Anthony Heath

• University of Oxford

In this chapter we use the CILS4EU data to investigate the precise generational status and the origin countries of the adolescent population in England, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. We describe the ethnic diversity in the study’s samples in more detail and show that it is very large in each of these countries. In addition, the composition o...

Using data from the Managing Cultural Diversity Survey 2010 and the Ethnic Minority British Election Study 2010, we explore the activity and employment outcomes of majority and minority individuals in the UK, and examine their association with a variety of ethnic embeddedness measures. We do not find that white British respondents living in areas o...

One of the most striking features of the contemporary world is the scale and complexity of international and internal migration and the rapidly increasing size of indigenous ethnic minorities in the national populations of many countries. International migration continues to be mainly from poor to rich nations but the more recent years have seen mi...

This paper contributes to the literature on wellbeing research by showing the distinct impacts of inter- and intra- generational social mobility on subjective wellbeing in mainland China. Based on the China General Social Surveys of 2006, we used diagonal reference modelling and other regression methods to assess the effects of social mobility on w...

Corruption, in both the developing and the developed world, has been studied in many disciplines, especially economics and politics, but there is considerable scope for a sociological contribution. There has been a large body of cross-national research using indices of perceived corruption, but the clandestine nature of corruption makes it difficul...

Cultural diversity is an important topic in comparative empirical social science research today. Individuals' socio-cultural and ethnic origins – that are often, but not always, related to their families' migration histories – are a potentially powerful predictor of social attitudes and behaviours. While there are fairly established instruments ava...

This article asks whether standard accounts of class reproduction apply among migrants and their descendants as among the majority group, whether there is a process of assimilation across generations toward the overall (British) pattern of class reproduction, whether the trends over time in absolute and relative mobility among the majority populati...

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/528315/The_childhood_origins_of_social_mobility.pdf

Two studies investigated the role of perceived realistic and symbolic threats in predicting collective action tendencies, and in mediating effects of intergroup contact and social identity on collective action in the context of an intractable conflict. Extending earlier research on collective action, integrated threat theory, and intergroup contact...

As an economist, my pursuits are prosaic. I deal not with grand ideas but with grubby details. Among my vices, the Ricardian does not number. I consider that sensible policies grow only from useful local knowledge, and that useful local knowledge relies, in part though not in whole, on meticulous and well-considered measurement. My ideal economist...

No abstract is available for this article.

In the United States, active church membership among ethnic and racial minorities has been linked to higher political participation. In Europe, the influence of religious attendance on political mobilisation of ethnic minorities has so far been little explored, despite the heated public debate about the public role of religion and particularly Isla...

To what extent and why do social origins matter for access to higher education, including access to elite universities? What is the role of private and selective schooling? This paper uses the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70) to analyse the trajectories of a generation currently in early middle age. We find that the influence of social origins, es...

We examine whether context matters for the integration of second-generation children of migrants into Western educational systems. Using data on ten destination countries and on five distinct educational outcomes at various stages of the educational career, we study educational inequalities between the second-generation immigrants and their majorit...

This chapter provides an introduction to the volume. It describes the scope of the work, namely the comparative analysis of ethnic educational inequalities in ten Western countries at different stages of the educational career, and provides the intellectual rationale. In particular, the authors ask whether ethnic inequalities can be explained by th...

In this chapter we explore the completion of upper secondary education. The central question here is whether the high rates of ethnic minority continuation into upper secondary education lead to a closing of the attainment gaps with the majority group. The story which emerges is that there are considerable continuities over the secondary school car...

This chapter investigates the grades and test scores of second-generation minorities at the end of compulsory schooling (around age fifteen). We document the differences in overall achievement both between minorities and between countries, showing that Chinese and some other Asian groups out-perform the majority group while Turkish, North African,...

This chapter focuses on students who continue in full-time education after compulsory schooling and asks whether minority students are disproportionately channelled into lower-status vocational tracks and are excluded from the high-status academic tracks which lead to higher education. The picture that emerges is of distinct patterns in different s...

Recently, there has been a proliferation of studies investigating the relationship between diversity and outcomes such as social cohesion and civic mindedness. This article addresses several common problems in this field and, using data for British neighbourhoods, elaborates on the experiences of both white British and ethnic minority respondents....

