Among the current Republican presidential candidates, immigration has arisen as a contentious talking point. Spurred by Donald Trump’s call to deport undocumented immigrants and end birthright citizenship, all GOP candidates professed strong support for strengthening the U.S.-Mexico border in their most recent CNN debate. As media commentators—including RSF author and former Visiting Scholar Karthick Ramakrishnan—have speculated, these remarks are likely to alienate Latino voters from the GOP.

The latest issue of the Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences contains a new paper by RSF grantee Deborah Schildkraut (Tufts University) that examines Latino voters’ engagement with electoral politics. With support from the Foundation, Schildkraut studied how Latinos’ identification with their national origins or ethnic group impacts their beliefs about the adequacy of representative democracy in the U.S. She also examined how Latinos’ perceptions of discrimination in the U.S. shapes their beliefs about democratic representation. The abstract states:

This study examines whether ethnic attachments and concerns about Latinos as a group predict the representational priorities of Latinos, and if so, whether they make a preference for narrowly targeted spheres of representation more likely. It relies on nationally representative survey data (n = 434) and employs ordered probit statistical analysis. The results show that thinking of oneself primarily as a member of an ethnic group instead of as an American increases the importance placed on having members of Congress bring federal resources to the district and decreases the importance placed on the pursuit of national issues, and perceiving discrimination against one’s ethnic group increases the importance placed on casework and decreases the importance placed on oversight. Other factors associated with the Latino experience in the United States, including acculturation and having a Latino representative, also affect how Latinos rank spheres of representation.

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