Studies have been devoted to important methodological and conceptual matters to do with how, and how not, to study minority political participation. This continues to be a vexed question despite almost three decades of national surveys on the topic, and this book addresses these points by outlining the rationale for its own development of survey and measurement techniques and the evidence produced therein. One recurring theme has been the relationship between mainstream electoral and other channels of participation. This theme is considered more extensively within this book, but at this point it is sufficient to recall that perhaps inevitably the lion's share of attention has been devoted to electoral questions. The book assesses why minority patterns of participation and partisanship look as they do. A number of quite striking patterns have been discernible from earlier evidence and are examined in considerable detail. The book addresses the so-called 'refeeding' debate by exploring the meaning of recent empirical voting evidence for representation theory and political strategy. The idea that ethnic minorities have distinctive and collective interests in politics has been debated regularly in Britain and is further considered, along with some detailed evidence. The book examines this dilemma with the use of empirical survey evidence and reveals that the institutional-circumstantial aspects of social representation are often crucial to understanding causal relationships. Political science theory can conceptualise the role of ethnicity in a number of ways.