Immigrant and Native

Abstract

The Mexican American electorate includes large numbers of immigrants as well as people of later generations. In this article, we test whether cross-generational acculturation shapes the ways in which Mexican American voters selected between John Kerry and George Bush in the 2004 presidential election. Although change across immigrant generations has long been a critical question in American political behavior, it is only with the current wave of immigrants and their U.S.-born children and grandchildren that it is possible to measure the relationship between acculturation and vote choice. With generational replacement, changes in the dynamics of vote choice across immigrant generations could herald long-term changes in the mechanisms of vote choice. We find that generation does shape Mexican American vote choice, both directly—in the simple measure of the generational dummy variables—and in the interaction between generation and partisanship, issue evaluation, religion, and state of residence.

A New Electorate? Explaining the Party Preferences of Immigrant-Origin Voters at the 2017 Bundestag Election

“…Summarizing the direct effects of length of stay (H2a), the majority of studies report that there is such an effect on vote choice but, at the same time, state that 'there is relatively little theory' to support it (DeSipio and Uhlaner 2007, 196). In the United States, several studies address how the vote choice of Latino voters is affected by their time spent in the country, with the voting patterns of Mexican-origin voters being at the centre of such analyses (Abrajano, Alvarez, and Nagler 2008; De la Garza, Falcon, and Garcia 1996;DeSipio and Uhlaner 2007). For Europe, recent findings from the UK show not only that immigrant-origin voters held a strong preference for the Labour Party in the 2010 election, but that this support pattern was further linked to their time spent in Britain (Heath et al 2013, 117).…”