Cho et al. - Residential Concentration, Political Socialization, and Voter Turnout



It’s a fact that political active neighborhoods produce and reproduce active citizens. Children and newcomers learn participatory values. We don’t very well understand how contextual determinants figure into this process.

This study considers how neighborhood racial or ethnic characteristics condition turnout. This is useful to study because the US is increasingly multiethnic.

Contextual Studies of Political Participation
It’s hard to geolocate data, so the study uses voter registration lists.

''Exploiting Underexploited Information Sources ''

The study is trying to examine variation in participatory behavior as a function of the ethnic heterogeneity of neighborhoods. The study examines the effect of residential isolation and integration on democracy by noting the differing effects of ethnic context on participation as one traverses the gamut from substantial coethnic populations (segregated areas) to ethnically heterogeneous locations (integrated areas).

The study looks at Asians because it is easy to identify this group by name. It is also nice because there is wide variation in the Asian population.

Registered Voters in Various Neighborhood Contexts
Voter registration is useful to study because it is a very good indicator of participation rates in politics.

Theory

Authors theorize that neighborhood context influences political participation because it structures information flow and affects the exogenous forces that come to bear on voters. What information people receives affects what they know about politics. Further, the ethnic composition of neighborhoods is a key determinant of how party strategies develop to target a group.

Exogenous forces

Membership in an ethnic group is important because different ethnic groups are subject to varying exogenous forces, namely campaign efforts targeting that ethnic group. The California data so often used on Asians will not be great for this, because mostly elsewhere Asians are not a target population.

Information Flow

Information flow is also valuable to study because neighborhoods with large foreign-born populations are likely to produce lower levels of political capital and subsequent engagement. There will be more limited political information flows because of insularity and retreat from the larger social environment. By contrast, Asians living in predominantly non-Asian populations should exhibit higher participation rates b/c their residential context leads to great interaction with individuals who have participatory political inclinations. Insularity should be detrimental to political participation (few political information flows).

Data and Methods
The data in this study is useful because it is not limited to ports of entry or California.

Hierarchical Linear Modeling

This is a complicated model that pulls data from the individual level and the neighborhood level where the individuals are clustered.

Results
<p class="MsoNormal">The results are split between California counties and outside of California. Three findings:

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0level1lfo1">(1)     Neighborhood participation levels across all study locations are powerfully influence by levels of education and income.

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0level1lfo1">(2)     Ethnic immigrant composition of neighborhoods is a significant predictor, implying that patterns of racial segregation and integration influence who votes.

<p class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="text-indent:-.25in;mso-list:l0level1lfo1">(3)     It does not take large concentrations of Asian American for neighborhood effects to appear.

<p class="MsoNormal">As percent of coethnic immigrants goes up, the probability of voting goes down. It doesn’t take California sized concentrations to dampen participation.

<p class="MsoNormal">But California is a substantially different case than outside California. In California, each Asian group is significantly more likely to vote. But regardless of the direction (which is a little all over the place), there is definitely some sensitivity to neighborhood context – the degree of coethnicity in a neighborhood has some effect on the probability of voting, even if the result appears to be divergent between California and outside California.

Discussion
<p class="MsoNormal">Dispersion patterns matters because geographic settlement affects information flow. Socioeconomic status has an effect. The size of the group is unmistakable, and has a threshold effect. Because there are so many Asians in California, there is sensitivity between the variables, but the results are quite different.

<p class="MsoNormal">Geographic concentration might not always be bad for democracy. While coethnicity seems to reduce participation outside of California, where there is a sufficiently large coethnic population, and thus a reason for politicians to pay attention, coethnicity seems to actually increase the degree of participation. Residential context appears to socialize voters, but it also influences the exogenous forces (party and candidate mobilization) that come ino play. The actual effect of coethic context varies, contingent upon the absolute size of the group, its pattern of dispersion, and the prevailing SES traits of the group.