Melissa R. Michelson

Compares Latino trust in government in the context of the 2012 presidential election campaign—one in which outreach to Latino citizens in pursuit of their votes signaled that they were important and powerful members of the polity—to Latino trust in government in the context of the 2006 immigration marches—one in which Latinos found themselves taking to the streets to protest anti-Latino and anti-immigrant legislation.

Brings together theories of expressive voting with literature on racial and ethnic identification to argue that prior studies, which have found either weak or null effects of identity messages targeting minority groups, have missed a crucial moderating variable—identity strength—that varies across both individuals and communities. Shows the effects of both ethnic and national identity appeals among Latinos in California and Texas are conditional on the strength of those identities in different communities and among different Latino subgroups.

Finds that people are often willing to change their attitudes about LGBT rights when they find out that others with whom they share an identity(for example, sports fans or members of a religious group) are also supporters of those rights. Provides a blueprint for thinking about how to bring disparate groups together over contentious political issues.

Investigates how various aspects of Latino acculturation impact feelings of political trust. The authors find that Latinos who more strongly identify as American and who support blending into U.S. culture are more trusting of government, and that the path to cynicism among Latinos is one of acculturation into a racialized subgroup. At the same time, strong feelings of linked fate mitigate the usual corrosive effect on trust in government, reflecting perceived reserves of social capital, interpersonal trust, and a sense of power as a subgroup.

Reviews results from fifteen recent voter mobilization field experiments conducted in California, comparing the effectiveness of various campaigns in increasing turnout among native-born and naturalized citizens, with specific attention focused on the civic engagement of Latino and Asian immigrant voters. Although Asian immigrants are moved to the polls by personal contact, Latino naturalized voters do not seem to need that contact in order to turn out. We argue the anti-immigrant political context, and framing of immigration as a “Latino” problem, results in the mobilization of naturalized voters, but by different means.

Shares the real-life stories of more than 100 DREAMers from four states. The authors assess the life circumstances in which undocumented Latino youth find themselves, the racializing effects generated by current immigration public discourse, and the permanent impact of this policy environment on DREAMers in America.

Does fluency in Spanish (or the lack thereof) matter to voters? Does the degree to which language ability matters depend on the ethnicity of the candidates, or of the voters? This article explores those questions with a series of randomized survey experiments with Republican voters in Texas and the U.S., in the context of the race for the Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate in Texas in the summer of 2012. We find that language ability matters. Latino voters, including Republican Latinos in Texas, reward bilingual ability. In contrast, Anglo Republican voters punish it, but not in Texas.

Identifies an increasingly predominant strategy used by organizations seeking to increase support for gay marriage: to personalize the issue by focusing on individuals in the LGBT community. This paper presents results from an original field experiment conducted in coordination with a marriage equality organization. Callers who self-identified as a member of the LGBT community were less effective in soliciting donations compared to callers who did not self-identify, suggesting that personalization has a negative effect on persuasion efforts.

Discusses which get-out-the-vote efforts actually succeed in ethnoracial communities, and why. Analyzing the results from hundreds of original experiments conducted in cooperation with community organizations, this book offers a persuasive new theory – the Social Cognition Model of voting, based on an individual’s sense of civic duty – to explain why some methods work while others don’t.