The Extent to Which Voting by Ethnic Minorities Reflects...

The Extent to Which Voting by Ethnic Minorities Reflects the Voting Behaviour of the Whole Electorate In present day there are currently 12 ethnic minority MP’s in parliament, all of who belong to the Labour party. Ethnic minority groups tend to be part of the immigrant population and so are more likely to belong to the working class and so have a stronger party identification with labour. This can be shown in the 1997 general election in which 70% of Asian voters and 86% of Black voters voted for labour. The difference in the two could be to do with the fact that Asian people in particular have been very successful in Britain with setting up businesses so in the 1997 elections the 25% of Asian†¦show more content†¦Although I have already explained that the ethnic minorities tend to have a stronger party identification with labour. In the 2001 census the ethnic minorities groups actually only totalled to 8% of the population which doesn’t reflect even a tenth of the electorate, so in which case you could argue that voting by ethnic minorities doesn’t really make much of a difference with that of the whole electorate and so doesn’t reflect the voting behaviour. At the moment Britain as a whole is facing a period of volatility in comparison to the ethnic minorities period of stability, although they are not participating within elections because of voter apathy, which does reflect the whole electorate. Reasons for the period of volatility, [in comparison to the period of 1945-70 when there was a strong partisan alignment within classes, parties focused their policies around classes and over 80% of people (the same figure of ethnic minorities identifying with labour in 2001) identified with their party] could be the influence of the mass media on today’s society which is changing peoples opinions of the government. For example in 1997 Murdoch, the editor of the sun, claimed that he had won labour the election by changing to a pro labour paper giving them better publicity with the