Ethnic Politics and the Persistence of Ethnic Identification (Michael Parenti)
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Ethnic Politics and the Persistence of Ethnic Identification | |
|---|---|
| Author | Michael Parenti |
| Publisher | American Political Science Review |
| First published | September 1967 |
| Type | Article |
| Source | https://www.jstor.org/stable/1976090 |
Ethnic Politics and the Persistence of Ethnic Identification was an article by Michael Parenti, published in the American Political Science Review in September 1967.
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A question that has puzzled students of ethnic politics can be stated as follows: in the face of increasing assimilation why do ethnics continue to vote as ethnics with about the same frequency as in earlier decades? On the basis of his New Haven study, Robert Dahl observes that "...in spite of growing assimilation, ethnic factors continued to make themselves felt with astonishing tenacity."[1] Nevertheless, he asserts, "the strength of ethnic ties as a factor in local politics surely must recede."[2] Dahl sets up a "three-stage" model to describe how political assimilation will follow a more general social assimilation. However, one of his co-researchers, Raymond Wolfinger, demonstrates in a recent article in this Review[3] that ethnic voting patterns persist into the second and third generations, and that "at least in New Haven, all the social changes of the 1940's and 1950's do not seem to have reduced the political importance of national origins."[4] The same observation can be made of religious-ethnic identities, for as Wolfinger notes, citing data from the Elmira study, social mobility in no way diminishes the religious factor as a determinant of voting behaviour; in fact, in the case of upper and middle class Catholics and Protestants, religion seems to assume a heightened importance as a voting determinant.[5] Wolfinger marshals evidence to support the arresting proposition that, melting pot or not, ethnic voting may be with us for a long time to come, a finding which craves explanation.
Part of the reason for the persistence of ethnic voting may rest in the political system itself. Rather than being a purely dependent variable, the political system, i.e., party, precinct workers, candidates, elections, patronage, etc., continues to rely upon ethnic strategies such as those extended to accommodate the claims of newly-arrived ethnic middle-class leadership; as a mediator and mobiliser of minority symbols and interests, the political system must be taken into account.[6]
Wolfinger suggests several further explanations, which may be briefly summarised as follows: (a) "Family-political identification." Voting studies show that as many as four-fifths of all voters maintain the same party identification as did their parents, a continuity which is not merely a reflection of similar life conditions but is in part ascribable to the independent influence of primary group relations.[7] (b) "Critical elections theory." The emergence of highly salient ethnic candidates and issues may cause a dramatic realignment so that a particular party becomes the repository of ethnic loyalty even after the ethnically salient candidate and issues have passed.[8] (c) "Historical after-effects." Partisan affiliations, as Key and Munger have demonstrated for Indiana, persist generations after the reasons for their emergence have ceased to be politically relevant. Thus "even when ethnic salience has faded, [...] its political effects will remain."[9] (d) "Militant core-city residue." The ethnic community may retain a group awareness despite a growing class heterogeneity because the assimilationist-minded will advance to the suburbs while those among the upwardly mobile who choose to stay in the ethnic city settlements are more likely to be the most strongly in-group oriented.[10]
Several comments are in order before we proceed further: of the above explanations, there seems to be some question as to whether (a), (b), and (c) are concerned with independent variables. It does seem that the Key-Munger historical aftereffect idea in (c) is an extension of the "fixation" of the "crucial elections" notion in (b) and that both must rest in large part on the strong inheritance and continuity of family partisan identifications in (a). Explanation (d), while suggestive, is wanting in substantiating data. What evidence we have does not necessarily support the "militant core-city residue" idea, and certainly does not lend substance to the image of a homogenised, assimilated suburbia, as we shall see below. Nevertheless, the above hypotheses submitted by Wolfinger may serve as useful explanations for the political continuity of all social groups, ethnics included.[11]
Yet, after all is said and done, I cannot free myself from the suspicion that perhaps a false problem has been created which can best be resolved by applying certain analytic and theoretical distinctions, supported by data that extend beyond the usual voting studies. If, in fact, it can be demonstrated that assimilation is not taking place, then the assimilation theory as propounded by Dahl, along with Wolfinger's alternate explanations are somewhat besides the point. And the question, why do ethnics continue to vote as ethnics despite increasing assimilation, becomes the wrong one to ask—because the answer may simply be that minorities are not assimilating. At first glance, such an assertion seems to violate the evidence of our senses. Have not old-world immigrant cultures all but disappeared? Are not the ethnics scattering into homogeneously Americanised suburbs? Is not the educational level of the national minorities continually increasing? Are not ethnic occupational distributions changing? etc.
