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This article presents an empirical test of three hypotheses dealing with the modernisation of polyethnic societies. An hypothesis derived from the functionalist/developmental perspective and two hypotheses derived from the conflict/competition perspective are assessed using survey data on Francophone‐Anglophone relations in contemporary Quebec. The main conclusions are that 1) the cross‐sectional design using survey data allows a clear test of Hechter's (1975) reactive ethnicity hypothesis; 2) the reactive ethnicity hypothesis is supported in the analysis; 3) the resource competition hypothesis (e.g., Nielsen 1980) is also supported; 4) the reactive ethnicity and resource competition hypotheses are not necessarily mutually exclusive, as some recent authors have claimed (Nielsen 1980; Ragin 1979), and can best be seen as two variants of the same communal competition perspective imbedded in the conflict theory tradition.