Rene R. Rocha

Racial Threat, Residential Segregation, and the Policy Attitudes of Anglos

The impact of racial context on the political behavior of Anglos has been a focus of social science research for well over half a century. We suggest that a shortcoming of earlier work has been the failure to account for the levels of segregation within a community. Relying on data from the Latino National Political Survey, our findings show that Anglo attitudes toward English-language and immigration policies are significantly related to changes in the size of the Latino population conditional on levels of segregation. We also find that Latinos elicit different reactions from Anglos based on their fluency in English and nativity.

Race and Turnout: Does Descriptive Representation in State Legislatures Increase Minority Voting?:

The 2008 election marked an end to the longstanding gap in the level of black and white voter turnout, offering further evidence that minority empowerment affects voter turnout. In this article, the authors move beyond a dyadic conceptualization of empowerment and argue that the level of descriptive representation within the legislative body as a whole is crucial to understanding how context affects voter turnout. They find African Americans and Latinos are more likely to vote when residing in states with increased descriptive representation in the state legislature measured by the percentage of black or Latino lawmakers.

Black-Brown Coalitions in Local School Board Elections

As the racial composition of the United States becomes increasingly diverse, scholars have begun to examine whether interminority, or rainbow, coalitions are feasible. The power thesis suggests that lower levels of social distance between Anglos and Latinos will make the formation of Anglo-Latino coalitions more likely than black-Latino coalitions. This hypothesis is reexamined using fifteen hundred school board election results. The findings offer little evidence for the formation of Anglo-Latino coalitions. There are, however, indications that Anglo-black coalitions form when an area becomes populated by Latino noncitizens, possibly due to the increased social distance this causes between Latinos and other racial/ethnic communities.

The Politics of Race and Voter ID Laws in the States: The Return of Jim Crow?

Does partisan and racial context have an effect on the likelihood that states will adopt stringent requirements for voting? Our duration analysis shows that Republican governments increase the likelihood that a new law requiring citizens to have a photo ID to vote will be passed. This effect is weakened by minority group size. We then examine whether the adoption of voter ID regulations affects turnout across racial groups. Our analysis, using state-level data and the Current Population Survey (CPS) November Supplement File (NSF) for 1980 to 2010, offers little evidence for the belief that minority turnout is uniquely affected by voter ID regulations.

Social Capital in the Fifty States: Measuring State-Level Social Capital 1986-2004

The idea of social capital has had a powerful impact on the study of politics, policy, and social science at large. In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention towards understanding what social capital is and exploring the direct and indirect consequences of living in high social capital environments. Much of what we know about the causes and effects of social capital is limited by the nature of data used regularly by scholars.Although the concept of social capital has been applied globally (Callahan 2005; Letki 2006; Putnam 1993; Tavits 2006; Warde et al. 2003), several works have focused on studying its role within in the context of the state and local politics in the United States (Carden, Courtmanche and Meiners 2009; Knack 2002; Hero 2003, 2007; Putnam 2000; Rice 2001; Tavits 2006). Current datasets offer us leverage in the study of social capital over time in the United States (Keele 2005) and on questions regarding static differences in the distribution of social capital across the states (Putnam 2000). The inability of scholars to know how social capital varies over time and across space limits the kinds of questions that can be asked. Static measures also pose a problem because mainly rival explanations of policy change, such as racial/ethnic diversity and political culture, are highly correlated with social capital. While culture is typically treated as a static concept, temporal shifts in racial/ethnic diversity do not always correspond with changes in social capital (see Hawes and Rocha 2011), allowing scholars the opportunity to establish the extent to which social connectedness alone creates shifts in political outcomes.In this paper, we offer a unique measure of social capital which varies by time and space. We rely sample data of over 20,000 individuals conducted biannually in the continuous 48 states by MediaMark Research Inc. (MRI), a marketing research firm. Although limited in some respects, the MediaMark data are able to construct measures that tap the non-attitudinal components of Putnam’s comprehensive social capital index. This data is available at the state level from 1986 through the present, allowing us to explore movement in these elements of social capital across the states over a twenty year time span.The idea of social capital has had a powerful impact on the study of politics, policy, and social science at large. Much of what we know about the causes and effects of social capital, however, is limited by the nature of data used regularly by scholars working in this area. Current data sets allow researchers to study changes in social capital over time at the national level and static differences in the distribution of social capital across the states. The inability of scholars to know how social capital varies over time and across space limits the kinds of questions that can be asked. In this article, we use sample data of more than 20,000 individuals conducted biannually in the continuous 48 states by the marketing research firm MediaMark Research, Inc. to create a unique measure of social capital that varies across time and space. These data are available at the state level from 1986 through 2004.

