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What wakes the sleeping giant? The effect of state context on Latino voter turnout in the 2004 election

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Abstract

Little research has been conducted to understand how state-level political and social conditions influence electoral participation among naturalized Latinos. This study begins to fill that gap by examining how both Latino-specific factors (the rate of hate crimes targeting Latinos, the rate of Latino unemployment and the amount of Spanish-language advertising) and more general state-level factors (the level of political competitiveness) impact Latino voter turnout in the 2004 election. I find that the single largest predictor of voter turnout among naturalized Latinos is the rate of Latino-specific hate crimes in a state, suggesting strong support for theories of group conflict and group consciousness as means of political mobilization. Latino unemployment has a large negative effect on voter turnout, even while holding constant individual household income, suggesting support for theories of social connectedness and the argument that collective identity can potentially demobilize individuals and groups. The overall findings provide further evidence of the need to develop models and theories of political engagement specific to minority groups.

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Notes

  1. In the interest of conducting the most thorough analysis possible, within the confines of the data, I also ran the multivariate regression model with a continuous measure of contestation. As expected, the contestation variable was non-significant. The other contextual variables remained largely unchanged in significance, direction and magnitude.

  2. The data were obtained from a project of the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project and include media tracking data from TNSMI/Campaign Media Analysis Group in Washington DC. The University of Wisconsin Advertising Project was sponsored by a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project or the Pew Charitable Trusts.

  3. When the multivariate model was run with contestation as a continuous variable, each one unit increase in Latino-specific hate crimes increased the odds of voting by about four times. Although this is a smaller increase, it is still extremely large and by far the most powerful predictor of turnout.

  4. The predicted probabilities are calculated for the average individual in the sample: a married woman without minor children who has less than a high school education, a household income below the state median, and who has been living in the United States for 27 years.

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  1. Emmanuel College, Boston, MA

    Catherine Simpson Bueker

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Bueker, C. What wakes the sleeping giant? The effect of state context on Latino voter turnout in the 2004 election. Lat Stud 11, 388–410 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2013.12

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