Status Inconsistency and Ethnoreligious Group Membership as Determinants of Social Participation and Political Attitudes

As a test of the theory of status inconsistency, the effects of ethnoreligious group membership and education on several economic and political attitudes and indicators of social participation were analyzed, using survey data on a white native-born Detroit sample. It was hypothesized that if status-inconsistency effects were operating, we would observe statistical interaction effects between ethnoreligious group membership and education, and that these interactions would vary as a function of ethnoreligious status. For some variables and for some ethnoreligious groups, regression analysis demonstrated the existence of interaction effects. However, they were not the specific interaction effects anticipated on the basis of status-inconsistency theory. Rather, we attribute our results to the persistence of subcultural differences within ethnoreligious groups in Detroit.