Marisa Abrajano

Agenda Setting, Public Opinion, and the Issue of Immigration Reform

Objective. Agenda-setting theory is used to motivate hypotheses about how media coverage of immigration influences public perceptions of its importance. The authors seek to offer a more complete explanation of public opinion on immigration by exploring differences in the effects of immigration news in border and nonborder states. Method. This article employs content analyses of newspaper coverage of immigration and Gallup public opinion data over a 12-month period (January‐ December 2006). Respondents’ identification of immigration as a ‘‘Most Important Problem’’ is modeled as a conditional relationship between border state/nonborder state residence and media coverage, ethnic context, and individual-level demographics. Results. Media attention to immigration is greater in border states than in nonborder states; as a result, residents of border states are more likely to identify immigration as a most important problem than are residents of nonborder states. Conclusions. The analyses point to the importance of geography and news coverage in explanations of public opinion on immigration. The public’s attitude toward immigration has traditionally been different for those residing in states that share a border with Mexico and those living in nonborder states. Extant survey research, which focuses primarily on Anglo attitudes (Alvarez and Buttereld, 2000; Johnson, Stein, and Wrinkle, 2003), reveals that individuals residing in border states consistently rate immigration as one of the ‘‘most important problems facing the nation,’’ relative to individuals residing in nonborder states. However, immediately following the 2006 spike in national media attention toward immigration reform and the wave of immigration protests nationwide, public opinion polls revealed that national public opinion regarding immigration surged to

Are Blacks and Latinos Responsible for the Passage of Proposition 8? Analyzing Voter Attitudes on California’s Proposal to Ban Same-Sex Marriage in 2008

On November 4, 2008, the majority of California’s electorate supported a ban on same-sex marriage. Anecdotal evidence attributes its passage to increased turnout among black and Latino voters. This article determines whether this was so; it also examines whether blacks and Latinos were more likely than whites to oppose same-sex marriage, even when accounting for religiosity and political attitudes. Had black and Latino turnout remained at the same level as in the 2004 presidential election, Proposition 8 would still have passed. Moreover, blacks were more likely to favor a ban on same-sex marriage when compared to whites.

The Hispanic Vote in the 2004 Presidential Election: Insecurity and Moral Concerns

This paper examines Hispanic voting behavior in the 2004 Presidential election. Our research makes a significant contribution to the literature on Hispanic politics, as this is the first study to apply theories of issue and economic voting to a nationwide sample of Hispanic voters. We demonstrate that, similar to Anglos, issues and ideology were highly influential in the vote choice of Hispanics in the 2004 election. However, using the best available data on Hispanic voting behavior for this election, a statewide aggregation of the National Election Pool (NEP), we demonstrate that in this election Hispanic voters placed more emphasis on moral values issues and national security than on traditional domestic issues such as the economy and education. This accounted for Republican gains beyond the overall increase in Bushs vote share from 2000 to 2004. We also show that moral values and national security had roughly equal importance in Bushs victory.

Does Language Matter? The Impact of Spanish Versus English-Language GOTV Efforts on Latino Turnout:

Latino voters comprise a growing segment of the voting electorate, yet their levels of participation in elections lags behind the general population and even other ethnic and racial groups. Recent experimental studies have found mobilization efforts directed at the Latino electorate to boost electoral turnout in federal, state, and local elections. Over the past two decades, campaign organizations and operatives have been increasingly relying on the use of Spanish-language appeals to mobilize Latinos. Surprisingly, the impact of language use in targeting Latino voters has, for the most part, eluded scholarly inquiry. We conduct a randomized field experiment in which Latino voters were randomly exposed to a mobilization message in either English or Spanish. It is, to the best of our knowledge, the first randomized experiment to present a direct test between English- and Spanish-language appeals. The experiment was conducted in the context of a special election that took place in February 2009 to fill a vacancy on the New York City Council for District 21, located in Queens. The results from our field experiment suggest that both Spanish- and English-language mobilization have the capacity to boost Latino turnout. That said, English-language appeals were effective across the board for Latinos in our sample, whereas Spanish-language outreach was only effective among low-propensity voters and participants whose primary language was Spanish.

Who Evaluates a Presidential Candidate by Using Non-Policy Campaign Messages?

