Suchergebnisse

The impact of liberal globalization and multiculturalism means that nations are under pressure to transform their national identities from an ethnic to a civic mode. This has led, in many cases, to dominant ethnic decline, but also to its peripheral revival in the form of far right politics. At the same time, the growth of mass democracy and the decline of post-colonial and Cold War state unity in the developing world has opened the floodgates for assertions of ethnic dominance. This book investigates both tendencies and argues forcefully for the importance of dominant ethnicity in the contemporary world.

Globalization and migration are pressuring nations around the world to change their ethnic self-definition and to treasure diversity not homogeneity. This book explores the growing gap between modern nations and their dominant ethnic groups.

Classic theories of nationalism, whether modernist or ethnosymbolist, emphasise the role of elites and spread of a common imagined community from centre to periphery. Recent work across a range of disciplines challenges this account by stressing the role of horizontal, peer-to-peer, dynamics alongside top-down flows. Complexity theory, which has recently been applied to the social sciences, expands our understanding of horizontal national dynamics. It draws together contemporary critiques, suggesting that researchers focus on the network properties of nations and nationalism. It stresses that order may emerge from chaos, hence 'national' behaviour may appear without an imagined community. Treating nations like complex systems whose form emerges from below should focus research on four central aspects of complexity: emergence, feedback loops, tipping points and distributed knowledge, or 'the wisdom of crowds'. This illuminates how national identity can be reproduced by popular activities rather than the state; why nationalist ideas may gestate in small circles for long periods, then suddenly spread; why secession is often contagious; and why wide local variation in the content of national identity strengthens rather than weakens the nation's power to mobilise.

Will the rising share of ethnic minorities in western societies spark a backlash or lead to greater acceptance of diversity? This paper examines this question through the prism of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), the most successful populist right party in British history. The paper contributes to work on contextual effects by arguing that ethnic levels and changes cross-pressure white opinion and voting. It argues that high levels of established ethnic minorities reduce opposition to immigration and support for UKIP among White Britons. Conversely, more rapid ethnic changes increase opposition to immigration and support for UKIP. Longitudinal data demonstrates that these effects are not produced by self-selection. The data further illustrate that with time, diversity levels increase their threat-reducing power while the threatening effects of ethnic change fade. Results suggest that the contextual effects literature needs to routinely unpack levels from changes. This also suggests that if the pace of immigration slows, immigration attitudes should soften and populist right voting decline. Does diversity heighten or reduce white threat perceptions? This paper claims that this depends on which form of diversity we examine: levels or changes. The level of ethnic diversity, in the British case, consists of the local proportion of non-White British population. This is distinct from ethnic change: the rate of increase of the local non-White British population. This paper surmises that, for the British case, local minority levels are conducive to contact and minority changes to threat. Others, working on different cases (i.e. Newman, 2013), have tested one argument or the other, but not both together - even where they have included both level and change variables in the same model. Moreover, there is a paradox: prior ethnic change, i.e. immigration, contributes to current minority levels. How then does threat-enhancing diversity transmute into threat-reducing diversity? This work provides an answer: habituation. That is, the threatening effects of ethnic change fade over time while threat-reducing properties of minority levels increase in power with time. Therefore, in addition to testing the levels versus changes argument for Britain, this work advances and tests the habituation mechanism. A final aim of the paper is to set these findings within the context of a meta-analysis of all work undertaken between 1995 and 2016 on the impact of ethno-contextual effects on immigration attitudes and populist right voting.

Does ethnic diversity increase or reduce white threat perceptions? Meta-analyses help orient a field and communicate findings to policymakers. We report the results of a meta-analysis of studies measuring the relationship between ethnic context and both opposition to immigration and support for anti-immigration parties. Our analysis attempts to be exhaustive, and is based on 171 post-1995 studies averaging 25,000 observations each, a knowledge base of over 4 million data points. We find a linear association between ethnic change and elevated threat. However, for diversity levels, the relationship between ethnic context and threat is nonlinear. This takes the form of a 'wave', with higher diversity predicting threat responses at the smallest and largest scales, whereas in units of 5000–10,000 people (such as tracts or neighbourhoods), diversity is associated with reduced threat.

Does the local presence of immigrant groups increase White hostility to immigration? Most research finds that diverse neighborhoods reduce White opposition to minorities and immigration. However, most studies at higher geographies find the reverse effect. We confirm this pattern for England and Wales for 2009-2012. Yet, contextual studies are open to selection bias, which is where this article makes its main contribution. Is White tolerance in diverse neighborhoods the result of a positive effect of inter-ethnic contact, or does it arise from White flight, with anti-immigrant Whites exiting diverse areas but remaining within wider geographies as radicalized opponents of immigration? We provide the first attempt we are aware of to track the opinions of in- and out-migrants, as well as stayers, from local areas over an extended period. We use 20 years of large-scale geocoded British longitudinal data and find only limited evidence of selection effects associated with White flight.

"Birth rates are falling and fertility rates are well below replacement levels. At the same time, the economic crisis has forced governments to scale back public spending, reduce child support, and raise the retirement age, causing immense social conflict. Taking a step outside the disciplinary comfort zone, Whither the Child? asks how demography affects individuals and society. What does it feel like to live in a low fertility world? What are the consequences? Is there even a problem - economically, culturally and morally? No other book confronts so many dimensions of the low fertility issue and none engage with the thorny issues of child psychology, parenting, family, and social policy that are tackled head-on here."--Provided by publisher.

"Birth rates are falling and fertility rates are well below replacement levels. At the same time, the economic crisis has forced governments to scale back public spending, reduce child support, and raise the retirement age, causing immense social conflict. Taking a step outside the disciplinary comfort zone, Whither the Child? asks how demography affects individuals and society. What does it feel like to live in a low fertility world? What are the consequences? Is there even a problem - economically, culturally and morally? No other book confronts so many dimensions of the low fertility issue and none engage with the thorny issues of child psychology, parenting, family, and social policy that are tackled head-on here."--Provided by publisher.