Citation:
Date Presented:
10 February 2012Abstract:
A wide range of factors are thought to be important in the formation of political opinion in immigrant-origin populations, including individual-level, group-level, and context-based factors. Studies have shown that in various communities and circumstances, such variables influence participation, partisanship, and left-right orientation. However, these studies usually focus on only one of the aforementioned aspects of political opinion (participation, partisanship, and left-right orientation), and the results that they find have been contradictory. In addition, the studies have almost exclusively focused on immigrant-origin populations in North America or Europe, leaving a geographic gap in the investigation of context-based arguments.
This thesis attempts to address this gap in the literature by studying a community of immigrant-origin Palestinians in Chile. It examines political opinion formation within this group, attempting to determine why some individuals have developed political perspectives that differ from the rest of the group. In doing so, it draws upon original field research gathered from the Palestinian Chilean community over a period of three months in Santiago. Using in-depth interviews, it finds that one factor cannot conclusively explain participation, partisanship, and orientation within this population. Rather, it concludes that the interaction between contextual factors (the political environment) and individual-level factors (such as education, age, and occupation) is most relevant.