Minorities, Social Capital and Voting

Pieter Bevelander () and Ravi Pendakur ()
Additional contact information
Ravi Pendakur: University of Ottawa

No 2928, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: It is widely held that voter turnout among immigrants and ethnic minorities is lower than among the native born. The goal of our paper is to explore the determinants of voting, comparing immigrant, minority and majority citizens in Canada. We use the 2002 wave of the Equality Security Community Survey to explore the relationship between personal characteristics (age, sex, education, and household type) work characteristics, social capital attributes (trust in government, belonging, civic awareness and interaction with others) and ethnic characteristics (ethnic origin, place of birth and religion) and voting. We find that the combination of socio-demographic and social capital attributes largely overrides the impact of immigration and ethnicity. This suggests that it is not the minority attribute that impacts voting. Rather it is age, level of schooling and level of civic engagement which effects voting, both federal and provincial.

Keywords: social capital; voting behaviour; immigrants; political participation; ethnic minorities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 J15 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2007-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-mig, nep-pol and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published as 'Social capital and Voting participation of Immigrants and Minorities in Canada' in: Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2009, 32(8), 1406-1430

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp2928.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp2928

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().