Search

This paper analyzes the manner in which ethnicity has affected the course of American and Canadian party politics. Specifically, the paper tries to demonstrate that although the social processes involved in the migration of large numbers of ethnics have been relatively similar in both societies, the manner in which the social reality of ethnicity has affected the political structures therein has been quite different. Thus, although successive immigrant groups became the chief political resource of the great American urban party machines, they were able to use the existing political structures for their own purposes. Ethnic groups have derived psychological and more tangible benefits, such as public and party office positions, and have strongly affected the foreign and domestic policy positions of the two major parties. In contrast, Canadian party leaden historically have been able to exploit ethnic cleavages, but rarely have had to play the game of ethnic politics in the maimer of their American counterparts. In fact, ethnicity continues to strongly affect American political structures even as it moves into the realm of an index of more important social facts, while Canadian political structures have remained relatively impervious to ethnic groups despite the fact that ethnicity continues to be a factor of major importance in Canadian social organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper began with an attempt to formalize the Davis-Moore functional theory of social stratification. It was found that the theory could be represented by a static model consisting of two algebraic equations with appropriate constraints on the functions. Then the tools of path analysis were used to evaluate the empirical adequacy of the Davis-Moore and Parsonian functional theories of social stratification as representations of cultural beliefs about stratification. Because of the likely presence of measurement and sampling errors, it was impossible to reject definitely either of the models. However, the estimated path coefficients were more consistent with the Parsonian theory than the Davis-Moore theory. This led to an inquiry into the conditions under which one model would be a better representation than the other. It was argued that the Davis-Moore scheme would provide a more accurate representation of cultural beliefs under conditions of high organizational interdependence whereas the Parsonian framework would give a better representation under conditions of low interdependence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been almost twenty years since Davis and Moore published their famed theory of stratification. During this period, the discussions which it has engendered have been numerous and highly instructive. It is now time to address ourselves to problems which concern the testability of the theory and its experimental validity. This paper reports the results of an empirical study of one of the basic issues raised by Davis and Moore. A major proposition of their theory argues that in the final analysis, social stratification arises in a society because of differential rewards for performance in the social positions therein. These rewards can be of several types. For our purposes, two are of major importance: symbolic and economic rewards, hereafter referred to as "prestige" and "reward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]