The impact of racial context on the political behavior of Anglos has been a focus of social science research for well over half a century. We suggest that a shortcoming of earlier work has been the failure to account for the levels of segregation within a community. Relying on data from the Latino National Political Survey, our findings show that Anglo attitudes toward English-language and immigration policies are significantly related to changes in the size of the Latino population conditional on levels of segregation. We also find that Latinos elicit different reactions from Anglos based on their fluency in English and nativity.

Objective. We reexamine the issue of phenotypic discrimination against Mexicans in the U.S. labor market, originally studied by Telles and Murguía (1990) and later by Bohara and Davila (1992). We also seek to explain this topic with respect to the Puerto Rican and Cuban populations in the United States. Methods. Instead of using household income as a dependent variable, we use occupational ranking scores computed by Hauser and Warren (1996) in combination with data from the 1990 Latino National Political Survey (LNPS). The occupational rankings more accurately reflect the level of labor market discrimination faced by individuals. Furthermore, the use of the more recent LNPS allows us to update the work of previous scholars and extend the analysis to two previously unexamined Latino groupsPuerto Ricans and Cubans. Results. Our findings indicate that darker-skinned Mexicans and Cubans face significantly lower occupational prestige scores than their lighter-skinned counterparts even when controlling for factors that influence performance in the labor market. However, we find no conclusive evidence that skin-color differences impact occupational prestige scores for Puerto Ricans.

Although some argue that Internet use may erode involvement in public life, the most common Internet behaviors, social communication and information searching, may actually foster social and civic participation. To examine this possibility, we test a series of non-recursive models using a national survey of nearly 3,400 respondents. Two-stage least squares regressions were performed to simultaneously test the reciprocal relationship between frequency of Internet use (i.e., hours per day) and three sets of community engagement behaviors: informal social interaction, attendance at public events, and participation in civic volunteerism (i.e., annual frequency). Time spent online has a positive relationship with public attendance and civic volunteerism. No evidence of time displacement from frequency of Internet use is observed.

This article examines the way in which racial/ethnic context influences Latino support for ethnic political causes. Welch et al. argue that feelings of solidarity within the African American community intensify as the size of the African American population in an individual's residential environment increases. We extend this hypothesis to Latinos, while also considering how other scholars have hypothesized different structural patterns of residence among Latinos to influence their political behavior. We also consider how higher levels of in-group heterogeneity within the Latino community might complicate this relationship. These hypotheses are tested using data from the 1999 Harvard/ Kaiser/Washington Post National Survey of Latinos. We find that higher levels of segregation between Anglos and Latinos dampen the positive relationship between Latino group size and participation in ethnic political causes.The manner in which individuals' environments shape their political behavior has been a perennial concern for political scientists. The influence of environmental factors is especially acute for scholars of racial and ethnic

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