Yamil Velez

Group Size versus Change? Assessing Americans' Perception of Local Immigration

Leading opinion research on immigration has begun to move from size-based to change-based measures of citizens’ ethnic context. This shift is based on the theoretical assumption that over-time growth in immigrant populations is more likely to capture citizens’ attention than their current size. At present, there is no empirical evidence supporting this assumption. This article demonstrates that while the size of local immigrant populations exerts virtually no effect on perceived immigration, over-time growth strongly influences citizens’ perceptions of immigration into their community. In addition, our analyses illuminate the differential contribution of growth in local Hispanic and Asian populations to perceived immigration.

Sandy the Rainmaker: The Electoral Impact of a Super Storm

The arrival of Hurricane Sandy within a week of the 2012 presidential election caused unprecedented disruption to the final days of the campaign and Election Day in areas that were affected. The precise impact of the storm on those areas hit hardest was not necessarily clear. Contrary to prior research on the effect of disasters on electoral outcomes, we find that the presidents vote share was ultimately increased in storm-affected areas by about four percentage points, plus or minus two points. While those states most heavily affected were unlikely to give their electoral vote to Romney because of other factors, we present counterfactual analyses that show that such a storm could have had a significant impact on swing states: although the storm only affected some areas, we show that Virginia would likely have been won by Romney were it not hit at all, whereas North Carolina would likely have gone for Obama had it been directly in the storms path.

Assessing Contextual Measurement Strategies

Contextual scholars have explored the impact of residing in racially and ethnically diverse environments on political attitudes and behavior. Traditionally, the literature has employed governmental administrative units such as counties as proxies for citizens’ social contexts. Recently, these measures have come under attack by scholars desiring more personalized measures. This article evaluates the performance of two personalized measures of intergroup context and finds that census-based measures are more closely aligned with subjects’ perceptions of local area demographics than measures that “bring the person back in.” The implications of these findings on the contextual literature are discussed.

Racial Diversity and the Dynamics of Authoritarianism

Past work on the political impact of racial diversity has focused on direct effects, demonstrating that diverse environments are associated with more negative—or in some circumstances, more positive—racial attitudes and race-targeted policy preferences. We show that diversity functions in a second way, as a variable that magnifies the political impact of individual differences in the psychological disposition of authoritarianism. Using a national sample, we find that in white areas with minimal diversity, authoritarianism had no impact on racial prejudice, political intolerance, and attitudes toward immigration. As diversity rises, however, authoritarianism plays an increasingly dominant role in political judgment. In diverse environments, authoritarians become more racially, ethnically, and politically intolerant and nonauthoritarians less so. We conceptually replicate these findings in a dorm setting with plausibly exogenous levels of local diversity and discuss the implications of our findings in terms of the various ways in which ethno-racial diversity structures political attitudes.

Nothing to fear? Anxiety, numeracy, and demographic perceptions

Studies have found that Americans tend to overestimate the size of minority populations, a pattern that potentially increases antipathy toward racial and ethnic outgroups due to heightened perceptions of intergroup competition. Recent research, however, suggests that providing people with accurate information about racial and ethnic demographics has no discernible impact on intergroup attitudes. In this study, we consider whether anxiety is responsible for overestimates of racial and ethnic groups in the USA. We conduct an experiment where we manipulate anxiety before asking subjects to estimate the size of racial and ethnic groups at the local and national level. Contrary to our expectations, our findings suggest that there is no discernible link between emotions and estimates of minority group percentages, and in some cases, negative emotions reduce misperceptions.

Independent Leaners: Ideals, Myths, and Reality

Abstract The ideal of the Independent citizen has not fared well in survey research. The study of party identification recast Independence from parties as a weakness rather than strength. Others, however, have derided the gloomy findings about Independents as a myth; those Independents who profess partisan leanings appear to deserve better. Our examination of partisan leaners then and now finds that, oddly enough, the gloomy conclusion about Independents then was off the mark. In 1952, partisan leaners surpassed party identifiers in being politically involved and informed. Nowadays, however, the reverse is true. The partisan leaners, let alone pure Independents, have handed over the edge on positive qualities to party identifiers. We surmise that these changes have occurred due to increased polarization. Nonetheless, then and now partisan leaners prove far too volatile to qualify for the long-term partisanship that is found among party identifiers.