Abstract
Does context—racial, economic, fiscal, and political—affect whites’ votes on racially-related ballot propositions? We examine non-Hispanic whites’ voting behavior on three California ballot initiatives: Propositions 187, 209, and 227. Unlike previous analyses that lacked individual-level data and were therefore limited to ecological inference, we combine individual-level data from exit polls with county-level contextual variables in a hierarchical linear model. Racial/ethnic context affected whites’ votes only on Proposition 187, economic context had no influence on vote choice, and the effect of fiscal context was limited to Proposition 227. However, across the propositions, whites’ decisions were shaped by their political context. Thus, we do not find support for the “racial threat” hypothesis across all racially-charged issues.
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Notes
http://uscis.gov/graphics/publicaffairs/newsrels/illegal.htm.
http://www.cde.ca.gov/news/releases2001/rel42.asp.
However, Citrin, Green, Muste & Wong (1997)—looking at individual attitudes and not context explicitly—found that although assessments of the national economy affected attitudes toward immigration, personal economic circumstances did not.
Proposition 187 would have denied state health, education and public assistance benefits to anyone in California who is not a citizen, legal permanent resident, or legal temporary visitor and required local officials to report undocumented persons to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The constitutionality of Proposition 187 was successfully challenged in federal court, and its major provisions have not been implemented. However, while its direct policy effects have been minimal, the passage of Proposition 187 did send a message that voters in California are concerned about illegal immigration.
This potential wedge issue ended up helping neither the Republican nor the Democratic presidential candidate directly, although Clinton (and other Democratic politicians) benefited indirectly as the minority population was successfully mobilized to vote (Cain, MacDonald, & McCue, 1997; Chavez, 1998; Rice, 1997).
In May 1998, Governor Wilson announced his support for Proposition 227, but the measure’s backers rejected his endorsement, afraid that association with the controversial 187 and 209 efforts would discredit their campaign to end bilingual education (Ingram, 1998).
We thank VNS and the Los Angeles Times for making county identifiers available to us.
We use the term “whites” to mean non-Hispanic whites.
Appendix 2 contains descriptive statistics for all 58 California counties and the sampled counties. More information about the counties sampled is available upon request. The exit poll data were weighted to represent the actual vote.
Governor Pete Wilson fueled the perception that Mexicans were the source of the illegal immigration problem; he ran prime-time television ads, linking Proposition 187 to his own campaign, with pictures of people running across the California–Mexico border.
Although some research (Green et al., 1998) has indicated that shifting contexts might have a greater effect than the actual level of diversity, we focus here on the relative size of each group. We did test whether changes in the size of racial/ethnic populations in counties drove vote choice on these propositions, but the effects were not statistically significant. For Propositions 187 and 227, we tested percentage change in the Hispanic population since 1980 and since 1990; these were significant neither with nor without percent Hispanic in the equation. Similar tests of changes in percent black for Proposition 209 also were not statistically significant. However, the data were not ideal for examining the effects of changing contexts. In order to assess the political effects of change, one must assume that a respondent has lived in the same area for a number of years, in order to have experienced and been affected by the increase or decrease in diversity. We do not have such measures of tenure in these data.
1995 data from Princeton Survey Research Associates indicate that Latinos, Asians, and blacks are often blurred together when people state their opinions about affirmative action, but distinctions between racial groups are made when deciding who had benefited from these programs at work: Blacks were significantly seen as benefiting the most (Steeh & Krysan, 1996). In the recent debates over affirmative action, both proponents and opponents are focused particularly on the potential effects of Proposition 209 on African Americans. Glazer (1997, p. 25), for example, argues that “Asians apparently can fend for themselves, and so, for the most part, can Latinos.... Can we restrict affirmative action only to African Americans?”
We also tested as measures of economic context (1) income per capita in a county, which gives similar results, and (2) county median education, which is highly correlated with both unemployment and median income, and which had similar, although weaker, effects.
For Proposition 187, which would potentially affect a wide range of social services, we also tested Food Stamps and General Relief spending per capita in counties, spending on school districts per capita in counties, Medi-Cal payments per capita in counties, Medi-Cal payments for aliens and refugees per capita in counties, and the proportion of jail inmates in a county. For Proposition 227, which focused only on bilingual education programs—in comparison to Prop 187’s possible much broader policy impact—we did not test such a wide range of fiscal context measures. Instead, in addition to AFDC spending, we also tested percent limited English proficiency enrollment in a county, percent Hispanic K through 12 enrollment, and percent Hispanic plus Asian K–12 enrollment. Unfortunately, neither school districts nor the California Department of Education tracks funds by the category of “bilingual instructional services” (personal correspondence with Dr. David Dolson, coordinator of the Emergency Immigrant Education Program of the California Department of Education).
