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4. The Changing California Voter: A Case Study of Mobilizing Opportunities and Latino Participation over Time
- University of Virginia Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Perhaps more than any other state, California witnessed many demographic and political changes in the 1990s. The convergence of these dramatic changes makes it increasingly complex to predict what lies ahead for California . Yet, despite these complexities, there are some patterns that help explain California’s current social and political landscape. First, the release of the 2000 Census indicates that California became the third majorityminority state—joining Hawaii and New Mexico.1 These demographic changes were largely the result of an increase in Latino and Asian immigration , as well as births to minority and immigrant women. The presence of Latinos and Asians is likely to continue to increase in the decades to come. The diversification of the state and the electorate is even more apparent in the 2010 Census, but for the purpose of this case study, I focus on the changes from 1990 to 2000. Latinos made up three-fourths of California’s 4.1 million population growth from 1990 to 2000 and represented one in three Californians, up from one in four in 1990.2 The white population constituted 57 percent of the total population in 1990. By the year 2000, the percentage of whites dropped to 46.7. During this same period, the Latino share of the population increased from 25.8 percent in 1990 to 32.4 percent in 2000.3 The younger age distribution among Latinos, immigration trends, and birth rates suggest that Latinos will be the largest segment of the entire population in the near future. It appears that population in California already looks like what the U.S. population is projected to become. Clearly, California’s demographic composition changed significantly 4 THE CHANGING CALIFORNIA VOTER A Case Study of Mobilizing Opportunities and Latino Participation over Time 74 Mobilizing Opportunities in the ten-year period between 1990 and 2000. With such changes in the state’s social landscape, one might assume that the political landscape also witnessed significant changes. Will the population changes translate to changes in the composition and behavior of the electorate? One of the consequences of an increasingly older white population and younger nonwhite population is that despite their declining presence in the population, whites would continue to be overrepresented among the state’s electorate due to the higher voting rates among older eligible voters. The combined effects of population change and voter propensity by age ensured that the “California voter” also changed, albeit at a slower rate than the population. In 1992, percentages of whites, Latinos, African Americans, and Asians in the electorate were at 82, 7, 6, and 3, respectively. By the year 2000 these percentages had changed to 71, 14, 7, and 6 for the above groups, respectively. While the “demography is destiny” scenario discussed in chapter 1 is more likely to take place in California before other states, naturalization patterns and age distribution are factors that are sure to play a role. Beyond demography, California serves as an excellent case study because the contentious national politics related to race and immigration since 2006 have many similarities to what took place in California between 1994 and 1998. Long before HR 4437 in the U.S. Congress in 2005 or Arizona ’s SB 1070 in 2010, there was a political context that served as a mobilizing opportunity for California’s Latino population and electorate. The factors creating this context in 1994 were the passage of Proposition 187, a ballot initiative banning undocumented immigrants from most social services ; the reelection of Governor Pete Wilson; and a shift in party control in the state assembly. Pundits and scholars attribute much of this change to the mobilizing effects of the political context on new Latino voters, who are said to be younger and to have less education and income than other racial/ ethnic groups or previous waves of Latino voters. In this chapter, I seek to demonstrate empirically when and how context structures the nature of the political behavior of the Latino electorate in California.4 I assess the continued relevance of models of participation that focus on individual-level characteristics, while ignoring the effects of political context. One way to conceptualize the intersection of the individual and political context is by testing for the possibility of unique generational/ cohort effects. If participation among a cohort is temporal in nature, it limits the discussion to one election cycle. However, if it is not temporal, these findings can highlight the possibility that political context can serve as a catalyst for changes in the...