Why Americans Don't Join the Party

Race, Immigration, and the Failure (of Political Parties) to Engage the Electorate

Zoltan Hajnal, Taeku Lee

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781400838776
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Partiti politici

Two trends are dramatically altering the American political landscape: growing immigration and the rising prominence of independent and nonpartisan voters. Examining partisan attachments across the four primary racial groups in the United States, this book offers the first sustained and systematic account of how race and immigration today influence the relationship that Americans have--or fail to have--with the Democratic and Republican parties. Zoltan Hajnal and Taeku Lee contend that partisanship is shaped by three factors--identity, ideology, and information--and they show that African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and whites respond to these factors in distinct ways.
The book explores why so many Americans--in particular, Latinos and Asians--fail to develop ties to either major party, why African Americans feel locked into a particular party, and why some white Americans are shut out by ideologically polarized party competition. Through extensive analysis, the authors demonstrate that when the Democratic and Republican parties fail to raise political awareness, to engage deeply held political convictions, or to affirm primary group attachments, nonpartisanship becomes a rationally adaptive response. By developing a model of partisanship that explicitly considers America's new racial diversity and evolving nonpartisanship, this book provides the Democratic and Republican parties and other political stakeholders with the means and motivation to more fully engage the diverse range of Americans who remain outside the partisan fray.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then flew down a monstrous crow,
As black as a tar-barrel!
Which frightened both the heroes so,
They quite forgot their quarrel.

—Lewis Carroll

Tuesday, November 4, 2008: millions of Americans participate in the quadrennial political ritual of electing a president. The day was, in the elements, unexceptional. The Northwest endured wet and windy weather, a hard rain fell over Southern California, and light precipitation descended on the Northeast. Yet the sun shone in the heart of the country, with record-warm fall temperatures in the seventies, as Chicagoans reveled boisterously on a historic day. The estimated 131 million voters who constituted the American electorate that day had elected the first American of African heritage to the highest office in the land. A body politic that had, at the nation’s founding, consented to counting African Americans in fractions for purposes of allocating political offices without any rights of representation; that had witnessed the effective dismantlement of the African American franchise in the Jim Crow South, following the hardearned progress of Reconstruction and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments; that had subsequently gloried in the effective reinstatement of the African American franchise, only to suffer through the continued deployment of the “race card” in electioneering, had done what few would have thought imaginable even a year earlier.

Spokespersons across many divides—partisan, ideological, racial— came together to commemorate and cherish the moment. President-elect Obama noted in his acceptance speech, “It’s been a long time coming,but tonight, because of what we did on this date in this election at this defining moment, change has come to America.” His foe during the election, Republican Senator John McCain, also recognized that “this is a historic election . . . we have come a long way from the injustices that once stained our nation’s reputation.” Similarly, in the editorial pages of the Los Angeles Times the following Wednesday, two African Americans who were usually at ideological loggerheads came to a rapprochement on the significance of the 2008 election. The progressive Michael Eric Dyson declared Obama’s ascendancy a “quantum leap of racial progress. . . .Today is a benchmark that helps to fulfill—and rescue—America’s democratic reputation” (Dyson 2008). Even the conservative Shelby Steele, while registering a decidedly more sober and skeptical tone, asked aloud, “Does his victory mean that America is now officially beyond racism? . . . Doesn’t a black in the Oval Office put the lie to both black inferiority and white racism?”

This rosy blush of “postracial” expectations quickly wilted under the glare of finer facts about of the 2008 election. Pollsters and the punditry alike were initially flush with predictions of a record turnout, bolstered by a mobilized youth vote and a decided willingness on the part of white voters to defy the “Bradley effect” and aver their support for a black president. Yet a deeper dig into the data reveals a decidedly racial cast to the 2008 election outcome. Of the 5 million new voters in 2008 (compared with the election tallies of 2004), an estimated 2 million were African American voters, another 2 million Latino ones, and 600,000 Asian American. According to the Current Population Survey, the number of non-Hispanic white voters remained unchanged between 2004 and 2008 (U.S. Census Bureau, July 20, 2009). Moreover, while the voting rate of eighteen-to twenty-four-year-olds increased from 47 percent in 2004 to 49 percent in 2008, this increase was highest among African American youth.

Perhaps more pointedly, Obama did not emerge victorious because he won over white America. In the end, a clear majority—57 percent—of all white voters opposed his candidacy. To put a finer point on it, the first ripples of the flood of scholarly studies on the 2008 election have emphatically found continued evidence of racial bias in whites’ electoral preferences (see, e.g., Jackman and Vavreck 2009; Pasek et al. 2009; Tesler and Sears 2010). Rather, Obama won in large part because the African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans who had expanded the voter rolls had supported his candidacy in overwhelming numbers. Quite apart from symbolizing our collective journey into a postracial era, the 2008 election appears to reinforce the realpolitik of the twin influences of an increasingly diverse electorate and a persistent racial divide in the hearts and minds of American voters.

