The political adaptation of second-generation Australians

Abstract

The study systematically analyses the location of second-generation Australian adults (defined as those born in Australia of an immigrant father) in the economic system, it investigates their educational achievements, and examines the nature of influences on their political behaviour by specifying relations among certain variables and by comparing them to first-generation immigrants and to the native-born of a native-born father. The one per cent person's sample file of the 1981 Australian census on population and housing is used for analyses of income and education; the 1984/1985 National Social Science Survey (urban preliminary sample) is used to investigate partisanship, participation and felt efficacy. The study draws mostly on American literature for its theoretical underpinnings. The conceptual basis of this study involves a three-fold distinction: the socioeconomic system, the cultural, or 'ethnic', dimension and the political system. The socioeconomic system is explored largely in the economic domain in terms of individual income and educational achievement, the ethnic or cultural dimension in terms of the extent of economic and educational integration and in terms of influences on political behaviour. Ethnicity is defined mainly in terms of father's birthplace. The political system is examined through extent and strength of, and influences on, partisanship, through political participation and through felt political efficacy. The model which best describes the political life of second-generation Australians in the early 1980s is partial assimilation. Their pattern of political adaptation is piecemeal, complex and at times puzzling. Political adaptation appears to be a function both of location in some important sociocultural systems and of cultural differentiation. Ethnicity permeates political adaptation, although its effects vary across the major subsystems of society. In short, a dual explanation - economic and cultural - is required. Many features parallel the adaptation of the second generation in the United States half a century ago, perhaps the most general being that adaptation and ethnicity are interwoven in concept and reality. But unlike what appears to be the American experience, most second-generation Australians have been assimilated into the economic system by virtue of their success in gaining incomes which are at least the equivalent of those earned by other native-born Australians.