Using percent Democrat resulted in similar effects for political context.
Appendix 2 presents correlations among the contextual variables for all 58 California counties and the sampled counties. There is less variance along some contextual dimensions in the counties sampled for the exit polls, compared to the state as a whole, and therefore contextual effects may be harder to detect. However, for these instances of statewide direct democracy, it should be noted that 74% of California’s population resides in the 13 counties sampled for Proposition 187, 86% reside in the 22 counties sampled for Proposition 209 and 94% reside in the 30 counties sampled for Proposition 227.
Respondents were sampled from counties, not from the state as a whole. Because we therefore cannot assume independent observations, we need to adjust the standard errors for serial autocorrelation.
The results reported in Table 2 are from a multi-level logistic regression, and the coefficients can be interpreted in the same way as coefficients from a comparable single-level logistic regression would be interpreted. The level-1 variables are group-centered and the level-2 variables are grand-centered. In Table 2, robust standard errors are reported for Proposition 227; the smaller number of level-2 units for Propositions 187 and 209 allow only regular standard errors to be reported. Because we do not have a large number of level-2 units for all the proposition votes, we also reran these models as single-level models with Huber/White cluster-correcting robust standard errors. The results are similar, and our substantive conclusions remain the same (specifically, racial context was only statistically significant for Proposition 187 while political context was significant across all three propositions. The only difference in the single- versus multi-level analyses is that county unemployment rate was statistically significant for Prop 187 in the former; with the multi-level model unemployment rate did not achieve statistical significance, but is influential substantively as shown below).
See Appendix 1 for the coding of the independent variables.
Citrin, Reingold, and Green (1990) did find that Americanism (i.e. beliefs about what makes someone a “true American”) increases with age.
We also examined the voting behavior of black and Hispanic respondents, but do not report the results here. Such analyses are outside the scope of this paper, as different theoretical considerations drive the voting behavior of these groups around ethnic/racial related propositions. Also, small sample sizes—ranging between 123 and 346 individuals, scattered across counties, per proposition—limit the statistical power of the analyses. Only two contextual effects were significant: blacks in counties with worse economic conditions were more likely to vote for the anti-affirmative action proposition, the opposite of expectations; and Hispanics in more Republican counties were more likely to vote for the anti-bilingual education proposition, similar to the behavior of their white counterparts.
We also tried predicting vote choice on Proposition 187 with alternative measures of racial context: percent nonwhite, percent black, percent Hispanic and Asian, percent white, percent immigrant, and percent foreign born (the first two, along with percent Hispanic, are reported in Table 2). Whites’ vote choice on Proposition 187 is influenced by the county presence of Hispanics and blacks only (and only at the .10 level of statistical significance). While there are other measures of racial and ethnic heterogeneity, such as fractionalization (Branton & Jones, 2001), using the percentage of a group in a locale is the standard in research on racial context, dating from Key’s work.
Although the contextual variables are not highly correlated (see Appendix 2), we also reran all of the models in Table 2 with only the single contextual-level measure of racial context (see Appendix 3). We find nearly identical results: racial context is influential only for Proposition 187, where whites in counties with more Hispanics are more likely to vote yes. Racial context as operationalized as percent black was of borderline statistical significance (P < .10) for Propositions 187 and 209, but the “wrong” sign—whites in counties with more blacks were less likely to vote for these propositions. Thus the presence of the other contextual variables in the models shown in Table 2 is not “knocking out” an effect of racial context, since little such effect is evident in models containing only racial context.
For all three propositions, political context influenced vote choice whether measured with county percent Republican or county percent Democrat. We also tested interactions between income and county unemployment, hypothesizing that lower income whites might be particularly sensitive to local economic conditions; the interaction term was not statistically significant for any of the propositions. In addition, we tested the interaction between county racial and economic climates, hypothesizing that whites might be even more likely to vote for these propositions in counties where there are both a greater proportion of Hispanics or blacks and worse economic conditions; these coefficients were not statistically significant for any of the propositions.
That gender did not predict vote choice on Proposition 209 is somewhat surprising, given the efforts by proponents of affirmative action like the National Organization of Women (NOW) to mobilize women, particularly white women, against the initiative (Chavez, 1998).