The growing clout of racial-minority voters is indeed impressive. Less than fifty years ago, white voters made up 95 percent of the active electorate.¹ One could argue that white voters operatively controlled the outcome of any national context and that in these electoral contexts, it mattered little, practically, whom minorities favored. By the time of the Obama-McCain contest, the population of whites had declined to 74 percent of the electorate. Thus, while whites may still constitute an imposing majority of voting Americans, their dominance has greatly diminished. Ever-larger numbers of black, Hispanic, and Asian American voters are filling the void and promise to continue doing so into the future.

The racial divide in the 2008 vote is equally impressive. Setting aside both public and privately viewed sentiments that Obama enjoyed his electoral success because, as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid indiscreetly put it, he was a “light-skinned” candidate of African American descent with “no Negro dialect,” the evidence of racial dissensus even in these allegedly best of circumstances is widespread. On one side, voters from the three largest racial and ethnic minority groups strongly favored Obama. He won 95 percent of the black vote, 67 percent of the Latino vote, and 62 percent of the Asian American vote.² On the other side, the clear majority of white voters favored McCain. Only 43 percent of white voters chose to support the Democratic nominee. Moreover, the first wave of studies on the 2008 election find little change in whites’ racial-policy preferences compared with the 1988 election, when the Reverend Jesse Jackson made an unsuccessful but legitimate run for the Democratic nomination for president and little change in the role of racial resentment in whites’ vote choices between 1988 and 2008 (Tesler and Sears, 2010). Despite talk of a postracial politics, the 2008 contest was as racially divided as any election in American presidential history.

To boot, there is little chance that this decidedly racial cast to American electoral politics will diminish in future contests. If anything, the continued change in the demographics of the U.S. voting population suggests that the significance of racial diversity and division will become only more important in the future. With whites predicted to lose their majority status in this nation somewhere near the middle part of this century, the balance of racial power will continue to shift and the outcomes of American democracy will increasingly hinge on the preferences and actions of racial minorities.

This has tremendous implications for anyone involved or interested in American politics, and it has more than obvious import for the nation’s two major political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans. Put simply, the future success of both parties depends in no small measure on winning over this relatively new racial and ethnic minority electorate. The burden on the Republican Party is clearly more onerous at this point. With McCain garnering almost all of his support from white Americans—90 percent of all his votes in the general election came from white voters—and with the proportion of white Americans dwindling, the Republican Party will have to try to make inroads into the minority population. An electoral renaissance of the Republican Party is unlikely to present itself without a successful shift in the partisan proclivities of minority voters and without motivating greater participation among those voters of color who are already sympathetic to the Republican cause.

This may seem like a tall order. Decades of initiatives by the Democratic Party in support of the civil rights movement and other causes that are important to the African American community have created a widely held perception that the Democratic Party is the party of minority interests (Carmines and Stimson 1989). Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency and his tacit role as leader of the Democratic Party could serve to further solidify a Democratic majority among the minority electorate.³ Despite the gesture of nominating Michael Steele as the chair of the Republican National Committee in 2009, recent immigrant bashing by certain segments of the Republican leadership and past efforts by Republican strategists to use racialized campaigns to generate a winning white majority also do little to portend large-scale minority gains for the Republican Party in the near future (Edsall and Edsall 1992).

But one of the main storylines of this book is that the role of African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans in this partisan competition is far from predetermined. Despite the fact that these communities of color voted overwhelmingly for Obama in the 2008 presidential contest, the single most important finding in our research is that the bulk of this segment of the electorate remains uncertain about its place in the partisan landscape of the nation. The best data we have indicate that the clear majority of immigrant-based groups such as Latinos and Asian Americans are not affiliated with either of the two major parties. Among Latinos in the 2006 Latino National Survey, only 44 percent of respondents identified as either Republican or Democratic. In the 2008 National Asian American survey, that figure was an almost identical 46 percent. Even among the most steadfastly Democratic electorate in America—the African American community—the 2004 American National Election Studies (ANES) found that 38 percent chose not to identify with a major party, and about 40 percent will not label themselves as Democrats (even if they vote for a Democratic candidate for political office).⁴ In fact, even among whites in the 2004 ANES, fully 39 percent chose not to identify as either Republican or Democrat.

Critically, among Latinos and Asian Americans, the bulk of those who reject partisan affiliation do not label themselves as Independents— a population that can, at times, conceal significant partisan ties. Instead, for both the Latino and Asian American population, the single largest group is what we call nonidentifiers, individuals who refuse to place themselves on the party-identification scale and who instead offer responses such as “don’t know,” “no preference,” or “none of the above.” These previously unrecognized nonidentifiers represent some 38 percent of the Latino population and another 36 percent of the Asian American population. Moreover, while the lack of a partisan affiliation is most pronounced within immigrant-based groups, it occurs within almost all segments of the public.