Drawing on comparative analyses from nine Western countries, we ask whether local-born children from a wide range of immigrant groups show patterns of female advantage in education that are similar to those prevalent in their host Western societies. We consider five outcomes throughout the educational career: test scores or grades at age 15, contin...

This article develops and tests a set of theoretical mechanisms by which candidate ethnicity may have affected the party vote choice of both white British and ethnic minority voters in the 2010 British general election. Ethnic minority candidates suffered an average electoral penalty of about 4 per cent of the three-party vote from whites, mostly b...

The aim of this special issue is to map the extent of generational change among Britain's ethnic minority population and to understand some of the underlying processes involved. Is there greater integration across generations, or has the ‘new second generation’ in Britain remained isolated from the mainstream, perhaps as a result of the prejudice a...

This paper subjects the criticisms advanced against multiculturalism to empirical test. It asks whether ethno-religious groups lead ‘parallel lives’ and, in consequence, fail to integrate with the wider society. It looks in particular at the alleged corrosive effects of multiculturalism, specifically at the maintenance of an ethnic rather than a Br...

Throughout Western Europe the children of immigrants continue to experience major ethnic penalties in the labour market in comparison with their peers from the majority group. Direct and indirect racial discrimination are undoubtedly part of the explanation for these penalties, but there are a range of other contributory factors too. Policy respons...

This proposal is for a repeat of the module on immigration attitudes fielded in the first round of the ESS in 2002/3, which has been extensively used in cross-national research and has made a major contribution to policy debates. A decade on, major political, cultural, economic and demographic developments make this a highly opportune time for a re...

This article focuses on questions and attitudes towards higher education in the British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey series. First, we analyse the changing BSA questions (1983–2010) in the context of key policy reports. Our results show that changes in the framing of higher education questions correspond with changes in the macro-discourse of high...

Democratic engagement is a multi-faceted phenomenon that embraces citizens' involvement with electoral politics, their participation in ‘conventional’ extra-parliamentary political activity, their satisfaction with democracy and trust in state institutions, and their rejection of the use of violence for political ends. Evidence from the 2010 BES an...

Thorough study of the political attitudes and behaviour of ethnic minorities in Britain First study with comparison of different ethnic minority groups Based on major new academic surveys Addresses major policy debates on discrimination, exclusion, marginalisation, and multiculturalism Britain has become increasingly diverse over the last fifty...

This Chapter provides a comprehensive overview of discrimination against immigrants and their children in OECD countries - its measurement, incidence and policy solutions.

This article reviews the evidence on New Labour’s educational achievements. It focuses on those aspects of policy that Labour itself highlighted in its manifestos, such as the raising of educational standards. A major issue, particularly on the issue of standards, is the methodological weaknesses of the statistics used. No firm conclusion can be dr...

An affirmative action programme, established by the Fair Employment (Northern Ireland) Act 1989, has been an important attempt to ensure ‘fair participation’ in employment for both Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland since 1990. The programme includes detailed monitoring of the community background of employees and requires employers to u...

The disadvantage experienced in the labour market by the ethnic groups currently in Britain has long been established. This study builds on earlier research by exploring how far religious affiliation can explain these inequalities. Distinguishing the effects of ethnicity and religion is difficult for both conceptual and technical reasons, due to th...

Using data from the 2010 UK general election, the article shows that there is a distinctive calculus of party choice among Britain's overwhelmingly Labour-supporting ethnic minorities. Ethnic minority (EM) voters are similar to whites in the importance they accord to partisanship and valence considerations in deciding which party they vote for. How...

This is a cross-national study of ethnic-minority disadvantage in the labour market. It focuses on the experiences of the second generation, that is, of the children of immigrants, in a range of affluent western countries (Western Europe, North America, Australia, Israel). Standard analyses, using the most authoritative available datasets for each...

We investigate the reasons why some people, and some countries, place greater or lesser emphasis on the idea that membership of a nation is tied to ancestry. We test the influence of two key factors - economic development and ethnic division. Economic development is strongly associated with support for the ancestry criterion of national membership....

Two studies investigated the role of intergroup contact in predicting collective action tendencies along with three key predictors proposed by the social identity model of collective action (SIMCA; Van Zomeren, Postmes, & Spears, 2008). Study 1 (N= 488 Black South African students) tested whether social identity would positively, whereas intergroup...

