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.

This study examines the conditions under which minorities will face policy inequity within the educational system. It turns to the theory of representative bureaucracy as one possible explanation, and extends the literature by considering whether African-American students benefit from the presence of Latinos on teaching faculties and vice versa. This study also tests competing theories of how racial context influences minority educational policy outcomes. Copyright (c) 2009 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.

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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.

Objective. We examine how the immigration policy preferences of Anglos and Latinos vary according to ethnic context. Specifically, we hypothesize that immigration policy attitudes are a product of both Latino immigrant and Latino native born group size. In contrast to previous work, which found that Latinos and Anglos react to contextual forces in an identical manner, we argue that Latino group size produces opposite reactions for Anglos and Latinos. Methods. These hypotheses are tested using an original state‐wide survey of Anglos and Latinos in Texas conducted during 2006, which is supplemented with data from the 2000 Census. Results. Our findings show that residing in a heavily Latino area produces more liberal immigration attitudes among Latinos and more conservative attitudes among Anglos. However, this result is driven not by the size of the foreign‐born Latino population, but by the size of the native‐born Latino population. Conclusion. Anti‐immigrant sentiments among Anglos appear to result, at least in part, from ethnic concerns.