Social scientists have long treated ethnicity as socially constructed and historically contingent, rather than fixed at birth and transmitted across generations in a linear fashion. A growing body of work has theorised and examined how individuals construct and express their ethnic identities in a variety of contexts and at different life course stages. Most studies have focused on Indigenous and ethnic minority groups; studies focusing on the experience of majority or dominant groups are rare. Utilising a unique longitudinal census dataset that links whole census microdata in successive censuses, this article adds to the literature by empirically measuring the relative fluidity or rigidity of majority European ethnic identification over several decades. Analysing four sets of linked census pairs, we find that European patterns of self-identification diverge significantly from those of Māori and ethnic minority groups. Individuals who identify solely as European in one census are far less likely to change their ethnic self-identification in the next census. These findings suggest that affiliation to dominant ethnicity operates in ways that are meaningfully different to other ethnic groups, indicating key cross-category differences in how majority ethnicity is socially constructed.

社会科学家长期以来一直将种族视为社会建构和历史偶然性，而不是在出生时就固定下来并以线性方式世代传播。越来越多的工作已经理论化并检查了个人如何在各种情况下以及不同的人生历程中构建和表达自己的种族身份。大多数研究集中于土著和少数族裔群体。专注于多数或优势群体经验的研究很少。本文利用一个独特的纵向人口普查数据集，将连续的人口普查中的整个人口普查微观数据联系起来，通过经验地测量几十年来大多数欧洲种族认同的相对流动性或刚性，将其添加到文献中。分析四组链接的人口普查对，我们发现，欧洲人的自我认同模式与毛利人和少数民族群体有很大差异。在一次人口普查中仅识别为欧洲人的个人在下一次人口普查中更改其种族自我认同的可能性要低得多。这些发现表明，与主要种族的隶属关系与其他种族有显着不同，这表明多数种族在社会建构方式上存在关键的跨类别差异。