The Foundations of Latino Voter Partisanship: Evidence from the 2000 Election

Abstract

Studies of partisan identification in the U.S. have concentrated on Anglo Americans. We argue that by focusing only on the descendents of naturalized, mostly white, immigrants, that previous research may have been biased toward largely sociological accounts for the development of partisan attitudes. Here we study the partisan affiliations of Latino voters and argue that by examining their partisan attitudes we should find that their partisanship is more explicitly political than Anglos. We utilize a telephone survey of Latino likely voters in the 2000 presidential election and find that Latino voter partisanship is shaped by both political and social factors.

Spatial and Temporal Proximity: Examining the Effects of Protests on Political Attitudes

“…The models include a dummy variable for whether respondents are first generation, since they are less likely to be politically acculturated and may be more likely to find politics confusing. Given differences in Latino political attitudes based on national origin groups (Abrajano and Alvarez 2010;Alvarez and García-Bedolla 2003), we also include dichotomous measures for whether respondents are of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, or El Salvadoran decent. 12 For example, Cubans are usually the most conservative among national origin groups, whereas Mexicans and Puerto Ricans are typically the most liberal.…”

Racialization in times of contention: how social movements influence Latino racial identity

“…We control for partisan differences by including a dichotomous variable for Democrat respondents. Given differences in Latino political attitudes based on national origin groups (Alvarez and García Bedolla 2003;Abrajano and Alvarez 2010), we also include dummy variables for Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, and Salvadoran respondents.…”

The Local Political Context of Latino Partisanship

“…Therefore their partisan ties might be more cemented so that by adulthood the local political environment has much less of an influence. For newer generations, partisan attachments may not be as firmly cemented because their socialization to partisan politics is different (Alvarez and Bedolla 2003;Bowler, Nicholson, and Segura 2006). Furthermore, local partisan environments could have a greater influence on immigrants given that "community-level political activities are open to unauthorized immigrants and legal immigrants not yet eligible for naturalization (DeSipio 2011(DeSipio , 1193."…”