Past decades have witnessed significant expansion in the reach of public opinion surveys. While the need for comparable data from increasingly heterogeneous countries has led some to infer that survey practices must be centralized and identical, the explicit inclusion of variation between countries may well improve the enterprise of cross-national...

The main aims of the paper are to explore how far class origins and qualifications can account for ethnic minority disadvantage in Britain and to explore whether they operate in the same way for the ethnic minorities as they do for the white majority. Thus the paper examines both the processes that promote inclusion into advantaged positions (in th...

This paper investigates whether in 2010 ethnic minorities continued to give overwhelming support to Labour or whether the Conservatives made inroads, especially among the more middle‐class or entrepreneurial sections of the ethnic minority electorate. Does ethnicity over‐ride other social cleavages such as the class cleavage? Or does religion, espe...

Rates of staying‐on in education beyond the age of 16 have increased dramatically in recent decades, both in Western and developing countries. This expansion has led to upper‐secondary education providing for an increasingly diverse student population, and concerns have been raised regarding declining standards, grade inflation and the declining va...

The Labour government elected in 1997, which lost power in 2010, was the longest serving Labour administration Britain has ever had. This period saw an enormous expansion of further and higher education, and an increase in the proportion of students achieving school‐level qualifications. But have inequalities diminished as a result? We examine the...

From the perspective of segmented assimilation in the United States, a key question is whether the children of immigrant workers in European societies will experience socio-economic inclusion (“assimilation”) or exclusion (“segmentation”). This study focuses on the Turkish second generation in European cities as a critical case of ethnic segmentati...

This chapter addresses issues of discrimination in the labour market by using pooled data from the General Household Survey (GHS) and the Labour Force Survey (LFS) to conduct a systematic study from 1972 to 2005 to see how far equal opportunity has been achieved in British society. The authors consider the labour market position of ethnic minoritie...

This paper investigates trends, patterns and determinants of intermarriage (and partnership) comparing patterns among men and women and among different ethnic groups in Britain. We distinguish between endogamous (co-ethnic), majority/minority and minority/minority marriages. Hypotheses are derived from the theoretical literatures on assimilation, s...

This chapter compares the evidence on the labour market integration of the children of immigrants in the European OECD countries with that in North America. In both European OECD countries and North America, the children of immigrants from many non-western countries experience disadvantages in education and the labour market. Children of Turkish, N...

New research has shown that Northern Ireland's innovative affirmative action programme has resulted in improvements in fair employment, both for Catholics and Protestants. In this article, we provide a non-technical account of this research and some preliminary "headline" results, together with a brief analysis of some policy implications. More det...

This chapter focuses on intergenerational class mobility, that is on the extent to which sons (and daughters) follow in their fathers' footsteps. We ask how 'open' India is and whether it is becoming more 'open' with greater equality of opportunity as it modernises. We find that overall there are rather low rates of intergenerational social mobilit...

This chapter introduces the economic, social, and political aspects of Indian modernities. It considers the question of uneven modernisation and studies the sphere of politics. The Indian economy and reform is discussed in detail as well.

This paper examines the stratification of the curriculum according to parents' education, gender, ethnicity and school sector in England, focusing on year 10 subject choices. Using the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, we analyse both year 10 subject choices and the factors that may motivate these choices, such as liked and disliked su...

This article examines the cause of school type effects upon gaining a first class degree at Oxford University, whereby for a given level of secondary school performance, private school students perform less well at degree level. We compare the predictive power of an aptitude test and secondary school grades (GCSEs) for final examination performance...

Many international surveys include batteries of questions which are combined to form scales by secondary analysts who often treat these scales as unproblematic. However, to be able to make valid cross-national comparisons of values on scales such as these, we need to be sure that the variations genuinely reflect differences in populations rather th...

This article examines the extent to which cultural capital helps to explain the link between social background and gaining an offer for study at the University of Oxford. We find that cultural knowledge, rather than participation in the beaux arts, is related to admissions decisions.This effect is particularly pronounced in arts subjects. We only p...

Background This analysis compares the educational attainments of the “new” second generation in Britain, Canada, and the United States using three nationally representative datasets. Objective To assess how the second generation has fared within Western educational systems. The study examines the achievements of seven minority ethnic groups: Afric...