The confusion rests, I submit, in the failure—common to many of us political scientists, and even to some sociologists and anthropologists—to make a conceptual distinction between "acculturation" and "assimilation." The distinction is crucial in reading correct meaning into our data and in guiding us to fruitful theoretical conclusions. For while it is established that ethnics have accommodated themselves to American styles and customs (acculturation) by the second generation, and while perhaps they may enjoy increased occupational and geographic mobility, it is not at all clear that they are incorporating themselves into the structural-identificational-group relations of the dominant society (assimilation). On close examination we find that the term "assimilation," as commonly used, refers to a multiplicity of cultural, social, and identificational processes which need closer scrutiny.[12]
I. Acculturation and Assimilation
At the outset, it is necessary, as Talcott Parsons and others have urged, to distinguish between cultural and social systems: the cultural is the system of beliefs, values, norms, practices, symbols, and ideas (science, art, artefacts, language, law, and learning included); the social is the system of interrelations and associations among individuals and groups. Thus a church, family, club, informal friendship group, formal organisation, etc., composed of individuals interacting in some kind of context involving roles and statuses are part of the social system, or one might say, represent particular subsocietal systems within the society; while the beliefs, symbols, and practices mediated and adhered to by members of the church, family, club, etc., are part of the cultural system or subcultural systems within the total culture. By abstracting two analytically distinct sets of components from the same concrete phenomena we are able to observe that, although there may often be an important interaction, the order of relationships and the actions and conditions within one are independent of those in the other. Attention to this independence increases analytical precision.[13]
What was considered as one general process becomes a multifaceted configuration of processes. And if it can be said that there is no inevitable one-to-one relationship between the various processes, and that imperatives operative in one system are not wholly dependent upon the other, then ethnic political behaviour becomes something less of a mystery. For ethnic social subsystems may persist or evolve new structures independent of the host society and despite dramatic cultural transitions in the direction of the mainstream culture.
Since early colonial times, nearly every group arriving in America has attempted to reconstruct communities that were replications of the old world societies from which they had emerged. With the exception of a few isolated sectarian enclaves such as the Hutterites, the Amish, and the Hasidic, they failed to do so. If culture is to be represented as the accumulated beliefs, styles, solutions, and practices which represent a society's total and continuing adjustment to its environment, then it would seem to follow that no specific cultural system can be transplanted from one environment to another without some measure of change. Unable to draw upon a complete cultural base of their own in the new world, and with no larger constellation of societal and institutional forces beyond the ghetto boundaries to back them, the immigrants eventually lost the battle to maintain their indigenous ways. By the second generation, attention was directed almost exclusively towards American events and standards, American language, dress, recreation, work, and mass media, while interest in the old world culture became minimal or, more usually, non-existent. To one extent or another, all major historical and sociological studies of immigration and ethnicity document this cultural transition of the American-born generation.[14]
However, such acculturation was most often not followed by social assimilation; the group became "Americanised" in much of its cultural practices, but this says little about its social relations with the host society. In the face of widespread acculturation, the minority still maintained a social substructure encompassing primary and secondary group relations composed essentially of fellow ethnics. A study of a Polish-American industrial town illustrates this cultural-social distinction. The Polish children treat their immigrant parents with either patronisation or contempt, speak American slang, are addicted to American popular music and popular culture, and accept fully the American way of piling up money and material goods when possible. Yet they keep almost all their social contacts within the confines of the Polish-American community and have no direct exposure to, and little interest in, middle-class American society.[15] Similar findings were made by White and Gans in their respective studies—done twenty years apart—of Italian-American communities in Boston. American styles, language, sports, and consumption patterns predominated, but interpersonal relations and social group structures were almost exclusively Italian-American in both the North End of the 1940's and the West End of the 1960's.[16]
From birth in the sectarian hospital to childhood play-groups to cliques and fraternities in high school and college to the selection of a spouse, a church affiliation, social and service clubs, a vacation resort, and, as life nears completion, an old-age home and sectarian cemetery—the ethnic, if he so desires, may live within the confines of his subsocietal matrix—and many do.[17] Even if he should find himself in the oppressively integrated confines of prison, the ethnic discovers that Italian, Irish, Jewish, Black, and Puerto Rican inmates coalesce into distinct groups in "a complex web of prejudices and hostilities, friendship and alliances."[18]
Hollingshead, in a study of New Haven, discerned vertical social divisions based on race, religion, and national origin along with the expected horizontal cleavages due to income and residence. Cutting across the class strata were the parallel dissections of the black and white worlds, with the latter further fissured into Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant components which, in turn, subdivided into Irish, Italian, Polish, et cetera. Within this highly compartmentalised world were to be found ethnic associational patterns.[19]
II. Heterogeneity Within the Homogeneous Society
III. Identificational Durability
IV. Conclusion
Notes
- ↑ Robert Dahl, Who Governs? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 59.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 62. See also pp. 32–62 inclusive.
