Ethnicity and Party Identification: Continuation of a Theoretical Dialogue

Abstract

IN EARLIER research, Dahl's three-stage theory of ethnic assimilation2 and original data were reanalyzed through multivariate procedures. The reanalysis had profound implications for Dahl's theory. In the crucial juxtaposition between class and ethnicity, class, contrary to Dahl's original theoretical interpretation, did not subsume the ethnic factor as a determinant of party identification. With ethnicity being both substantively and statistically significant, the argument for the suppression of ethnic influences in the wake of socioeconomic concerns, the basis of the theory of ethnic assimilation, could not be sustained. Class was, however, a vital influence in the determination of ethnic-based political loyalties but in a highly intricate fashion. Class and ethnicity interacted in a manner in which class either reinforced or eroded ethnic partisan loyalties. Dahl was quite perspicacious and correct in his view that ethnic-based party identification was not immune to the influences of socioeconomic factors,3 but his bivariate mode of analysis prevented him from viewing the interactive component of the two factors. The current research seeks to extend the theoretical concerns of the original analysis. Whereas the original analysis was applied to Dahl's New Haven data and followed his conceptualization, the analysis presented below remains faithful to the earlier conceptualization but looks at a different, indeed unique, data setnational survey data. The earlier refinement of the theory of ethnic assimilation, as translated through the observable presence of interaction and the theory of crosspressures, is now tested against the national political universe. Such incursions into the still uncharted domain of ethnic politics come at a time when the rediscovery of the American ethnic has cast the subject of ethnic politics into a previously unknown place of prominence. Scammon and Wattenberg4 have perceived the development of a new ethnic coalition based on the