Segmented political assimilation: perceptions of racialized opportunities and Latino immigrants' partisan identification

Abstract

To account for Latino immigrants' assimilation into the American political mainstream, I derive social psychological factors from the contextual notion of ‘modes of incorporation’ in the segmented assimilation literature. These social psychological factors, perceptions of racialized opportunities (PROPs), relate to immigrants' adoption of political party identities (i.e. Democrat, Republican). I test these PROPs factors utilizing the 2006 Latino National Survey (N=5,717 immigrant Latino respondents). Multinomial logistic regressions predicting party identification, compared to either ‘Don't Know’ or ‘Don't Care’ options, indicate that PROPs are significantly related to Latino immigrants' identification as either Democrats or Republicans. High levels of identification with perceived white opportunities are related to Republican identity and high levels of identification with perceived black opportunities differentiate Democrats from Republicans.

Keywords:

• immigrant incorporation
• Latinos
• assimilation
• racial attitudes
• political preferences
• acculturation

Notes

1. I use the terms Hispanic and Latino interchangeably. The Latino National Survey uses ancestry (Latin American descent) to ground Hispanic or Latino identities, and recent research has discussed the racialization of Latinos (Cobas, Duany and Feagin 2009).

2. The results discussed do not differ substantially when coding PROPs as dummy variables, preserving ‘Don't Know’ and ‘Not Applicable’ as separate attitudes (available upon request).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Frank Samson

FRANK L. SAMSON is Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Miami.