National Study of Ethnic Pluralism and Politics

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

Demographic changes fueled by immigration and differential birth rates are producing major changes in the ethnic and racial composition of the population and eventually in the American electorate. Models of political participation, organizational attachment and social capital, identity, ideological beliefs, and electoral behavior have been developed on samples constituted largely by non-Hispanic whites, and to a lesser degree, African Americans. Over the next several decades of the 21st century, individuals from Asian American, Caribbean American, Latino American, and African American groups will constitute an increasingly substantial share of the population, until mid-century when non-Hispanic whites are projected to comprise a numerical minority of the national population. We believe this is a propitious time to launch a comparative, baseline survey and modest panel follow-up of Americans' political attitudes, beliefs, aspirations, and behaviors; and to begin developing conceptual and empirical models that are appropriate within and across these growing race and ethnic populations. These groups differ greatly in the nature of ethnic and racial identity, political consciousness, and their attachments to American ideological and political institutions. The investigators and advisory panel members bring to the study a long, complimentary, and productive history of empirical political research on these diverse groups. The development of relevant constructs and empirical measures will make a major contribution, not only to the proposed data collections, but also to future local, regional, and national studies on similar topics within and between these complex and heterogeneous ethnic and racial groups. Based upon recently completed, large area probability studies of multiple race and ethnic groups in the continental United States, the proposed telephone surveys of 5,000 Asian, Caribbean, African, non-Hispanic white and Latino American groups will be the first, to our knowledge, nationally representative, explicitly comparative, simultaneous study of all these groups. Using the same constructs, with measures empirically validated to work satisfactorily across these samples, will provide opportunities for the first comparative, empirical analysis of how race and ethnicity influence the political attitudes, behaviors and activism levels across a broad array of groups. The data will permit scholars to explore within and between group differences, thereby increasing our knowledge about how identity, consciousness, ideological beliefs, socio-demographic, and social and economic status factors, influence or structure the political lives of people that differ in ethnic and racial background, immigration and citizenship status, and geographic dispersion; advancing the understanding of the ways in which important aspects of group, self, and social development related to political behavior in adulthood. The existence of these datasets on national samples of diverse American ethnic and racial populations will provide unprecedented opportunities for hypothesis development and testing of empirical relationships. Because the 2004 data collection will be disseminated (ICPSR and the Web) in 2005 and the panel datasets released in 2009, the data will be available very quickly to the larger social science fields, especially political science. This will provide unprecedented opportunities for seasoned and new investigators to test a variety of hypotheses about the relative influence that group and individually based resources have on the political lives of racial and ethnic groups, but rarely tested because of the absence of appropriate, comparative, high quality data. As we have learned from the earliest NBES and Black and Hispanic Politics studies of the 80s and 90s, these data will also be of benefit in the high school, undergraduate and graduate classrooms, and for other educational purposes (workshops, text books, etc.). In addition, the research and training activities accompanying the development of the NBES and related studies had positive influences in the development and training of a large number of academic political scientists now holding prestigious and important positions in the field. This proposed study has the potential of surpassing the accomplishments of these earlier studies because: 1) of its larger scope; 2) it builds on the work of the last two decades; and, 3) the presence of a wider array of interested political scientists across the country that are well-versed in sophisticated survey research methods and quantitative data analyses. When completed, this new study will have important implications for understanding the nature of racial and ethnic minority policy concerns, policy and candidate preferences, party attachments, and methods of increasing political participation, including a wide variety of activities, such as voting, in the American democratic process.