Furthermore, even the modest racial effect we find for Proposition 187 may be an artifact of the exit poll sample. The correlation between % Hispanic and county vote on 187 was .04 for the 58 counties, but much higher, .42, for the 13 counties sampled. Thus, the racial effect may appear for Proposition 187 only because the bivariate correlation between % Hispanic and county proposition vote is much higher in the counties sampled than in all 58 California counties (see Appendix 2A).
By 1998, the sentiment that immigrants were taking jobs away from native-born Americans—an attitude that was prevalent only 4 years earlier—had changed. In an April 1998 poll conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California, a plurality of the Californians interviewed agreed that “immigrants today are a benefit to California because of their hard work and job skills.”
Recent research on racial attitudes has already indicated the need to look beyond racial context to factors like socioeconomic status (see, for example, Oliver & Mendelberg, 2000).
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The authors thank Jake Bowers, Claudine Gay, the editors, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions.
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Appendices
Appendix 1
Coding of individual-level independent variables in Tables 1 and 2
Age. Propositions 187 and 209: Coded 1 if Age 18–24, 2 if 25–29, 3 if 30–39, 4 if 40–44, 5 if 45–49, 6 if 50–59, 7 if 60–64, 8 if 65 or over. Proposition 227: Coded 1 if Age 18–24, 2 if 25–29, 3 if 30–39, 4 if 40–49, 5 if 50–59, 6 if 60–64, 7 if 65 or over.
Male. Coded 1 if male, 0 if female.
Education. Coded 1 if no high school diploma, 2 if high school graduate, 3 if some college, 4 if college graduate, 5 if post-graduate.
Income. Propositions 187 and 209: Coded 1 if under $15,000, 2 if $15–29.9K, 3 if $30–49.9K, 4 if $50–74.9K, 5 if $75–99.9K, 6 if $100K or more. Proposition 227: Coded 1 if under $20,000, 2 if $20–39.9K, 3 if $40–59.9K, 4 if $60–74.9K, 5 if $75–99.9K, 6 if $100K or more.
Black. Coded 1 if Black, 0 if White, Hispanic, Asian or Other.
Hispanic. Coded 1 if Hispanic, 0 if White, Black, Asian or Other.
Asian. Coded 1 if Asian, 0 if White, Black, Hispanic or Other.
Ideology. Coded 1 if liberal, 2 if moderate, 3 if conservative.
Party Identification. Coded 1 if Democratic, 2 if Independent, 3 if Republican. Other removed from analysis.
Appendix 2A
Contextual variable descriptive statistics for all 58 California counties and the counties sampled for the exit polls
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Min | Max | Mean | SD | ||
Prop 187 | |||||
Hispanic (%) | All counties | 3.6 | 68.4 | 18.7 | 13.2 |
Sample (n = 13) | 11.9 | 41.0 | 21.5 | 8.3 | |
Unemployed (%) | All counties | 4.6 | 26.1 | 10.7 | 4.0 |
Sample | 5.7 | 16.4 | 8.3 | 3.2 | |
Republican (%) | All counties | 16.4 | 52.6 | 39.2 | 7.1 |
Sample | 16.4 | 52.6 | 37.0 | 10.8 | |
AFDC $ per capita | All counties | $40 | 356 | 170 | 80.7 |
Sample | $92 | 286 | 161 | 62.1 | |
Prop 209 | |||||
Black (%) | All counties | .2 | 17.7 | 3.5 | 3.7 |
Sample (n = 22) | .2 | 17.7 | 5.1 | 4.3 | |
Unemployed (%) | All counties | 3.4 | 29.4 | 9.7 | 4.6 |
Sample | 3.4 | 14.0 | 7.0 | 2.9 | |
Republican (%) | All counties | 15.4 | 51.6 | 39.3 | 7.5 |
Sample | 15.4 | 51.6 | 36.8 | 9.2 | |
AFDC $ per capita | All counties | $35 | $396 | $162 | $79 |
Sample | $50 | $268 | $150 | $75 | |
Prop 227 | |||||
Hispanic (%) | All counties | 3.8 | 69.2 | 19.4 | 13.4 |
Sample (n = 30) | 4.4 | 42.4 | 21.4 | 11.3 | |
