Inductivist

I showed recently that Americans overwhelming select someone of the same race for a best friend.  Friendship is a good measure of how well groups are mixing, or, on the other hand, how much they cluster.

In this post, let's focus on religion. Does your best friend share your religious affiliation?  I used General Social Survey (GSS) data to answer this question (sample size = 1,932).  Here are the percentages who indicated a religious match between themselves and their best friend:

Percent whose best friend belongs to the same religion

Jews  75.6
Protestants  74.5
Catholics   59.4
None  42.3

Jews emerge as the group that clusters the most.  You might respond that Protestants have basically the same number, but we would expect a high number for a such a large group.  According to the latest GSS, 48.9% of Americans are Protestant, 23.3% are None, 21.2% are Catholic, and 1.7% are Jewish. If Protestants picked their friends at random, their best friend would also be Protestant around half the time. For Jews, a random process would give a Jewish best friend less than 2 percent of the time, and yet the number is over 75%.  This shows an intense level of clustering among Jews.

I recently presented evidence that non-whites tend to be clannish because they are non-white, not because they are outnumbered. But I also mentioned that there is variation among whites. This is consistent with bloggers hbd chick  and JayMan who stress that not all Europeans are the same, and that the Hajnal line divides them.

Using the General Social survey question ("When you think about yourself, how important is your ethnic group membership to your sense of who you are?" 1 = not at all, 2 = slightly, 3 = moderately, 4 = very) I calculated the mean score for various white groups:

Using General Social Survey day, I've shown before that non-white Americans are much more ethnocentric or clannish than whites.

Now this could be due to whites, especially those with ancestors from northwestern Europe, being more universalistic than other groups, or it could be due to the self-consciousness that comes from being in a very small group. You feel surrounded, so you stick together. This would mean that tiny whites groups would be clannish, too. Are Greek Americans, for example, somewhat clannish because they are a tiny slice of America, or because they are naturally ethnocentric?

I looked at this by creating a variable for ethnic group size. The group was scored 1, 2, or 3 depending on whether it was small, medium, or large.  English, Italians, and Finns, respectively, serve as examples.

Next, I regressed how important your ethnic group is to you on to variables I thought might be related to clannishness.  Here I show the standardized OLS coefficients (sample size = 1,959):

Importance of ethnic group to you

Age   .10***
Male   .00
Non-white  .32***
Immigrant   .06*
City size  .02   
Education   -.03
Ethnic group size  .03

The variables that significantly predict clannishness from strongest to weakest are: non-white, being older, and being an immigrant. The other variables, including ethnic group size, don't matter.

(For age, perhaps people tend to "come home" as they get older, similar to what you see with religious involvement.)

So non-whites are not clannish because they're small and thus feel they need to stick together; rather, they are ethnocentric because that's who they are. Whites tend to be universalistic because that's who they are.

This has implications for assimilation. Evidently, non-whites will remain clannish even after being here for generations, as blacks and Native Americans have done. (I should mention that there is variation: according to GSS data, Japanese Americans are not ethnocentric, while Orthodox Jews are.)

If you want immigrants to become true blue Americans with no other loyalties, invite whites to move here.