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Obama and the Latino Vote: From Policy Failure to Political Success?

John D. Skrentny and Jane Lilly Lopez , University of California, San Diego
October 16, 2012

election-2012As part of our Election 2012 series, John D. Skrentny and Jane Lilly Lopez examine the crucial Latino vote and President Obama's record on immigration reform. A contributor to the RSF book, Reaching for a New Deal: Ambitious Governance, Economic Meltdown, and Polarized Politics in Obama's First Two Years, Skrentny is the director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Lopez is a graduate student in sociology at UCSD.

Obama’s support among Latino voters remains unchanged from 2008 despite the failure of his central promise to Latino voters: that he would pass comprehensive immigration reform. In actuality, Obama did not even come close to passing immigration reform. The administration never promoted a bill, and no bill reached the floor of either the House or the Senate. How does failure in policy lead to success in politics? The answer is that Obama used his executive authority to do just enough on policy to signal his support for Latinos. The Republicans, meanwhile, have contributed by further alienating Latinos even as their presence in the electorate has grown.

Why was comprehensive immigration reform such a failure in Obama’s first term? Comprehensive immigration reform has come in different versions over the years, but always retains the basic model of a "grand bargain" that pairs mass legalization of undocumented immigrants with efforts to control the border with Mexico to prevent a new population of undocumented immigrants from forming.

The Politics of Comprehensive Immigration Reform

The reasons Obama failed to pass reform can be stated succinctly. First, by the 2000s, much of the electorate and members of Congress had adopted negative attitudes toward undocumented immigrants and comprehensive reform. Many saw these immigrants as undeserving lawbreakers, and they saw reform as doomed to fail. This was because a 1986 comprehensive reform legalized almost 3 million migrants, but left the borders uncontrolled – by the mid-2000s, there were about 10 million new undocumented migrants in the country. For this reason, even many Democrats were skeptical of reform.

This factor helps us to understand Obama’s failure to enact reform, as well as George W. Bush’s failure. He tried twice in his two terms, and could not even rally a majority of his own party.

Another major factor was Republican opposition to nearly all Obama initiatives. Some Republicans had sponsored comprehensive reform under Bush. Under Obama, comprehensive reform did not have a single GOP sponsor. Even former stalwart supporters, such and John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), abandoned the effort.

The final factor was the institutional structure of Congress. There are so many "veto points" that it is not difficult for a determined minority to pull the plug on any legislation.

The Executive Route

Failing at legislation, Obama avoided the Republicans and institutional obstacles in Congress by boldly going it alone to signal support for Latinos. Responding to the negative moral meaning of “illegal immigrants,” Obama targeted a legalization effort at the most deserving of the undocumented: those who would have been eligible for the “DREAM Act.” This category included those who came into the country when they were fifteen or younger, and thus as minors moving with parents were never “lawbreakers” in the true sense of the term. Moreover, to benefit from Obama’s plan, they had to be productive members of society: either students or soldiers. Finally, the plan was not a pathway to citizenship, it was simply a Department of Homeland Security announcement that there was no plan to deport them. It could even be reversed—if the wrong person became president.

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Segregation Between White Men and Black Men by Sector, 1966 - 2005

October 15, 2012

The figure below, taken from the RSF book Documenting Desegregation, reports segregation levels and trends among white and black men for eleven industrial sectors between 1966 and 2005. In all sectors, there were strong declines in racial segregation beginning in 1966, shortly after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Overall, transportation, communication, and utilities saw the steepest initial declines in employment segregation and the lowest levels in the present period. However, racial desegregation among men stalled in most sectors in the 1980s. The durable manufacturing sector strongly resegregated after 1980. You can analyze each sector by clicking on the industry labels in the chart's legend.

