Dario Moreno

Second-Generation Cubans.

This article tests the hypothesis that second-generation Cuban Americans have significantly different political attitudes than either their parents or more recent Cuban immigrants to the United States. Using the unique data set provided by the Latino National Political Survey, the article investigates whether or not there are differences between the following three sets of Cuban Americans: those born in the United States, those whofirst arrived in the United States at the age of 10 or younger and those who immigrated to the United States when they were over the age of 10. The authors find significant differences between these three groups in several sets of political attitudes, including partisanship, trust in the federal government, feelings of closeness toward the Cuban American community, and support for increased governmental spending. Interestingly, the authors find no significant differences among Cuban Americans over the question of reestablishing relations with the Castro regime.

Racial and Partisan Voting in a Tri-Ethnic City: The 1996 Dade County Mayoral Election

Through an analysis of the 1996 Dade County, Florida mayoral election, this article explains which is more important in vote choice in a racially-diverse polity—ethnicity or partisanship. We directly test this question in a metropolitan local election that constitutes a unique natural experiment. In September 1996, Dade County held a mayoral election with four major candidates whose partisan and ethnic interactions were not normal for the political history of the area: a Black Republican, a Puerto Rican Democrat, a Cuban American Democrat, and a Cuban American Independent. There was no non-Hispanic White (Anglo) candidate, even though Anglos constituted the bare plurality of the county’s registered voters. In the October runoff, the Black Republican challenged the Cuban American Democrat in a county where over 80% of registered Black voters are Democrats, and over 60% of registered Hispanic voters are Republicans. As such, this election gives scholars a unique opportunity to untangle the effects of ethnicity and partisanship on vote choice. Using a three-wave survey of Dade County voters in 1996, we find that ethnicity was an overwhelmingly more powerful predictor of vote choice than partisanship. We assess the implications of how this study can be generalized to other multi-ethnic polities.

Language as a Variable: English, Spanish, Ethnicity, and Political Opinion Polling in South Florida

This article argues that conducting public opinion surveys in Spanish as well as English is crucial to the study of the modern Latino electorate. Unfortunately, the conventional wisdom is to survey only in English because, so the argument goes, the validity and reliability problems raised by bilingual polling and translation do not make it worthwhile to conduct surveys in two languages. The authors challenge this assertion with evidence from six political surveys in Miami-Dade County, Florida, that were conducted in both English and Spanish. It is found that, had the conventional wisdom been followed and the polls been conducted in English only, results would have been profoundly inaccurate and invalid. The authors further take advantage of bilingual survey research methodology and assess the level of difference between the survey responses of English-speaking and Spanish-speaking Latino voters, comparing the former to non-Hispanic White voters as well. It was found that, on average, English-speaking Hispanic voters gave sets of responses to different survey questions that were roughly equidistant between those of non-Hispanic Whites and Spanish-dominant Hispanics. The importance of these findings, not only for the survey research methods literature but also for assimilationist models of ethnicity, is assessed.

U.S. Policy in Central America: The Endless Debate

Under Carter and Reagan, US foreign policy toward Central America failed. In this intriguing study, Dario Moreno explains how policy in those administrations was made, tracing its failure to a foreign policy establishment plagued by division and lack of consensus. Moreno shows that in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, and Cuba, Carter and Reagan played out two dramatically different Third World strategies and that neither Carters liberal internationalists nor Reagans rollback theorists understood the reality changes in those countries. Morenos study draws authenticity from his interviews and discussions with a dozen key Central American policy makers in each of the two administrations and with eminent political figures in Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, among them, Patricia Derian, assistant secretary of state for human rights under Carter, Elliot Abrams, Reagans assistant secretary of state for human rights, and former president of Honduras, Jose Azocona.

“Bureaucratic Bargaining”: An American Foreign Policy Simulation

The complexities of the governmental machinery and personal perceptions involved in the formulation of American foreign policy are difficult for students to comprehend from the confines of the classroom. Beginning students often enter the study of international relations/political science with a simplistic view of policy making. They tend to accept a priori what Graham Allison (1971) calls the “rational actor model” in which students “package the activities of various officials of a national government as action chosen by a unified actor, strongly analogous to an individual human being.” Students often believe that foreign policy is set by a cohesive group of individuals who share common goals and preferences. The additional tendency to anthropomorphize the state leads undergraduates to write papers in which nation-states are portrayed with such diverse human qualities as sympathy, cruelty, greed, and aggression. Modern scholarship on decision making has expanded beyond this traditional view to encompass differing variables. There is an ongoing debate in the discipline as to what is the most potent variable in American foreign policy. One group of scholars contends that the bureaucratic or role variable is more important. While agreeing that role is a powerful restriction, particularly at the lower levels of the bureaucracy, other scholars argue that the individual perceptions and beliefs of policy makers are more important in the decision-making process. Given the complicated nature of this debate, a creative way to expose beginning students to American foreign policy decision making is through a simulation. Simulations are useful for the study of the decision-making process because the standard lecture-discussion format, which provides a linear overview of the subject, does not adequately communicate the complex structure and multiplicity of factors in operation.