Another important plotline in this racial and partisan equation is that there is every reason to believe that this diverse, unaligned population can be mobilized and integrated into one of the two major parties. The racial and ethnic minority population, as we will see, is far from homogeneous in its political interests, social identities, and life experiences. Accompanying the nation’s demographic diversity is a multiplicity of core issue concerns and ideological orientations, a bricolage of salient social identities, and a wide range of experience with and knowledge about American democracy. This will make targeting this diverse population complex and will probably require a multipronged approach. But it will also create openings for both parties. Republicans, for example, can point to the moral conservatism of many Latinos and Asian Americans as an avenue for partisan incorporation. Likewise, Democrats can point to minorities’ widespread experiences with racial discrimination as an issue to exploit. Moreover, the evidence suggests that once a party touches on the right message, mobilization becomes possible. Experimental research indicates that contact to encourage voter participation does work and that it can be effective with members of the minority population (Ramírez and Wong 2006). Broader historical patterns also imply that if the motivation is strong enough, members of the minority population will become energized and involved in the partisan fray. In response to Proposition 187, an anti–illegal immigrant initiative that was pushed by a Republican governor in the 1990s, naturalization rates, voter turnout, and identification with the Democratic Party increased substantially among Latinos in California (Bowler et al. 2006; Pantoja et al. 2001). The spontaneous mobilization of over three million immigrants in Los Angeles and other cities in support of immigrants’ rights during the 2007 congressional debates on comprehensive immigration reform further attests to the potential of minority mobilization (Bada, Fox, and Selee 2006). The bottom line is that there is a real opportunity for both major parties. Party leaders and advocates need only act, and in response the growing number of unaligned immigrants and minorities could offer a critical electoral edge.

The focus of this book is this linkage of racial and partisan considerations that we have just outlined. Our main goal is to offer a more encompassing model of partisan choice, one that incorporates the diverse range of people and perspectives found in America today. We seek to explain why—precisely for reasons of racial and ethnic definition and immigrant experience—the pathways to partisanship or nonpartisanship vary among whites, African Americans, and immigration-based groups such as Latinos and Asian Americans. In the ensuing pages, we explain why an account of the attachments (or lack thereof) of racial and ethnic minorities and immigrants to the present-day political parties is important, why increased attention to nonpartisanship is warranted, and how the two are linked.

Is there a need for a new theory of partisanship? We maintain that the two dominant theories of partisanship—the Michigan School and the Downsian approach—do an excellent job of accounting for the partisan choices of the bulk of Americans whose views and experiences allow them to fit neatly along the spectrum of partisanship that defines the nation’s politics. But we also believe that these two theories often fail to consider the unique experiences and concerns of different segments of our increasingly diverse public. The Michigan School, for example, contends that party identification is a strong psychological attachment that is developed early in life and largely inherited from one’s parents through preadult socialization. But how can parental partisanship explain the party identification of immigrants whose parents have no obvious partisan connections in the American domain? The Downsian approach also neglects to incorporate some of the distinctive aspects of America’s diverse democracy. According to the Downsian model, individuals attach to the party whose publicly declared positions on the main issues of the day come closest to their ideal point on a liberal-conservative scale. But what happens if one has little knowledge of those issues or if your core issue concerns are ignored by both parties? What are the likely partisan attachments of the Filipino who is altogether unfamiliar with the issue stances of either party? What of the African American whose main ideological motivation involves the debate between integration and black autonomy? What of the Puerto Rican who is committed to Puerto Rican statehood?

In providing a comprehensive theory of party identification, we seek to understand not only how Americans who fit neatly into the partisan structure choose an affiliation but also how other Americans whose interests, ideologies, and identities fit less well choose to align or not align with one of the two major parties. That is, we offer an encompassing account of the partisan attachments that Americans have (or lack) and show how the pathways and patterns of partisanship vary crucially by groups defined by race and immigrant origins.

In our theoretical account, we contend that the partisan significance of America’s growing demographic diversity can be accounted for largely by three factors that have generally been overlooked in accounts of party identification: (1) disparity in levels of information across the electorate, (2) the salience of distinct social identities, and (3) divergence in core issue concerns and ideological orientations. Thus, our story, which we detail in the coming pages, is one of the central role of information, identity, and ideology in shaping party identification, and the variation in the dynamic interplay of these three factors between whites, African Americans, and immigration-based groups such as Latinos and Asian Americans. We hope that our account will not only provide a greater understanding of the large numbers of unaligned partisan misfits who characterize America’s increasingly diverse electorate but also offer both incentives and strategies to incorporate this population.

AMERICA’S RACIAL TRANSFORMATION

To stress the importance of understanding how patterns of partisanship vary by race and immigrant origins, we need to go back roughly four decades in time. The year 1965 is often thought of as a defining moment in our nation’s history of racial politics. What defines this moment for many is the juxtaposition of two formative events—the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965 and, less than a week after ...