*Segregation is measured using the conventional index of dissimilarity (D). The index equals 100 when groups are completely segregated from each other. The level of the index suggests what percentage of a group would have to switch occupations in order to end segregation in a workplace.
Source:Authors' calculations based on data from EEO-1 surveys (EEOC, various years)

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Desegregation in the Private Sector: An Interview with Kevin Stainback and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey

Rohan Mascarenhas, Russell Sage Foundation
October 15, 2012

workplace diversityKevin Stainback and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey are the co-authors of the RSF book Documenting Desegregation: Racial and Gender Segregation in Private-Sector Employment Since the Civil Rights Act. The volume offers the most comprehensive account to date of what has happened to equal opportunity in America and is an indispensable guide for those seeking to understand where America stands in fulfilling its promise of a workplace free from discrimination.

Q: Your book draws on data collected by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that report on more than 5 million workplaces between 1966 and 2005. Talk a little about the data – what are in these reports and why were they collected? Secondly, have social scientists been able to use them before to analyze desegregation trends?

A: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided numerous legal gains for previously disadvantaged groups. With regards to employment, the act outlawed racial and gender discrimination and segregation; it also created the EEOC, which was mandated to monitor progress toward an equal opportunity society. This federal regulatory agency was charged with processing discrimination complaints and collecting annual data from private sector organizations. These annual reports, known as EEO-1 reports, contain the race and gender composition of occupations for each workplace in private sector firms with more than 100 employees. The EEO-1 surveys of private sector workplaces we analyze in this book were the primary tool mandated by the Civil Rights Act to monitor progress in private sector firms toward equal employment opportunity.

The EEOC, unfortunately, has never had the resources to use these data for the Act’s intended purpose. Additionally, these data have only been used occasionally in the past by social scientists. More recently, social scientists have had increased access to these EEOC-generated data, but access remains difficult and the EEOC is extremely limited in its ability to use these data to identify systemic employment discrimination.

In the 1960s corporations were terrified of being held publicly accountable for employment discrimination. The political pressures of those times severely limited the EEOC's ability to analyze these data or to share them with either the academic community or society at large. It is our hope that these data will become more available to both the academic community and the public at large.

In short, these extraordinary data are remarkable in scope and have very rarely been analyzed until recently. Documenting Desegregation provides the most systematic analysis of change in racial and gender employment opportunities since the Civil Rights Act.

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Mass Incarceration and Education: Questioning the Conventional Data

October 12, 2012

In an essay published this week on GOOD.is, Becky Pettit, the author of Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress, explains the impact of excluding inmates and other disadvantaged groups on conventional data:

During the Great Depression, the federal government began collecting data in between census years through the Sample Survey of Unemployment—which in 1942 became the Current Population Survey, a monthly survey of 50,000 to 60,000 individuals living in households. We continue to collect and use this data to design and evaluate public policy and determine how to distribute federal money. Reports that the unemployment rate dropped to 7.8 percent in September, for example, come from data collected through the Current Population Survey.

Here's the problem: Those data don't include some of the most disadvantaged segments of the population—people who are highly mobile, people who don't live in households, or people who reside in prisons and jails. The most recent Current Population Survey data show that in 2008, 13.5 percent of black men between 20-34 years old didn’t finish high school or an equivalency degree. But, including inmates in estimates of high school completion suggests a nationwide dropout rate among young black men of 19 percent—more than 40 percent higher than conventional estimates.

Including inmates shows that there has been no improvement in the black-white gap in high school completion among men since at least the early 1990s and the racial gap in high school completion has hovered close to its current level of 11 percentage points for most of the past 20 years. Moreover, young black male dropouts are more likely to be in prison or jail than they are to be employed.

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Fisher v. University of Texas and Race-Based Affirmative Action: An Interview with Sigal Alon

Rohan Mascarenhas, Russell Sage Foundation
October 9, 2012

fisher v. university of texasThe Supreme Court will hear arguments this week in Fisher v. University of Texas, which raises questions about the use of race in admissions to American universities. Sigal Alon, currently a RSF Visiting Scholar, has published several studies dealing with admission, affirmative action and financial aid policies in post-secondary education. Below, she answers questions about her research and affirmative action in the United States.