Social Capital, Racial Diversity, and Equity: Evaluating the Determinants of Equity in the United States

Robert Putnam’s work suggests social capital is compatible with social equality, while Rodney Hero argues the two are inversely related. Hero and Putnam, however, are limited in their arguments because they have only cross-sectional data and their theoretical arguments imply dynamic relationships over time. We create a state-level social capital index and a measure of racial diversity that varies over time and across states. We use multivariate models to determine whether social capital or racial diversity better predicts levels of policy equity. We find that social capital detrimentally affects policy equity and racial diversity is positively associated with policy equity.

Racial Diversity and Public Policy in the States

How does racial diversity affect public policy outcomes in the states? The policy backlash hypothesis suggests that the presence of blacks increases antagonistic attitudes toward minorities among whites and thus produces racially conservative policies. The electoral constraint hypothesis argues that the presence of blacks increases the size of population that supports policy liberalism and thus results in more liberal policies. The authors reconcile these competing explanations by arguing that the hypothesized negative impact of minority group size on policy liberalism varies across states in accordance with socioeconomic and institutional conditions that strengthen or weaken the impacts of electoral constraint or backlash.

Segregation, Immigration, and Latino Participation in Ethnic Politics

This article examines the way in which racial/ethnic context influences Latino support for ethnic political causes. Welch et al. argue that feelings of solidarity within the African American community intensify as the size of the African American population in an individual’s residential environment increases. We extend this hypothesis to Latinos, while also considering how other scholars have hypothesized different structural patterns of residence among Latinos to influence their political behavior. We also consider how higher levels of in-group heterogeneity within the Latino community might complicate this relationship. These hypotheses are tested using data from the 1999 Harvard/ Kaiser/Washington Post National Survey of Latinos.We find that higher levels of segregation between Anglos and Latinos dampen the positive relationship between Latino group size and participation in ethnic political causes.

Immigration Enforcement and the Redistribution of Political Trust

Social construction theory argues that public policy creates powerful feedback effects and that groups burdened by policy feel alienated. We reevaluate this argument by examining how immigration enforcement policies affect Latino immigrants, native-born Latinos, and Anglos. Using data from a 2012 survey of Texas residents and government statistics on the Secure Communities program, we find that higher removal rates, especially among noncriminal populations, are associated with negative political orientations among native- and foreign-born Latinos. We also extend social construction theory by arguing that the attitudes of individuals outside the target group are affected by enforcement. Our findings show that Anglos living in high-enforcement contexts are the most trusting of government and externally efficacious. We conclude that immigration policy enforcement redistributes trust in government from resource-deprived immigrants to Anglos. Enforcement practices thus perpetuate existing political inequalities.

Latino Immigration and Representation in Local Politics

Theories of racial politics argue that areas with large minority population are characterized by greater levels of policy equity, yet empirical research often fails to find evidence for this prediction. In this article, we develop and test an alternative view of the relationship between minority group size and the representation of minority interests in government using the case of Latino representation in local politics. We argue that Latino group size results in both favorable and unfavorable policy outcomes for Latino communities. The nature of the Latino population, specifically the extent to which it is composed primarily of citizens or noncitizens, explains when each outcome will occur. Latinos achieve more favorable policy outcomes for their interests when the size of the Latino citizen population increases but less favorable outcomes when the number of Latino noncitizens increases. The negative effect of noncitizen group size is mediated by the presence of Latino citizens and representatives. Our hypotheses are tested using data from a national sample of several hundred local school districts and educational policy outcomes.