Loren Collingwood

Revisiting Latino Voting: Cross-Racial Mobilization in the 2012 Election

Traditional vote-choice models include variables such as party identification, assessments of the economy, as well as other demographic characteristics. We argue that variables that tap shared racial/ethnic identity or some such similar dimension can enhance Latino vote-choice models beyond the traditional model. We evaluate Barack Obama and Mitt Romney’s cross-racial mobilization of Latino voters during the 2012 Presidential election. Using a survey of several thousand Latino voters, we find that these candidates’ policy stances vis-à-vis immigration and their ability to convey care and concern to the Latino community are important variables that guide Latino vote choice. Implications are discussed.

The Politics of Refuge: Sanctuary Cities, Crime, and Undocumented Immigration:

This article assesses the claim that sanctuary cities—defined as cities that expressly forbid city officials or police departments from inquiring into an individual’s immigration status—are associated with post hoc increases in crime. We employ a causal inference matching strategy to compare similarly situated cities where key variables are the same across the cities except the sanctuary status of the city. We find no statistically discernible difference in violent crime, rape, or property crime rates across the cities. Our findings provide evidence that sanctuary policies have no effect on crime rates, despite narratives to the contrary. The potential benefits of sanctuary cities, such as better incorporation of the undocumented community and cooperation with police, thus have little cost for the cities in question in terms of crime.

Chameleon politics: social identity and racial cross-over appeals

ABSTRACT In this paper, we challenge the existing framework which argues that ethnic cues essentially operate for Latino candidates but not for Anglo/non-Latino candidates. Instead, we suggest that Anglo candidates can tap into Latino shared-identity by employing social-identity bridging mobilization during their campaigns. Using measures that gauge policy, culture, and mobilization, we examine what drives Latino support for presidential candidate Jeb Bush. We find that support for Bush increases among Latino voters who prefer Anglo candidates who mobilize voters using social-identity bridging. We corroborate our results with an analysis of real-world voting behavior of recent senate and gubernatorial elections, finding that candidates who make more appeals to the Latino community by minimizing the social space do considerably better than candidates who do not do this. Implications are discussed.

The Politics of Choice Reconsidered: Partisanship, Ideology, and Minority Politics in Washington’s Charter School Initiative:

Charter schools enjoy support among Republican and Democratic lawmakers in states and Congress, but little research has examined their support among the electorate. We take advantage of Washington’s 2012 charter school ballot initiative—the first voter-approved charter initiative in the United States—to shed light on the politics of school choice at the mass level. Because in-depth, individual-level voter data are often unavailable in state-level elections, we leverage extensive precinct- and district-level data to examine patterns of support and opposition toward the charter school initiative, focusing on how partisanship, ideology, and demographic factors serve to unify or divide voters. Our analysis reveals that the coalition of supporters cut across usual partisan and demographic cleavages, producing somewhat strange bedfellows. This finding has important implications for the strategies advocacy groups may consider as they seek to expand or limit school choice programs via ballot initiatives as opposed to the statehouse, and provides suggestive evidence regarding the evolving shapers of voter support for school choice and ballot initiatives more generally.