Q: Let’s first look at the Top 10 Percent admission rule in Texas. Give us some background on the policy – why was it enacted, and how is it different from the previous admission rule in Texas? What can you tell us about the Fisher v. Texas case?

A: Following a judicial ban on the use of race preferences in college admissions in Texas (imposed by the 1996 Hopwood decision) the Texas legislature passed H.B. 588, which guarantees seniors who graduate in the top 10 percent of their class admission to any Texas public college or university. In University of Texas, Austin, the flagship institution in the state, for example, it accounts for 80 percent of the entering freshman class. Abigail Noel Fisher applied to UT-Austin in 2008 (at the time she was a senior at Stephen F. Austin High School in Sugar Land, TX). She did not qualify under the automatic Top Ten Percent program so she had to compete with others for the remaining 20 percent of seats. Admissions decisions for students who do not graduate in the top 10 percent of their class are based on a broad range of objective and subjective criteria. Since 2005 (following the Grutter decision) UT added race to the list of factors they considered in making the admission decision. In essence they have implemented a race-conscious admissions policy for applicants who are not in the Top Ten Percent. The motivation: bring racial and ethnic diversity at the university closer to the state’s overall population diversity, especially at the classroom level and in the major field of study. Fisher sued the UT, contending that her academic credentials exceed those of minority students who were admitted.

Q: In a study co-authored with Marta Tienda and Sunny X. Niu, you examined the impact of the 10 percent rule. Can we say that the rule lead to more diversity in Texas universities?

A: The need of UT-Austin to implement a race-based admissions policy arises because the percent plan did not generate enough racial and ethnic diversity to meet the changing demographic composition of high school graduation cohorts. This is not surprising because, by default, any race-neutral policy cannot produce the same level of demographic diversity as race-conscious admissions tools. Moreover, while the plan was successful in broadening geographic diversity, it failed to augment socioeconomic diversity.

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Data Present a Distorted View of Black Progress: Becky Pettit on Her Book "Invisible Men"

Stephen Sachs, Russell Sage Foundation
October 5, 2012

Becky Pettit, author of Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress, spoke on Thursday, September 28, during a telephone press conference hosted by the Foundation. We include here her introduction to the research in her book, which finds that the omission of the incarcerated population in survey data creates a distorted picture of black progress in America.

You may need: Adobe Flash Player.

You can read coverage of the press event by BusinessWeek's Peter Coy here.

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Romney vs. Obama on the Environment

Judith Layzer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
October 4, 2012

election-2012As part of our Election 2012 series, political scientist Judith Layzer of MIT analyzes the environmental policy proposals of the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. A contributor to the RSF book, Reaching for a New Deal: Ambitious Governance, Economic Meltdown, and Polarized Politics in Obama's First Two Years, Layzer is Associate Professor of Environmental Policy at MIT.

Although the environment has not been a prominent issue in the 2012 presidential campaign, there is a stark difference between President Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney on the subject of energy—and by implication climate change. For decades, the Democratic-Republican divide on the environment has been growing, and nowhere is the chasm deeper than on the issue of climate change. The divergence in the two sides’ positions is largely driven by a shift within the Republican Party, which increasingly has embraced the conservative view that climate change is a problem invented by extremist environmentalists seeking to impose government control on all aspects of the economy, and that regulations on greenhouse gas emissions are the products of power-hungry bureaucrats run amok.

