elective affinity

Calque of German Wahlverwandtschaft.

elective affinity (plural elective affinities)

1. (sociology) A process by which two cultural forms (e.g. religious, intellectual, political or economic) having certain similarities or kinships enter into a relationship of reciprocal attraction and influence, and mutual reinforcement.[1]
   • 2000, Milton Fisk, Toward a Healthy Society: The Morality and Politics of American Health Care Reform, Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, Chapter 8, pp. 196-197,

     Weber spoke of an elective affinity between a form of religious belief (Protestantism) and a practical ethics (the work ethic of capitalism). His idea can be extended to explain how different groups come to have a basis for entering a single party.

2. (dated) The feeling of being attracted to or sympathetic with someone or something.
   • 1901, John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics‎, London, Section 17, pp. 62-63:

     Matrimony was not a matter of elective affinity between two persons seeking to spend their lives agreeably and profitably in common, so much as an institution used by the state for raising vigorous recruits for the national army.

3. (chemistry, obsolete) The tendency of a substance to combine with some specific substances more readily than others.

   Synonym: elective attraction

   • 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles”, in Essays‎, Boston: James Munroe, page 259:

     Has the naturalist or chemist learned his craft, who has explored the gravity of atoms and the elective affinities, who has not yet discerned the deeper law whereof this is only a partial or approximate statement, namely, that like draws to like; and that the goods which belong to you, gravitate to you, and need not be pursued with pains and cost?

• valence

• “elective affinity”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.