientations to the Labour Party, dominance of ethnic‐specific issues within the ethnic political agenda, the irrelevance of some mainstream issues to ethnic minorities, and cultural proximity of South Asians in Britain to the Conservative Party. The effect of the mainstream and ethnic issues and cultural traditionalism on party identification is then examined. The results confirmed that whereas ethnic issues are supported consistently by ethnic minorities, they matter less when choosing a political party than mainstream issues, except for some of the non‐relevant popular issues. On most economic issues minorities were closer to Labour than to Conservatives. The hypothesis on the cultural proximity of South Asians to Conservatives was to a great extent confirmed.