Page 175 - DSOC202_SOCIAL_STRATIFICATION_ENGLISH

Social Stratification

Notes analyses clarify these results, and sum up the difference between ethnic majorities and minorities.
Insofar as immigrants can potentially become members of a nation, but not of an ethnic group, one
would expect national identification to precede ethnic identification as a predictor of xenophobic
attitudes. The results show that this is the case for majorities only for whom the driving force
behind xenophobia was ethnic identification which mediated the impact of national identification
on xenophobia. No such mediation was found for minorities where only national identification
predicted xenophobia. These results lend support for the in group projection model (Mummendey
and Wenzel, 1999; Waldzus and Mummendey, 2004) inas much as they suggest that majorities
cognitively connect their ethnic subgroup to the superordinate national group. Indirectly, hostility
towards immigrants reflects the tendency that majorities express a stronger sense of entitlement to
the nation, its institutions, rules and customs. Hence, they feel more inclined to “protect the
nation” against immigrants who are viewed as a threat to the ethnic group rather than to the
nation as a whole.

Self-Assessment
Choose the correct options
1. The Turko-Iranian is the type of people belongs to
(a) Baluchistan (b) Turky (c) Afganistan (d) None of these
2. The Mongolo-Dravidian is the type of people who belongs to
(a) Bengali Brahmins (b) Kayasthas (c) Rajputs (d) both a and b
3. The Western Brachycephals are
(a) Alpinoid (b) Dinaric (c) Armenoid (d) All of these
4. An ethnic group is a group of people whose members are identified through
(a) Education (b) Language (c) Common trait (d) Culture
5. In India the population is categorized in terms of the ........ mother language spoken.

8.5 Summary

• Our findings underscore the importance of analysing xenophobia and prejudice from a
perspective of nested intergroup relations which combines processes occurring within
superordinate categories and between sub-groups. The minority or majority status of ethnic
subgroups within nations shapes attitudes towards outgroups such as immigrants. The main
thrust of our findings is consistent with the asymmetry hypothesis of ethnic sub-groups
within national contexts (Sidanius and Petrocik, 2001). Overall, these findings suggest that
for dominant ethno-cultural majorities there is an unproblematic and positive association
between attachment to one’s nation and attachment to one’s ethnic subgroup. On average,
majorities hold more hostile attitudes towards immigrants than ethnic minorities, and their
ethnic and national identification predicts xenophobia. Subordinate minorities, in contrast,
have a more complicated relationship with the nation. For them, ethno-cultural identification
is largely orthogonal to national attachment, and refers to two relatively independent
dimensions of identity and self-definition.
• In coming to these conclusions, we must note that the identification measures used in the
ISSP survey are not ideal for a definitive test of some of these hypotheses, since single-item
indicators may be subject to various biases. Moreover, another important shortcoming of this
research concerns the sampling of the minority groups. Other than the typical immigration
countries and clearly multi-ethnic societies, the dataset often contained an inadequate number
of minority group members who were long-time residents and legal citizens of the country.
As a result, many countries had to be discarded from the analyses. Future surveys studying

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