Gary M. Segura

War, Casualties, and Public Opinion

The authors begin the construction of a generalizable theory of casualties and opinion, reexamining the logic employed by Mueller and showing that although human costs are an important predictor of wartime opinion, Muellers operationalization of those costs solely as the log of cumulative national casualties is problematic and incomplete. The authors argue that temporally proximate costs, captured as marginal casualty figures, are an important additional aspect of human costs and a critical factor in determining wartime opinion. Using Muellers data on opinion in the Vietnam and Korean wars, the authors find that marginal casualties are important in explaining opinion when casualty accumulation is accelerating, and earlier findings about the importance and generalizability of the log of cumulative casualties as the sole casualty-based predictor of opinion are overstated. Finally, the authors offer some thoughts about other factors that should be considered when building a model of war deaths and domestic opinion.

Citizens by Choice, Voters by Necessity: Patterns in Political Mobilization by Naturalized Latinos

In this article, we compare the 1996 turnout among cohorts of naturalized and native-born Latino citizens, looking for between-group differences endogenous to recent anti-immigrant rhetoric and events in California. We argue that immigrants naturalizing in a politically charged environment represent a self-selected subsample of all voters, identifying individuals who feel strohgly about the political issues at hand, and who seek enfranchisement as an act of political expression. We suggest that newly naturalized citizens living in California made exactly these choices, which differentiate them from native-born citizens, longer-term naturalized citizens, and Latinos in other states. Using the Tomas Rivera Policy Institutes 1997 three-state survey of citizen attitudes, validated using original registrars-of-voters data, we estimate multivariate logit models of individual turnout of Latino citizens in each state for the 1996 national election. The data support our hypotheses. Newly naturalized Latinos in California behave differently from other Latino citizens of California, and the patterns of difference are not replicated in either Florida or Texas. Turnout was higher among those who naturalized in the politically hostile climate of California in the early 1990s. Our results suggest important political effects of wedge-issue politics that target Latino immigrants.

The Mobilizing Effect of Majority–Minority Districts on Latino Turnout

We inquire whether residence in majority–minority districts raises or lowers turnout among Latinos. We argue that the logic suggesting that majority–minority districts suppress turnout is flawed and hypothesize that the net effect is empowering. Further, we suggest that residing in multiple overlapping majority–minority districts—for state assemblies, senates, and the U.S. House—further enhances turnout. We test our hypotheses using individual-level turnout data for voters in five Southern California counties. Examining three general elections from 1996 to 2000, we demonstrate that residing in a majority-Latino district ultimately has a positive effect on the propensity of Latino voters to turn out, an effect that increases with the number of Latino districts in which the voter resides and is consistent across the individual offices in which a voter might be descriptively represented. In contrast, the probability that non-Hispanic voters turn out decreases as they are subject to increasing layers of majority-Latino districting.

Cross-National Variation in the Political Sophistication of Individuals: Capability or Choice?

We argue that structural and contextual factors substantially affect the costs and benefits to individuals of becoming politically sophisticated. If the party system, the electoral system, and legislative institutions of a polity affect the availability, clarity, and usefulness of political information, they will also account for some of the cross-national variance in any individual-level measure of sophistication. Testing the Ordinary Least Squares model using cross-national survey data from the twelve nations of the pre-1995 European Union, we find substantial support for the hypothesized relationships. This support remains robust when we control for individual-level factors, and the model explains virtually all of the available cross-national variance.

Does Ethnicity Matter? Descriptive Representation in Legislatures and Political Alienation Among Latinos*

This article uses a political empowerment approach to explore the effect that descriptive representation in legislatures has on levels of political alienation among Latinos. Copyright (c) 2003 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.