This article tests the hypothesis that low-education voters are more likely to evaluate a candidate using personalistic or non-policy campaign messages than are more educated voters. The Latino electorate in the U.S. presents an ideal case study, given that both Presidential candidates in the 2000 election directed personalistic campaign messages toward them. Latinos with low-levels of education should be the most likely to evaluate a candidate using personalistic campaign cues since processing and understanding these messages require little in stored political information. Analysis of self-reported responses from the Latino Voter Survey of 2000 indicates that low-education Latinos are more likely than are high-education Latinos to use non-policy cues when evaluating a candidate. This finding implies that vote choice is structured differently for Latinos with varying levels of education. To test this implication and to confirm the finding from the self-reported responses, I estimate a model of Latino vote choice for the 2000 Presidential election. Probit analysis shows that high-education Latinos are indeed more likely to use factors that are informationally demanding, such as candidates’ issue positions and ideology than are low-education Latinos.

Assessing the Causes and Effects of Political Trust Among U.S. Latinos

This article examines why Latinos are more trusting of the federal government than Anglos and Blacks. We address this puzzle by turning to previous research on racial politics and political trust. Consistent with previous research, discrimination and generational status are important predictors of Latinos’ political trust, with first-generation Latinos more trusting than later-generation Latinos. Encounters with racial discrimination also make Latinos and Blacks less trusting of government. In contrast, Anglos’ political trust can be explained by their economic evaluations as well as their partisanship. Although these findings are insightful, they do not directly address why intergroup differences arise when it comes to their trust in government. We argue that combined with generational distinctions among Latinos in their trust of government, the heavy flow of Latino immigration in the past 30 years has changed the Latino population in such a way that the views of the foreign-born are disproportionately represented in survey questions related to trust in government. This is producing a Latino population that is more inclined to trust government than Anglos or Blacks. We then examine the impact of political trust on individuals’ opinions toward redistributive policies. Political trust has a strong and positive effect on Latinos’ attitudes toward such policies.

How Watershed Immigration Policies Affect American Public Opinion Over a Lifetime

Important political events are known to influence political socialization and development (Green, Palmquist, and Schickler 2002). It is also possible that such events impact political socialization within particular age cohorts, and also across important social groups who may be impacted differently by landmark events. This paper examines whether landmark immigration events can leave a permanent mark on an individuals views toward immigrants and immigration, and whether that impact varies across different ethnic/racial groups in the United States Specifically, we examine the cohort of individuals who were in their formative years during the passage of major US immigration bills that were proposed or enacted from 1965 to 2010. Altogether, we focus on four pieces of landmark immigration legislation. The findings reveal variations on the effect of these events depending on the group in question; a relationship also emerges between these landmark legislative events and attitudes on immigration policies. The analysis contributes to an ongoing debate regarding the ways in which political elites influence attitudes, and we discuss how the findings may apply to other contexts outside the US.

Reexamining the “Racial Gap” in Political Knowledge

Scholars have long lamented the low levels of political knowledge in the American public, particularly the “racial gap” in the rates of knowledge between racial/ethnic minorities and whites. This article examines whether the racial gap is an artifact of perceptual biases or differential item functioning, brought about by the distinct political experiences of racial/ethnic minorities in the United States. In analyzing data from the 2008 American National Election Studies, the raw responses to political knowledge questions indeed reveal a discrepancy in blacks’ and Latinos’ placements of prominent political figures when compared to whites. However, once these perceptual biases are corrected for, the racial gap dissipates. Blacks and Latinos are able to accurately identify the positions of prominent political candidates and parties on a range of policies across the liberal-conservative dimension. These findings pose several implications for our current understanding of the uneven distributions of political knowledge in the nation.

Trump’s All Too Familiar Strategy and Its Future in the GOP

Abstract Although many observers have been surprised both by the racial explicit nature of Donald Trump’s campaign and the subsequent success of that campaign, we contend that Trump’s tactics and their success are far from new. We describe how for the past half century Republicans have used race and increasingly immigration to attract white voters – especially working class whites. All of this has led to an increasingly racially polarized polity and for the most part Republican electoral success. We conclude with some expectations about the future of race, immigration, and party politics.