The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (169 page)

The body of ideas and approaches associated with the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan, which has been conducting national surveys of the US electorate since 1952. In their landmark study
The American Voter
(1960), they set out the evidence that voters' decisions on party support were determined much more by their long-term
political socialization
, notably by tending to inherit their parents' orientations, than by ideology, issues, or evaluation of the competence of the candidates. The anchoring factor was thus a voter's
party identification
, which was typically stable even if in a given election the voter might support another party for, say, the Presidency.
Michigan ideas were highly influential in election studies elsewhere, including the United Kingdom. They have been challenged by the rise of rational choice approaches, and by new evidence showing the greater salience of
issue voting
and retrospective evaluation of the incumbents' performance. Survey analysts, including those at Michigan, are more catholic in their approaches now than in the 1950s and 1960s.

 
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The branch of economics which deals with the choices of individual economic actors such as households and firms. Microeconomists are marginalists and use calculus extensively to build formal models of the interactions of numerous market actors in (and out of)
equilibrium
. Microeconomic models have been imported into politics by writers in the
rational choice tradition
.

 
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The class or social stratum lying above the working class and below the upper class. It is a term that everybody uses every day, but hardly anybody ever defines. The earliest use of it recorded in the
Oxford English Dictionary
was by Queen Carolineof Denmark in 1766; however, she denied its existence in Denmark. The term settles into something like its present meaning by 1843, when George Borrow talks about ‘the middle class, shopkeepers and professional men’. The middle class are distinguished from the
working class
by occupation and education. They are distinguished from the upper class, apparently, by seriousness, moral purpose, and earning a living. Nowadays, a large proportion of respondents class themselves as middle class when asked which social class they belong to—as many as 80 per cent in typical surveys in the United States.
The term clearly refers to status rather than to
class
. People are judged to be middle class or otherwise more by their level of education, the physical conditions in which they work, and/or their consumption habits than by their relationship to the means of production. An example of each follows:

(1) 
Education
. In Victorian Britain, when the present system of school-leaving examinations supervised by the universities was introduced, they were sometimes called the ‘middle class examinations’. For a century from the 1850s to the 1950s passing such examinations was regarded as a passport to the middle class. Although fading, this idea is still found.
(2) 
Physical conditions
. ‘White collar’ is a near-synonym for middle class, and ‘blue collar’ for working class. Thus a job is middle class if it is done in clean conditions and does not involve heavy manual work. A working-class job is perceived as one done in dirty conditions which require protective clothing. This distinction is also fading with the rapid change in the nature of work since the 1960s.
(3) 
Consumption habits
. The commonest measurements of
class
are those used by the advertising industry to classify those who read or watch particular media. But advertisers are interested only in consumption habits, not in class properly defined.

The basis for the commonly expressed view that ‘we are all middle class now’ is therefore:

(1) that many or most of us call ourselves middle class; and
(2) that the old badges of status of the working class are no longer reliable.

 
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The permanent movement of individuals or groups from one place to another. Migration is of course a basic fact of human history. Recent work on the ‘mitochondrial Eve hypothesis’ has used the diversity of mitochondrial DNA to trace the maternal lineage of different ethnic groups and hence infer the patterns of population migration. Mitochondria are the energy generators of the cell, which have their own genetic message of DNA, separate from that in the cell nucleus. Mitochondrial DNA may be regarded as an evolutionary clock. The more similar the mitochondrial DNA of a pair of individuals, the more recent was their last common ancestor. The oldest branching of the mitochondrial tree separated the group studied into two subsets, one of them consisting only of Africans and the other of people from all five continents; and the diversity among Africans was much greater than that within any other ethnic group. This research therefore suggests that we all have a common mitochondrial ancestor, who lived in Africa perhaps 200,000 years ago.
The politics of migration and race can be explosive. Emigrants are pushed by war or starvation. Immigrants are pulled by freedom or jobs.
émigrés
(literally those who have emigrated; used especially of those who fled from the
French Revolution
and supported counter-revolutionary armies against the French Republic) are angry about whatever drove them from home and therefore may campaign, peacefully or otherwise, against those who occupy their homeland.
émigré
politics gave popular support to Hitler's drive to the East before and during the Second World War, as many Germans lived to the east of Germany's interwar boundaries, Irish
émigré
politics have led to massive support, especially in North America, for both the peaceful and the violent wings of Irish nationalism. Immigrants typically provoke the hostility of the native population, who accuse them of taking their jobs or undermining their culture. Easily identifiable immigrants are a handy scapegoat for frustration, whatever its true cause may be.
Democratic societies have various ways of trying to resolve these tensions. Many have severe restrictions on immigration, although trying to dump the problem on somebody else is not a generalizable solution to the problem of emigration push or immigration pull. Some, such as the United States, base citizenship on birth in the country. Others, such as Ireland, base it on having had direct ancestors who were born in the country. Others again, such as Germany and Israel, base it on ethnicity irrespective of place of birth. Given that the member states of the
European Union
face common domestic hostility to immigration, have enormous pools of potential migrants close to their external frontier, and have very different conceptions of citizenship, it is predictable that the politics of migration will be one of the tensest issues in the EU in the 1990s and onwards. See also
irredentism
.

 
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