2019. “Geographic Identity and Attitudes toward Undocumented Immigrants” Political Research Quarterly
This article examines the extent to which economic attitudes, political predispositions, neighborhood context, and socio-demographic factors influence views toward adult, undocumented immigrants living and working in the United States. We specifically examine how these factors differ for respondents living in various types of American urban, suburban, and rural areas. Arguably, in the aftermath of the 2016 Presidential election, public opinion toward often racialized immigration policy proposals is incomplete without an understanding of the role of place and geographic identity. In the 2016 general election, 62 percent of rural voters cast a ballot for Trump, as compared with 50 percent of suburban voters, and 35 percent of urban voters. However, we know little about how their views toward undocumented immigration, a persistent hot-button issue, varied by geographic type. Our findings suggest that views toward undocumented immigrants currently living and working in the United States are conditioned by factors related to a respondent’s geographic type. We find that attitudes toward immigrants vary considerably across place. These findings provide support to our argument about the development of a geographic-based identity that has considerable impact on important public opinion attitudes, even after controlling for more traditional explanatory factors.
2019. “Introduction to Dialogues: Linked fate and the politics of groups and identities” guest editor with Natalie Masuoka and Matt Barreto for Dialogues Symposium in Politics, Groups and Identities (PGI).
Symposium features 7 short peer reviewed articles and a reflection from Michael C. Dawson on the 25th anniversary of Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African American Politics (1994).
2018. “Choosing the Velvet Glove: Women Voters, Ambivalent Sexism, and Vote Choice in 2016”. Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics.
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This paper examines the extent to which ambivalent sexism toward women influenced vote choice among American women during the 2016 Presidential election. I examine how this varied between white women and women of color. The 2016 American National Election Study (ANES) features several measures from the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI)—a scale developed by Glick and Fiske (1996) to assess sexist attitudes toward women. An index of these measures is used to examine the extent to which ambivalent sexist attitudes influenced women’s vote choice for Donald Trump, controlling for racial resentment, partisanship, attitudes toward immigrants, economic anxiety, and socio-demographics. On the one hand, my findings indicate that ambivalent sexism was a powerful influence on women’s Presidential vote choice in 2016, controlling for other factors. However, this finding, based on a model of all women voters is misleading, once an intersectional approach is undertaken. Once the data are disaggregated by gender and race, white women’s political behavior proves very different than women of color. Among white women, ambivalent sexist views positively and significantly predicts vote choice for Trump, controlling for all other factors. However, for women of color, this relationship was negative and posed no statistical significant relationship to voting for Trump. Scholarship in gender and politics that does not account for group differences in race/ethnicity may present misleading results, which are either underestimated or overestimated.
2018. “Best practices in collecting online data with Asian, Black, Latino, and White respondents: evidence from the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-election Survey” with Matt A. Barreto, Edward Vargas, and Janelle Wong. Politics, Groups, and Identities 6:1, p. 171-180.
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As the U.S. becomes increasingly diverse, new challenges to capturing this diversity emerge for survey researchers studying political attitudes and behavior. Sampling methods are no longer straightforward as simple random-digit-dial. Given the confluence of changing demographics and changing survey technology, we argue that researchers should carefully consider a stratified listed/ density quota-sampling approach to multilingual surveys with large racial/ethnic minority samples. We examine the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post-election Survey, which implemented this approach with great success. Our approach resulted in collecting 10,145 completed surveys, in five languages, with large samples of Asian Americans, African-Americans, Latinos, and Whites. We conclude with a set of best practices or principles for online research of racial/ethnic minority populations that we hope will guide future social science research in this domain.
2015, 2016. Racial and Ethnic Politics in American Suburbs New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
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2013. “Black Views toward Proposed Undocumented Immigration Policies: The Role of Racial Stereotypes and Economic Competition.” with Stacey Greene. In Black and Brown in Los Angeles: Beyond Conflict and Coalition. Josh Kun and Laura Pulido (eds.) University of California Press. Berkeley, CA: p.90-111
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The study American racial attitudes and the influence of such attitudes on public opinion formation have traditionally focused on the attitudes of Whites toward African Americans. Broadening the scope beyond a Black/White dichotomy is increasingly important given the demographic shifts taking place in multi-ethnic metropolitan areas, such as Los Angeles. Understanding what factors shape minority attitudes toward other minority groups and the influence of such attitudes concerning hot-button, often racialized policy issues such as undocumented immigration is important in order to provide insight on the prospects for multi-racial coalition formation and sustainability. Using the Los Angeles County Social Survey (LACSS 2007), we examine the extent to which racial stereotypes and SES/demographic factors influence Blacks’ policy preferences toward undocumented immigration. We find that attitudes toward undocumented immigration policies are often conditioned by factors beyond economic competition. Blacks with lower levels of income are more likely to reject punitive policies such as deportation, while Blacks who hold negative racial stereotypes about Latinos are more likely to favor more punitive policies towards undocumented immigrants. However, we also find that attitudes about racial identity and perceived commonality with Latinos are important influences on Blacks’ views favoring more lenient policies toward undocumented immigrants.
2012. “Holding the Borderline: School District Responsiveness to Demographic Change in Orange County, California” In The Resegregation of Suburban Schools. Erica Frankenberg and Gary Orfield (eds.) Harvard Education Press. P .69-90.
