He Pōkēkē Uenuku I Tū Ai: A Quantitative Exploration of Māori Identity, Political Attitudes, and Behaviour

Abstract

To be Māori is to be political. Our history is filled with political struggles and victories. These struggles, originating from experiences of colonisation and assimilation, have greatly influenced what it is to be Māori today. This thesis explores the relationship between Māori ethnic identity, and political attitudes and outcomes. In this thesis, I present five studies (across four published papers and one full manuscript) which validate the Multidimensional Model of Māori Identity and Cultural Engagement (MMM-ICE2). I focus particular attention on the scale’s Socio- Political Consciousness dimension, and illustrate the links between identity and politics for Māori. The MMM-ICE2 is a seven-dimension scaled designed with Māori, by Māori, and for Māori to measure Māori ethnic identity (Houkamau & Sibley, 2010, 2015a). In the first two studies, I focus on using psychometric techniques to further validate the MMM-ICE2 as a measurement tool. Firstly, I use random intercept exploratory factor analysis to show that the scale is not vulnerable to acquiescent responding (yea-saying; Greaves, Houkamau, & Sibley, 2017). The second study uses multigroup confirmatory factor analysis to illustrate that the MMM-ICE2 shows reasonable measurement equivalence across diverse Māori groups (Greaves, Manuela et al., 2017). In the third study of the thesis, I demonstrate that Māori, broadly defined, are more likely to vote for the political left – the Labour, Green, and New Zealand First parties – over the centre-right National Party (Greaves, Robertson et al., 2017). The results lay the groundwork for two further studies, which demonstrate the construct validity of the Socio-Political Consciousness dimension of the scale by predicting a range of political attitudes and behaviours. Study Four shows that, above and beyond the effects of demographics, Māori enrolled to vote on the Māori electoral roll were higher on the Socio-Political Consciousness and Group Membership Evaluation dimensions (Greaves, Osborne, Houkamau, & Sibley, 2017). Additionally, in Study Five, I demonstrate that higher Socio-Political Consciousness for Māori is related to higher levels of support for Māori rights protests, the left-wing Green Party, and the Māori-issue focussed, Māori and Mana political parties (Greaves, Sengupta et al., 2017). Yet, lower levels of Socio-Political Consciousness were related to higher support for the right-wing National Party. Taken together, these studies show that the MMM-ICE2 scale and the Socio-Political Consciousness dimension can predict important, realworld political outcomes and attitudes for Māori. Finally, I discuss the contributions that the papers in this thesis have made to the literature, and the inevitable limitations of the research. I then provide future research directions for the study of quantitative Māori identity and for Māori political participation more generally. I finish with reflections on the process of writing this thesis and on being an emerging Māori quantitative researcher.