obama agendaThe rhetorical divide between Republicans and Democrats on energy and climate change is striking. The Democratic Party platform warns that global climate change is "one of the biggest threats of this generation—an economic, environmental, and national security catastrophe in the making." President Obama has repeatedly argued that climate change is a serious problem and urged Americans to pursue a "clean-energy economy." By contrast, the Republican platform opposes “any and all cap and trade legislation,” while vowing to end “the EPA’s war on coal” and instead encourage rapid development of the nation’s coal resources. The platform also calls on Congress to “prohibit the EPA from moving forward with new greenhouse gas regulations that will harm the nation’s economy and threaten millions of jobs.” The word “environment” does not appear as a category on Romney’s website, but he, too, decries regulation as a “hidden tax on Americans,” claiming that, as a result of minimal oversight from the White House, the economy is “subject to the whims of unaccountable bureaucrats pursuing their own agendas.” Although Romney is unusual among Republicans in acknowledging that humans contribute to climate change, he insists “there remains a lack of scientific consensus” and has ridiculed Obama for trying to prevent sea-level rise and heal the planet. Despite his record of support for energy efficiency and renewables as governor of Massachusetts, Romney has lambasted Obama for imagining that “government-subsidized windmills and solar panels could power the economy.”

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The High Stakes for U.S. Health Care on November 6, 2012

Theda Skocpol, Harvard University
October 3, 2012

election-2012As part of our Election 2012 series, political scientist and sociologist Theda Skocpol analyzes the health care proposals of the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, and what the election could mean for the future of the Affordable Care Act.

Should the United States expand health coverage and prod the system toward greater efficiency? Or should government retrench and unleash market forces? In our chapter on health reform in the recent Russell Sage Foundation book Reaching for a New Deal: Ambitious Governance, Economic Meltdown, and Polarized Politics in Obama’s First Two Years, Lawrence Jacobs and I highlighted the enormity of the legislative achievement represented by the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act of 2010. This comprehensive effort seeks to expand health insurance coverage to more than thirty millions additional Americans, and also puts in place strategies and experiments to reduce rapidly rising costs in the U.S. health care system.

obama agendaOf course, the law and other Obama reforms sparked fierce conservative opposition. Far-right popular and plutocratic forces have since taken control of most of the Republican Party’s agenda going into the 2012 elections. For heath care in the United States, this raises the stakes as Americans are about to head to the polls in one of the most pivotal general elections in memory. Republicans, including presidential nominee Mitt Romney and vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, are not only committed to repealing the Affordable Care Act. They have also promised to slash Medicaid and turn Medicare into a set of voucher subsidies for private health insurance.

Democrats want to use federal powers to expand health coverage and prod insurance companies and health-care providers into more efficient forms of care delivery, while Republicans call for sharp reductions in federal funding for health care and would count on expanded market competition to reduce future costs. The fate of Affordable Care, Medicaid, and Medicare are all at issue in this election. I draw on my own research with Lawrence Jacobs and on many two-page briefs on health care issues spotlighted this October by the Scholars Strategy Network (SSN) to outline the stakes in 2012. (SSN is a nationwide effort to get the voices of civically engaged scholars more fully into the public sphere. It has dozens of two-page briefs sure to interest Russell Sage Foundation devotees, not just on health care issues, but on a full range of social and political topics.)

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Are Voters Competent? An Interview with Neil Malhotra

Rohan Mascarenhas, Russell Sage Foundation
October 3, 2012

election-2012In the latest installment of our Election 2012 series, political scientist and RSF Visiting Scholar Neil Malhotra discusses his research on retrospective voting and voter competence.

Q: In his book, Just How Stupid Are We?, the popular historian Rick Shenkman writes, "The consensus in the political science profession is that voters are rational." Before we go into the literature, I wanted to ask you to give your own assessment: How strong is the evidence that voters are rational? Would you agree with Shenkman’s conclusion?

A: I'll quote Vanderbilt political science professor Larry Bartels' response to Shenkman: "Well, no." If anything, the consensus in political science is that voters are uninformed and do not have well-structured preferences. Nonetheless, I think the question of whether voters are rational or irrational is not the right one. The important question is: Under what conditions does the American electorate collectively make decisions that benefit society and promote democratic accountability? That's a much tougher and more important question, I think.

