Patterns of Immigrant Political Behaviour in Australia: An Analysis of Immigrant Voting in Ethnic Context.

Immigration is becoming an increasingly important issue in virtually every Western democracy. However, immigrants' participation in politics varies greatly from country to country. This article identifies and explains the two key determinants of this variation. We establish that ethnicity along with traditional socioeconomic factors are the two primary forces that determine immigrant political behaviour. We theorise immigrants' ethnic differences from the native population, along indicators such as language and residential segregation, increase information costs and create barriers to participation in politics as well as influencing partisanship. To test our theory, we analyze data from the Australian Election Study (AES) from 1993 to 2010. The results of the analysis in this paper provide strong empirical support for our theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]