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This chapter examines how an Orange County public school district, Azalea Unified (a pseudonym), conceptualized and responded to an increase in low-income, minority, and recently arrived immigrant students; internal pressures related to the collapse of the housing and job markets and nearly $40 million in district-wide budget cuts in less than a decade; as well as internal and external pressures to adhere several state (Prop 209 dismantling bilingual education in California) and federal mandates (No Child Left Behind Act of 2001). This chapter underscores the complexity of issues facing school districts with, for example, borderline or recently transitioned to majority-minority status. The study highlights the many ways in which administrators and school districts are far from autonomous institutional actors in suburbia. Administrators must find common ground and a method of developing and implementing programs and policies to address an out-migration of the white student population and a subsequent in-migration of low-income, minority, and recently arrived immigrant students to suburban district schools.
The research for the Orange County, CA case study was part of a multi-state project titled, “Suburban Change and the Schools: The Effect on the Educational Opportunities of Poor and Minority Students.” The Spencer Foundation funded this project and UCLA Professor Gary Orfield serves as the Principal Investigator. In addition to the California case study, the research team included faculty from universities around the country who developed individual case studies of local suburban school districts in Boston, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, Illinois and Texas.
2010. “The Logic of Institutional Interdependency: The Case of Day Laborer Policy in Suburbia.” with Michael Jones-Correa. Urban Affairs Review 45: 451-482.
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This article challenges public choice and regime theory interpretations of constraints on local politics, developing instead the institutional logic behind coalitions of local institutional actors designing redistributive policies addressing immigrant newcomers in increasingly diverse suburban jurisdictions. Employing qualitative data from a data set consisting of over 100 in-depth interviews among state and local elected and appointed officials, and community-based leaders in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, the authors find that elected officials, bureaucrats, and nonprofits partner to gain additional leverage to overcome suburban NIMBY problems such as those associated with day labor workers. These partnerships develop for at least three reasons: (1) they give community-based organizations (CBOs) access to resources available in the public sector; (2) for public agencies, these alliances lower the transaction costs associated with overcoming language and cultural barriers between newcomers and existing residents; and (3) these partnerships allow local bureaucrats to minimize outlays of their scarce resources to deal with the problems associated with the demographic shifts taking place in suburbia by essentially outsourcing much of the effort to nonprofit organizations while still allowing local bureaucrats and the elected officials who control their budgets to take credit for the programs these organizations initiate, maintain, and staff.
2010. “The Burden of Jekyll and Hyde: Barack Obama, Racial Identity and Black Political Behavior.” In Whose Black Politics: Cases in Post-Racial Black Leadership. Andra Gillespie (ed.) Routledge Press p.133-154.
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Using a mixed method approach including pre-election and exit poll results, newspaper reports as well as data from the 2004 Illinois Senate Pre-election Study, I examine the influence of racial and political identity, political information, and socio-demographics on political attitudes and behavior towards Black candidates in the post-civil rights era. I examine these factors through the lens of three early political campaigns of Barack Obama in Illinois: 2000 primary election for US Congress; 2004 US Senate primary election; and 2004 US Senate general election. I address the following research questions: 1) which factors led to Obama’s 2000 primary defeat for the US Congress?; 2) which factors influenced a dramatic shift in Black support for Obama during his winning 2004 US Senate primary race?; 3) and which factors influenced a vote for Obama in the 2004 US Senate general election, including how the salience of these factors vary by race? My findings suggest that racial differences including factors related to one’s racial identity still play an important role in shaping political behavior for Blacks and Whites. Other factors such as party ID, political information and educational attainment also remain important influences on shaping political behavior.
2009. “Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Disparities in Political Participation and Civic Engagement,” with Linda Faye Williams. In Emerging Intersections: Race, Class, and Gender in Theory, Policy, and Practice. Bonnie Thornton Dill and Ruth E. Zambrana, (eds.), NJ: Rutgers University Press. p. 316-356.
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This research, funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, examines the intersection of race/ethnicity, class, gender, and civic and political participation in the US. We provide a broad overview and synthesis of literature on civic and political disparities and their causes in the US. By centering the experiences of racial/ethnic minorities, we identify innovations and promising practices for overcoming civic and political disparities among racial/ethnic groups in the US. We focus on the policy implications that flow from our research findings on civic and political disparities.
2007. “Beyond the Myth of the White Middle-Class: Immigrant and Ethnic Minority Settlement in Suburban America.” in the National Political Science Review. p. 65-86.
This article uses the Current Population Survey Annual March Supplement to test the influence of some direct and indirect migration related measures on the propensity of White, Black, Asian and Latino householders to move into suburban ‘melting pot metro’ (SMPM) areas and how these migration decisions varied by race, ethnicity and class. I find that housing and/or family related concerns were significant predictors of SMPM settlement for whites, Asians and Hispanics in the model, but posed no significant effect for blacks relative to other reasons. This relationship was modified by low-income status for some groups in the sample. Moreover, disaggregating some Hispanic national origin groups (including Mexicans, Central/South Americans, and Puerto Ricans) present notable variations in the impact the migration related measures on their likelihood of suburban ‘melting pot metro’ settlement. This study underscores the increasing need to evaluate separate national origin group models of suburbanization.