- ↑ Raymond E. Wolfinger, "The Development and Persistence of Ethnic Voting," this Review, 59 (December 1965), 896–908.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 907.
- ↑ Ibid., see also Bernard R. Berelson et al., Voting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), p. 65.
- ↑ Besides the studies cited in Wolfinger, op. cit., and his own data on New Haven, almost all the literature on the relationship between the political machine and the ethnic lends support to this proposition.
- ↑ Cf. Wolfinger op. cit., p. 907 and the studies cited therein. Also Herbert Hyman, Political Socialization (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1959), and much of the work done by Fred I. Greenstein.
- ↑ Here Wolfinger is applying Key's hypothesis. See V. O. Key, Jr. "A Theory of Critical Elections," Journal of Politics, 17 (February 1955), 3–18.
- ↑ The quotation is from Wolfinger, op. cit., p. 908. See also V. O. Key and Frank Munger, "Social Determinism and Electoral Decision: the Case of Indiana," in Eugene Burdick and Arthur J. Brodbeck (eds.), American Voting Behavior (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1959), pp. 281–299.
- ↑ Wolfinger, loc. cit.
- ↑ For a more extended and systematic treatment of the question of political continuities and discontinuities see Seymour M. Lipset et al., "The Psychology of Voting: An Analysis of Political Behavior," in Gardner Lindzey (ed.), Handbook of Social Psychology, Vol. II (Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1954), pp. 1124–1170.
- ↑ For instance, Wolfinger uses the term "assimilation" synonymously with "general acculturation and occupational differentiation," in the same body of propositions, op. cit., p. 906.
- ↑ A. L. Kroeber and Talcott Parsons, "The Concepts of Culture and of Social System," American Sociological Review, 23 (October 1958), 582–583; also Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1951).
- ↑ See for instance: Oscar Handlin, Boston's Immigrants, A Study in Acculturation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, rev. ed. 1959); Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1951); R. E. Park and H. A. Miller, Old World Traits Transplanted (New York: Harper, 1921); W. I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, 5 vols. (Boston: Badger, 1918–20); E. V. Stonequist, The Marginal Man, A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict (New York: Scribner, 1937); W. L. Warner and Leo Srole, The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1945); William Foote Whyte, Street Corner Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943); Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers (New York: Free Press of Glencoe), 1962.
- ↑ Arnold W. Green, "A Re-examination of the Marginal Man Concept," Social Forces, 26 (1947), 167–171.
- ↑ Whyte, op. cit., and Gans, op. cit. A socially unassimilated pluralism is readily visible in many areas of American life. Thus, in a single weekend in New York separate dances for persons of Hungarian, Irish, Italian, German, Greek, and Polish extractions are advertised in neighbourhood newspapers and the foreign language press.
- ↑ See Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 34; also Erich Rosenthal, "Acculturation without Assimilation?" American Journal of Sociology, 66 (November 1960), 275–288; Amitai Etzioni, "The Ghetto—a Re-evaluation," Social Forces (March 1959), 255–262; J. Milton Yinger, "Social Forces Involved in Group Identification or Withdrawal," Daedalus, 90 (Spring 1961), 247–262; Y. J. Chyz and R. Lewis, "Agencies Organized by Nationality Groups in the United States," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 262 (1949).
- ↑ M. Arc, "The Prison 'Culture' From the Inside," The New York Times Magazine, 28 February 1965, p. 63.
- ↑ August B. Hollingshead, "Trends in Social Stratification: A Case Study," American Sociological Review, 17 (1952), 685 f; see also Gans, op. cit.; Warner and Srole, op. cit., for further evidence of ethnic subsocietal systems.