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

Lucinda Platt,Alita Nandi

doi:10.1080/1369183x.2018.1539286

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe 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 second-generation compared to immigrant minorities.

Highlights

The rise across Europe of political parties espousing an ethnic conception of the nation, explicitly opposed to the immigrants and minorities and their claims to belonging, has brought into stark relief the politics of identity (Pehrson, Vignoles, and Brown 2009; Hopkins 2010; Huddy 2001)
We further argue that if political identity is enhanced through mobilisation of ethnic identity we would expect these common unobserved drivers to be stronger among majorities compared to minorities since there is greater scope for triggering ethnic identity among the typically normalised majority
Ethnic identity is subject to increasing analysis and political debate in Western European countries

Summary

Introduction

The rise across Europe of political parties espousing an ethnic conception of the nation, explicitly opposed to the immigrants and minorities and their claims to belonging, has brought into stark relief the politics of identity (Pehrson, Vignoles, and Brown 2009; Hopkins 2010; Huddy 2001). Note that by political identity, we refer to the salience of politics to an individual’s sense of self, rather than partisanship These contemporary developments would be expected to shape the ethnic and political identity of minorities, as the salience of minority status is heightened and politicised by such narratives. Studies of minority ethnic identity often continue to imply that ethnic identity is the sole relevant aspect of identity, and neglect other forms of identification, such as political, or for that matter, gender, class or occupational identity (Nandi and Platt 2012). Given that identification is an expression of ‘interest’ (Jenkins 2014) that has implications for others through processes of inclusion and exclusion (Tajfel and Turner 1986), the relationship between political identity (with its implication for claims to the public sphere) and ethnic identity (with the potential for polarisation) merits consideration

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Conclusion