Should They Stay or Should They Go? Examining Legislator Behavior on State Immigration Policy (original) (raw)
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Politics & Policy, 2013
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Under what conditions are Latinos elected to the Congress and state legislatures? Additionally, how much does the ethnic composition of a district affect the chances that a Latino candidate will be elected in a given district? These questions are all the more important given that Latinos are the single largest minority group in the country and growing at exponential rates. Post- 2000 redistricting created more majority-Latino districts, although the absolute number of Latino legislators did not increase correspondingly. In the most comprehensive treatment on this subject to date, this article demonstrates that states with higher turnover rates and citizen legislatures are more conducive to the election of Latinos and demonstrates the institutional and demographic differences among several states affecting Latino descriptive representation. Namely, the institutional design of the state legislature matters in terms of electoral responsiveness, with Florida and New Mexico the most responsive, and New York and the U.S. House the least responsive to the election of Latino legislators
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Congress & the Presidency, 2023
In this paper, I look at how differences in committee participation help further explain the way Latinos are represented in Congress. I examine levels of participation in four committees in the House of Representatives for the 109 th-112 th Congresses. I find that Latino committee members participate at greater levels when high Latino salient legislation is considered, but overall, they do not engage in greater committee activity, compared to non-Latino members. I also find that a higher percentage of Latinos in a district leads to greater levels of activity among committee members, especially when considering high Latino salient bills. The results show that Latinos receive substantive representation in committees via district composition, but that descriptive representation is relative and not absolute. These findings may speak to the continued lack of Latino institutional power and the tradeoffs Latino members must consider when deciding where and when to invest legislative effort. Furthermore, the results underscore the importance of institutional context in assessing the link between descriptive and substantive representation.
Race and the Response of State Legislatures to Unauthorized Immigrants
The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2009
Increasingly, state legislatures are enacting laws to regulate immigrant populations. What accounts for these responses to foreign-born residents? To explain legislative activity at the state level, the authors examine a variety of factors, including the size and growth of foreign-born and Hispanic local populations, economic well-being, crime rates, and conservative or liberal political ideology in state government and among the citizenry. The authors find that economic indicators, crime rates, and demographic changes have little explanatory value for legislation aimed at restrictions on immigrant populations. Rather, conservative citizen ideology appears to drive immigrant-related restrictionist state legislation. Meanwhile, proimmigrant laws are associated with larger Hispanic concentrations, growing foreign-born populations, and more liberal citizen and governmental orientations. These findings suggest that ideological framing is the most consistently important factor determinin...
Does Political Power Affect Policies? Immigrant Political Incorporation and State Immigrant Laws
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Politics, Groups, and Identities, 2017
What explains legislators' behavior when they are uncertain whether they will be rewarded or punished at re-election? Typically, politicians are incentivized to deliver policies preferred by the majority. Less well understood is what happens when legislators face decisions on issues on which their traditional supporters disagree. Owing to the unavailability of public opinion data for congressional districts, however, studies evaluating competing theories of representation on such issues are scarce. We examine this question by evaluating leading theories of representation on the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), a complex, historically significant, highly salient, and controversial bill that gave citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrantsprecisely the type of group that past research suggests should struggle to obtain representation. We employ recent advances in estimating public opinion using multilevel regression and post-stratification to estimate districtlevel public opinion on IRCA. Contrary to traditional conceptions of subconstituency politics, the results suggest that, under at least some circumstances, traditionally marginalized groups are able to make important policy advances in the face of negative opinion, particularly when they are able to build coalitions that cross party lines and divide their opposition.
Regional Studies, 2019
Over the past two decades, US states differentially increased their involvement in immigration policy-making, producing both welcoming and restrictive legislation. This uptick allows for a systematic comparative analysis on how state-level policies affect immigrants' political attitudes and behaviour. This paper scrutinizes this question by drawing on the policy feedback literature and using a new immigration policy database and individual-level Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) survey data. The quantitative models reveal heterogeneous effects of state-level integration policies on voter turnout and governor approval among different ethnic and nativity groups. The study comprehensively documents regional integration policy outcomes and contributes to emerging theories on spillover effects.