Levels or Changes?: Ethnic Context and the Political Demography of the UKIP Vote Eric Kaufmann, Professor, Department of Politics, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK
[email protected]; twitter: @epkaufm; web: www.sneps.net Abstract Does contact with ethnic minorities make native whites more or less concerned about immigration – and how does this affect voting for populist right parties? This paper asks how ethnic diversity and change affect white support for the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in Britain in the 2010-15 period. In so doing, it underscores the contradictory responses evoked by levels and changes in minority presence. Extant work posits that both work in the same direction on white threat perceptions. This work instead holds that local minority levels and changes work at cross-purposes: minority increase contributes to whites’ sense of threat while minority levels produce contact effects in the direction of inter-ethnic accommodation. In addition, this analysis adds to work on contextual effects by applying a more rigorous technique for addressing the problem of selection bias, casting doubt on the notion that there is ‘white flight’ of anti-immigration whites away from diverse areas or toward whiter neighbourhoods. Finally, few have remarked that today’s ethnic changes contribute to tomorrow’s ethnic levels. Since minorities are attracted to areas that already minority-dense, the two measures are strongly correlated. This presents a paradox – how do threat effects associated with change become contact effects? The data here suggest that yesterday’s changes fade through habituation and contact while yesterday’s ethnic levels become increasingly salient for contact over time.