This paper examines the effect of institutional contact on political participation among non-White communities. While both formal and informal institutions help shape community citizen participation, their effects vary on the historical inclusion (or exclusion) of certain racial groups. Formal institutions, like political parties, have historically excluded or neglected non-White and immigrant voters. We argue that for the excluded or neglected, non-traditional political institutions, like community based organizations, serve as supplements to facilitate political incorporation and engagement. These informal institutions help develop skills and resources among their constituents, and offer routine opportunities to participate. We use the 2008 Collaborative Multi-racial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) to test the differential effects of self-reported voter mobilization through nonpartisan and partisan institutional contact to explain variations among racial groups by the intensity of contact, occurrence of co-ethnic outreach, and type of institutional mobilization. We find that while contact by a partisan/political institution, like a political party or campaign, has an overall positive effect on political participation for all voters, contact by a nonpartisan/civic or community group is substantively more important for Latino and Asian American voter mobilization. Our analysis therefore offers cohesive evidence of how voters interact with and are affected by mobilization efforts that attends to differences across racial and ethnic boundaries, and variations in institutional contact.

U.S. immigration policy over the last 100 years has changed the onus of political acculturation from public programs to private groups like churches. After this significant policy change, how do religion, social capital, and nativity intersect in the political mobilization of racial minorities? Furthermore, after the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, the country of origin of immigrants shifted from European countries to Latin America and Asia. Scholars have theorized that churches play a pivotal role in the socialization of immigrants by providing a place of belonging and a community willing to teach newcomers about the goings-on of American political society. How have these acculturation policies worked under new immigration populations? Previous scholarly work has connected social capital with churches, though their relationship to political participation has been minimal. We hypothesize that social capital and religious tradition have a multiplicative effect on the participation rates of believers, but that race mitigates that effect. The positioning of racial groups in broader society impacts the significance and role of churches within these communities. We use Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) 2016 data to examine the connection between social capital, religion, and political behavior in a novel attempt to systematically identify the unique role of churches in the mobilization of racial minority communities. We use these results to suggest that the current policies of privatizing political acculturation have had less success with more recent waves of immigrants.

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