Unemployed (%) | All counties | 2.7 | 26.5 | 8.9 | 4.4 |
Sample | 2.7 | 15.5 | 6.9 | 3.6 | |
Republican (%) | All counties | 15.0 | 51.3 | 39.0 | 7.5 |
Sample | 15.0 | 51.3 | 36.9 | 8.6 | |
AFDC $ per capita | All counties | $35 | $369 | $162 | $78 |
Sample | $35 | $333 | $154 | $85 | |
Appendix 2B
Correlations among contextual variables for all 58 California counties and sampled counties
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Country Prop 187 vote | Hispanic (%) | Unemployed (%) | Republican (%) | |
Prop 187 | ||||
Hispanic (%) | −.04 (n = 58) | |||
.42 (n = 13) | ||||
Unemployed (%) | .54*** | .49** | ||
.61* | .24 | |||
Republican (%) | .84*** | −.08 | .20 | |
.92*** | .35 | .46 | ||
AFDC $ per capita | .30* | .31* | .59** | −.02 |
.39 | .55# | .50# | .17 | |
Prop 209 | ||||
County Prop 209 vote | Black (%) | Unemployed (%) | Republican (%) | |
Black (%) | −.51*** (n = 58) | |||
−.55** (n = 22) | ||||
Unemployed (%) | .38** | −.21 | ||
.43* | −.16 | |||
Republican (%) | .90*** | −.46** | .19 | |
.92*** | −.45* | .23 | ||
AFDC $ per capita | .18 | .16 | .57** | .02 |
.23 | .34 | .66** | .10 | |
Prop 227 | ||||
County Prop 227 vote | Hispanic (%) | Unemployed (%) | Republican (%) | |
Hispanic (%) | −.29* (n = 58) | |||
.04 (n = 30) | ||||
Unemployed (%) | .31* | .48** | ||
.28 | .53** | |||
Republican (%) | .84*** | −.13 | .21 | |
.92*** | .07 | .24 | ||
AFDC $ per capita | −.32* | .85** | .30* | −.34** |
.22 | .82** | .28 | −.29 | |
Appendix 3
Predicting white’ proposition votes with individual-level variables and racial context only
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Independent variables | Proposition 187 W/diff racial context vars | Proposition 209 W/diff racial context vars | Proposition 227 W/diff racial context vars | ||||||
Hispanic (%) | Black (%) | Nonwhite (%) | Hispanic (%) | Black (%) | Nonwhite (%) | Hispanic (%) | Black (%) | Nonwhite (%) | |
Age | .030 (.044) | .028 (.043) | .020 (.045) | .025 (.036) | .023 (.035) | .021 (.035) | .050# (.025) | .054* (.025) | .054* (.026) |
Male | .341* (.157) | .321# (.149) | .333* (.151) | .108 (.136) | .111 (.141) | .105 (.137) | .207* (.074) | .183* (.079) | .182* (.080) |
Education | −.299* (.105) | −.295* (.100) | −.294* (.098) | −.110 (.072) | −.128# (.070) | −.122# (.071) | −.115** (.038) | −.116** (.038) | −.116** (.038) |
Income | −.005 (.072) | −.001 (.069) | −.008 (.068) | .006 (.052) | .021 (.049) | .017 (.050) | .077* (.032) | .078* (.032) | .078* (.032) |
Ideology (con high) | .493** (.133) | .456** (.125) | .483** (.122) | .550*** (.117) | .564*** (.119) | .552*** (.118) | .695*** (.053) | .676*** (.053) | .677*** (.055) |
Party ID (Rep high) | .480** (.140) | .493** (.146) | .478** (.139) | .642*** (.089) | .638*** (.089) | .635*** (.087) | .308*** (.069) | .317*** (.068) | .317*** (.069) |
County racial context | .060* (.020) | −.083# (.043) | −.002 (.018) | .016 (.017) | −.073# (.037) | −.008 (.012) | .011 (.007) | −.006 (.017) | −.001 (.006) |
Constant | .283 (.262) | .273 (.302) | .275 (.308) | .410# (.208) | .410* (.190) | .414# (.203) | .314** (.090) | .318** (.095) | .317** (.095) |
Number of Level-1 Units | 1118 | 1141 | 2750 | ||||||
Number of Level-2 Units | 13 | 22 | 30 | ||||||
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Campbell, A.L., Wong, C. & Citrin, J. “Racial Threat”, Partisan Climate, and Direct Democracy: Contextual Effects in Three California Initiatives. Polit Behav 28, 129–150 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-006-9005-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-006-9005-6