Race Matters: Latino Racial Identities and Political Beliefs

Abstract

We examine how the racial self-identifications of Latinos affect orientations towards the political system, specifically partisanship, ideology, issue positions, and the sense of commonality Latinos feel towards African-Americans and whites.Our central contention is that racial identities matter in Latino orientations to the political system.While Latinos may, in fact, occupy a "middle" position between whites and blacks, this masks substantial and significant political variation among those claiming a Latino or Hispanic identity, variation which can be attributed, at least in part, to variation in racial identification.We find that racial identity among Latinos appears to significantly influence both their policy views-at least when the policy has a clear racial aspect in the broader population-and their perceptions of other racial and ethnic groups in the US.Afro-Latinos are significantly more supportive of government sponsored health care, and significantly less supportive of the death penalty, than Latinos identifying as white.Moreover, when assessing their "commonality" with non-Hispanic blacks and whites, Afro-Latinos feel significantly closer to African-Americans whereas white Latinos feel significantly closer to whites.By contrast, when we examine broader indicators of political orientation-including partisanship and ideology-the results are far less striking.While there are modest differences occasionally approaching significance, it is not the case that Afro-and white-Latinos were polarized on these measures.We discuss what we see as the important implications of racially driven political diversity among Latinos.

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