In the shadow of the stars and stripes: testing the malleability of U.S. support for Puerto Rican statehood

ABSTRACT

Do voters update their racialized political preferences in response to new information? To answer this long-standing question, we conduct an original survey examining U.S. mainland attitudes toward towards Puerto Rican statehood, a rare consequential racialized issue of low salience. To test whether public support for statehood can be changed, we embedded an information experiment describing Puerto Rico’s political status and its relationship to the U.S. The treatment was designed to increase the perceived connection between the groups through effortful thinking. Descriptively, our results indicate that Americans are generally ambivalent to the idea of Puerto Rico becoming the 51st state. We further find that opposition to statehood is related to anti-immigration attitudes, conservative ideology, and lack of knowledge about the issue. Nonetheless, we also show that highly racialized opposition to statehood can be significantly decreased among all groups of voters by providing simple background information on U.S. and Puerto Rico’s relationship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed https://doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2020.1821037.

Notes

1 While statehood is supported by the plurality, Puerto Ricans are not unanimous on the issue- the 2017 referendum only had a 23% turnout and was boycotted by pro-Independence and pro-Commonwealth supporters.

2 See Economist/YouGov Poll from May 17, 2016.

3 See Economist/YouGov Poll from May 17, 2016; New York Times from September 26, 2017.

4 The (post-treatment) demographic question block also asked respondents their age, gender, income, state of residence, and education.

5 To report these descriptive results for the control group, we weighted our sample to match the population estimates for education, age, and gender from the 2016 Current Population Survey (see Table A1).

6 See USA Today from September 26, 2017; NBC News from October 3, 2017; NPR from October 13, 2017.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Abdiel Santiago

Abdiel Santiago Stanford Law School, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.

Alexander Kustov

Alexander Kustov Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.

Ali A. Valenzuela

Ali A. Valenzuela Department of Politcs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.