Beyond the ballot box: age-at-arrival, civic institutions and political participation among Latinos

ABSTRACT

Sociologists mostly treat age-at-arrival as a dichotomous variable whereas economists often approach it as a continuous variable. This article extends this debate by addressing a set of political behaviours that has mostly been the purview of political scientists. Analysing restricted, geocoded data from the National Survey of Latinos on Politics and Civic Participation, this article examines how age-at-arrival and civic institutions shape political participation among Latino immigrants. Logistic regression and random effects models suggest three key findings. First, age-at-arrival has a strong impact on participation, with child arrivals showing the highest level of participation and midlife arrivals reporting the lowest level of participation. Second, there are no ethnic differences in the likelihood of participating in non-electoral politics among Latinos. Third, involvements with civic institutions significantly shape political participation, confirming these institutions’ potential role in cultivating political efficacy and participatory skills. At the same time, the impact of civic organisations on political participation is contingent on both the type of organisation and the immigrant’s age-at-arrival, with ethnic organisations playing an important role in the political resocialisation process. Finally, ethnic concentration at the county has limited positive impact on political participation.

KEYWORDS:

• Age-at-arrival
• civic institutions
• political participation
• integration
• Hispanic/Latino

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Mary Waters, Chris Winship, William J. Wilson, Orlando Patterson, Jennifer Hochschild, Michael Jones-Correa, Helen Marrow, the JEMS editors and reviewers for their helpful comments on previous drafts. David Dutwin provided access to the restricted version of the 2004 NSL for geocoding purposes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Van C. Tran http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2532-6811

Notes

1 This figure is rather high and captures a specific moment in time where protests for immigrant rights were rather widespread. The immigration rallies were rising in the early 2000s and peaked in 2006 where millions of people across the country marched in support of immigrant rights (Voss and Bloemraad 2011; Silber Mohamed 2013).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a Soros Fellowship for New Americans. This research was presented at the Harvard Migration and Immigrant Incorporation Workshop and the annual meetings of the Eastern Sociological Society and the American Sociological Association.