The Foundations of Latino Voter Partisanship: Evidence from the 2000 Election

Abstract

Studies of partisan identification in the U.S. have concentrated on Anglo Americans. We argue that by focusing only on the descendents of naturalized, mostly white, immigrants, that previous research may have been biased toward largely sociological accounts for the development of partisan attitudes. Here we study the partisan affiliations of Latino voters and argue that by examining their partisan attitudes we should find that their partisanship is more explicitly political than Anglos. We utilize a telephone survey of Latino likely voters in the 2000 presidential election and find that Latino voter partisanship is shaped by both political and social factors.