Fear and Loathing in California: Contextual Threat and Political Sophistication Among Latino Voters

Environments having candidates or policies deemed threatening to an individual or group have previously been found to trigger feelings of anxiety that in turn motivate people to closely monitor political affairs. Racially charged ballot propositions, and the strong feelings they evoked, made California in the mid-1990s just such an environment for Latino citizens—resulting, we believe, in higher levels of political information. Using the Tomás Rivera Policy Institutes 1997 postelection survey of Hispanic citizens, we compare levels of political knowledge between naturalized and native-born Latino citizens in California and similarly situated Latino citizens in Texas. We find that, as a result of these highly publicized and controversial initiatives, Latino immigrants in California (a) are more likely than native-born Latinos and Latinos outside California to perceive racial issues as most important, and (b) manifest higher levels of political information than their fellow native-born Latinos and Latino citizens outside of California, controlling for other well-recognized predictors of political information levels.

All Politics Are Local

Inquiries into the domestic determinants of international behavior, including democratic peace arguments, build on the pioneering work of Mueller by presupposing that individuals in a democracy are extremely sensitive to casualties. The authors hypothesize that this relationship is, in part, dependent on the rate at which casualties accumulate and the local variation in these costs. Employing, for the first time, spatially disaggregated “killed in action” data, the authors offer a multivariate logit model of individual opinion on the administrations policies in Vietnam as a function of both local- and national-level casualties. The authors find that recent county-level losses and partisanship are important predictors of individual opinion on the presidents policies early in the war as marginal casualties increased but are less helpful in understanding opinion in the wars later years when marginal casualties declined. Conversely, a number of individual-level variables that had minimal explanatory power at the beginning of the conflict become more important.

Racial/Ethnic Group Attitudes toward Environmental Protection in California: Is "Environmentalism" Still a White Phenomenon?

One view of minority opinion on environmental issues suggests that minority voters are focused on less esoteric concerns such as education, jobs, and crime. An alternative argument is that minorities, many of whom live proximate to the sources of pollution and environmental degradation, are actually more concerned. Focusing here on Latinos, we argue that minority concern about environmental issues is endogenous to the nature of the issue and has changed over time. Specifically, we suggest that increasing environmental awareness among minorities has led Latinos to become more sensitive to environmental issues than their white counter-parts over time, but that this difference is manifest only on issues of proximate concern to Latinos and not on more abstract environmental principles. Pooling Field Polls in California across a 21-year span, we model support for various pro-environment positions among Latino, African-American, and non-Hispanic white respondents. We find considerable empirical support for the dynamics of growing minority environmental concern among Latinos, but only weak evidence for a similar trend among African-Americans.

War Casualties, Policy Positions, and the Fate of Legislators

Politicians appear to anticipate that the public will hold them accountable for war deaths. Yet, little is known about why some politicians openly oppose costly conflicts while others do not and the difference this makes to their electoral fortunes. Examining U.S. Senate elections from 1966-1972, we find that state-level casualties, military experience, and a variety of other factors affect candidate positions on the Vietnam War. Challenger and incumbent positions are negatively related, suggesting that strategic considerations play a role in wartime policy formation. We also find that war plays a role in elections. Incumbents from states that experience higher casualties receive a smaller percentage of the vote, an effect ameliorated when the incumbent opposes the war and his or her opponent does not. Wartime casualties, we conclude, influence both the perceived cost of the war and its salience, affecting both candidate positions and elections, suggesting that selectorate/electorate-type arguments about war and domestic politics can apply to the US system.

Presidential Approval and the Mixed Blessing of Divided Government

Divided government provides ambiguous and conflicting information about which branch of government to hold accountable for government performance. The implication for presidents, who are easy targets of blame, is that they are less likely to be held accountable for governments failures during periods of divided government because the public has a plausible alternative for affixing responsibility: the U.S. Congress. Because presidents are punished more heavily for negative outcomes than they are rewarded for favorable ones, we argue that a divided government context has the effect of increasing presidential approval relative to periods of unified government. At the individual level, using data from the 1972-1994 National Election Studies we show that divided government increases the probability that respondents approve of a presidents job performance. This effect is even stronger among citizens who are knowledgeable about control of government. Examining approval at the aggregate level from 1949 to 1996, we find further evidence that divided government boosts presidential approval ratings.