Q: Let’s look at how political scientists have approached this question over the years. Let’s say I conducted a series of studies to find how much voters know about government, such as, "Who is the President?" or "What does the Federal Reserve do?" If I found that most people didn’t know the answers, could I conclude anything about voters' competence?

A: I don't think so. Skip Lupia of Michigan has rightly pointed out the question should not be "What do voters know or not know?" but rather "What do voters need to know?" Why is knowing the name of the Chief Justice an important or necessary job for voters? Indeed, the proponents of a research agenda called "retrospective voting" noted that voters actually need to perform fairly simple tasks: evaluate the health of the country and reward/punish the incumbent accordingly.

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Why Do We Comply With the Judicial Branch?

James Gibson, Washington University in St. Louis
September 27, 2012

James L. Gibson is the Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government at Washington University in St. Louis. A Visiting Scholar the Foundation, Gibson is also the author of Overcoming Apartheid: Can Truth Reconcile A Divided Nation? and, most recently, Electing Judges: The Surprising Effects of Campaigning on Judicial Legitimacy.

Judicial LegitimacyMy Russell Sage project (jointly with Milton Lodge) begins with the observation of what’s known as the "judicialization of politics." This is a phenomenon that is worldwide in scope – courts are making highly salient, politically relevant, controversial decisions on issues that transcend the interests of private litigants in that they set public policy for the polity as a whole. Examples are easy to find: the Israeli high court rulings on the rights of settlers and Palestinians, the German constitutional court decision on whether religious crosses can be displayed in German classrooms, the decisions of high courts in the United States, Ukraine, and elsewhere, on the outcomes of elections, etcetera.

The judicialization of politics raises important issues of compliance with court decisions. Bereft of democratic accountability, the question these courts must confront is: why would citizens comply with or acquiesce to court decisions with which they disagree? As has been famously said in the American case, courts have neither the power of the purse nor of the sword. But even if courts had control over means of coercion and the resources to force citizens into compliance, the instrumental model of compliance (costs as compared to benefits) simply does not work very well, and, even if it did, it certainly is not very efficient. All institutions must rely upon some degree of voluntary compliance, the most efficient form of inducing compliance. Especially when citizens feel a normative obligation to comply with institutional decisions with which they disagree, the problem of acquiescence becomes manageable for political institutions.

Controversial Cases and Public Reaction

We know something about the normative bases of compliance from the research of Tom Tyler, who focuses on the influence of perceptions of procedural justice (e.g., when citizens are given the right to express their viewpoints in political disputes, they are more likely to accept unfavorable outcomes). But procedural justice can be thought of as a component of a larger theory of institutional legitimacy. Legitimacy Theory posits that people acquiesce to unwanted decisions because they believe the decision of an institution to be normatively appropriate; the institution has the "right" (sometimes called the "competence") to make binding decisions for the polity. Legitimacy generates a normative obligation to comply – because the institution is legitimate, its decisions must be accepted. Legitimacy Theory is becoming increasingly popular with nearly all of the social sciences, with even hardcore rational choice scientists paying considerable attention to this normative theory (e.g., institutionalists).

Examples of legitimacy in action are easy to identify, with the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court on the contested 2000 presidential election in the U.S. being the "poster-child" for the theory. The Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore had all the potential to create an enormous backlash against the institution. The decision was of immense political importance; the ruling was deeply divided, with a split of 5 to 4 on the outcome; the divisions on the Court lined up well with the justices’ ideologies and partisanship; by most accounts, the decision was an “activist” one because it was not well-grounded in existing precedent; the crucial swing vote of Sandra Day O’Connor was tainted by comments she made at a cocktail party about preferring a Bush victory; and more than 500 law professors, many distinguished, openly challenged the legitimacy of the Court’s decision. If ever there were an instance of an institution needing voluntary acquiescence, Bush v. Gore was it.

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