Many writers have suggested that as we move from an industrial to a post-industrial society, traditional social identities such as class will decline in social significance (Clark and Lipset, 1991; Pakulski and Waters, 1996; though compare Hout et al., 1993). Clark and Lipset, for example, have posed the question, ‘Are classes dying?’, while in a b...

Such an imaginary exchange captures a commonly held view about national identity in England (Kumar, 2003). As members of by far the predominant part of the Union, people in England can easily come to regard England and Britain as synonymous with each other. The remainder of the United Kingdom impinges little on their everyday lives or consciences....

Purpose – This paper seeks to investigate ethnic disadvantages in the UK labour market in the last three decades. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on data from the most authoritative government surveys, the gross and net differences in employment status and class position between minority ethnic and White British men covering 34 years (1972‐20...

This paper reviews recent research in ten Western European countries on the educational and labor market outcomes of second-generation minorities. Minorities from less-developed origins appear to be particularly disadvantaged in education, access to the labor market, and occupational attainment. Disadvantages are most evident with test scores early...

We are grateful to the ESRC for funding this research (Socio-economic position and political support of the BMEs in Britain (1971-2004), ESRC (RES-163-25-0003)) and for the UK Data Archive for making data accessible to us. We alone are responsible for any error that might exist in the analysis and interpretation of the data reported in this paper....

This article examines how national pride has changed in Britain since the beginning of the 1980s. We show that there have been large declines in pride and that this is exclusively generational in nature; with more recent generations having substantially lower levels of pride in 'Britishness' than previous generations. Confirming the reality of 'Tha...

This paper explores the relationship between the reading attainment of a group of 8–14 year olds in long-term foster care and factors in their histories and current home environments. The findings suggest that children's early histories before entry to care may have an effect on their educational attainment in middle childhood. Some amelioration of...

The experience of the second generation of migrants gives a clearer idea of whether liberal developed countries of Europe and North America provide equal opportunities to all their citizens, irrespective of their ethnic or national origin. This chapter examines the relationship between patterns of ethnic disadvantage and the nature of each country'...

Britain has long been home to migrants from Ireland (which until 1921 had been part of the United Kingdom). More recently, it has seen major inflows from a number of less-developed countries such as Jamaica, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Kenya, and Hong Kong that had formerly been part of the British Empire. While there is some reason to believe that t...

Canada is a classic country of immigration with 21% of its working-age population being first generation and a further 9% second generation. Canada has also been notable in the last quarter of the twentieth century for its 'point system' for selection of economic immigrants, and indeed the first generation proves to be highly educated (more so inde...

Ethnic minority disadvantage in the labour market has been a matter of growing concern in many developed countries in recent years. Discrimination on the basis of ascriptive factors, such as social origins or ethnicity, is generally regarded to be a source of economic inefficiency and waste. More importantly, it is a source of social injustice and...

1 Executive Summary 1. Ever since systematic data on ethnic minorities in the labour market started to be collected over thirty years ago, the evidence has shown that ethnic minority employment rates are substantially lower than those of the white British. Currently the gap is around ten percentage points for men, although varying from one ethnic g...

This paper reports findings from a longitudinal study on the educational progress and behaviour of children in long‐term foster care and a ‘comparison’ group of children receiving social work support while remaining with their birth families. The study reinforces earlier research showing low attainment and high levels of behaviour problems among ch...

Educational expansion has been a major change in the sociological profile of post-war Western democracies, whilst various theses have long been advanced about correlations between educational levels and politics. Several of these theses are examined for the atypical British case of educational change, drawing upon new survey data from the 1983 Brit...

This article applies theoretical ideas in the literature on the household division of labor to the analysis of partners’ political preferences. We regress men's and women's political party preferences on their own and their partners’ characteristics using data from the 1991 British Household Panel Survey (N =2,846). We find a symmetrical pattern of...

Acknowledgements: we are grateful to the ESRC which funded much of the research on which this report draws, especially through the Identities and Social Action programme (RES 148-25-0031). We are also very grateful to Richard Wyn Jones for his comments and for providing the data for Wales.

The aim of this study was to: • review the current position of ethnic minorities in Britain’s labour market; • explore how ethnic minority representation and achievement varies by different employer characteristics; • establish how far these variations might be linked to discrimination in the workplace. This report presents findings based on data...