Race: Towards a Multicultural Electorate?

Ethnic Heterogeneity in the Social Bases of Voting at the 2010 British General Election

“…Saggar and Heath (1999) noted that in 1997 Indian and Pakistani self-reported levels of turnout (among registered electors) exceeded those of the majority group (85% for the two South Asian groups compared with 81% for the majority) while those of Black Caribbeans and Black Africans fell somewhat below (at 73% and 74% Downloaded by [University of Newcastle, Australia] at 22:08 02 January 2015 respectively). A similar pattern of lower Black self-reported turnout was found by Studlar (1986) for the 1979 election and by Mortimore and Kaur-Ballagan (2006) for the 2005 election.…”

Uninterested Youth? Young People's Attitudes towards Party Politics in Britain

“…Lovenduski (2001, p. 189) suggests that ‘women are more likely [than men] to intend to vote, less likely to express satisfaction with the government, and more likely to be floating voters’. Recent studies also point to ethnicity as a major political cleavage in British political behaviour, with members of British minority ethnic (BME) groups having lower registration and voter turnout rates than, and displaying different political loyalties from, their white counterparts (Saggar and Heath, 1999). 7 As well as social class, gender and ethnicity, evidence suggests that educational history (Bynner and Ashford, 1994) and the place in which people live (Curtice and Park, 1999) are also important variables that influence people's political engagement.…”

Negative and positive racialisation: Re-examining ethnic minority political representation in the UK

“…By North American standards such conceptual legitimacy would be fairly unsurprising where urban electoral mobilisation frequently centres on a long tradition of aggregation of, and responsiveness to, the objective interests of ethnic collectivities . 12 A similar point is pursued in the recent published review of Spencer (1997) and Holdaway and Baron (1997); see Saggar (1999).…”

“…This re-evaluation contributed to positive racialisation in certain parts of the country with relatively large ethnic minority populations where political representation became a more salient issue. In particular, the appreciation of the size and potential importance of the so-called`ethnic vote' spanned all the major parties and, oddly, had the effect of making this group of voters appear rather more volatile and instrumental than they actually were (see Amin and Richardson 1992;Anwar 1994;Saggar 1998a,b,c,d;Saggar and Heath 1999;Werbner 1991).…”

“…For a full presentation and discussion of demographic data on Britain minority population, see Ballard and Kalra (1994). 2 See Saggar and Heath (1999) for an example of how this contextual point can be used to inform empirical electoral studies research. Geddes (1993) pursues a similar approach in examining candidate selection opportunities and performance in local government in the early 1990s.…”