Abstract
Does pre-existing preference based on skin tone, facial features, and other observable characteristics, i.e., phenotypic preference, affect immigrant voters’ support for political candidates competing in their countries of origin? Do these preferences change as migrants’ tenure in their host society increases? These questions are important for ethnic and racial politics in general, and particularly for the sizable foreign-born population in the United States, which includes 11 million Mexicans. Using a unique, random sample of foreign-born Mexicans in San Diego County, we employ a voting experiment to test the impact of skin tone and phenotype on vote choice among first generation immigrants. Our design allows us to distinguish responses to different phenotypic cues by exposing respondents to European, mestizo, and indigenous looking candidates competing in a hypothetical Mexican election. Migrants showed higher support for the Indigenous candidate, and evaluated the European and Mestizo candidates as more ideologically conservative. As migrants’ time in the United States increases, the preference for indigenous features gives way to a preference for whiteness, which we interpret as evidence of first generation migrants adopting the dominant racial ideology of the United States. While ethnic distinctions have long been viewed as a key component of voting behavior, our research demonstrates that, even within a single ethnicity, racial differences may have profound impacts on the evaluation of and support for electoral candidates. This study contributes to the research on race and political behavior in comparative perspective, as well as the political consequences of migration.
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Notes
For a general approach to the use of physical features in forming opinions about others, see Ashmore and del Boca (1981), Fiske and Taylor (1984); for specific applications to evaluations of political candidates, see Terkildsen (1993), Maddox (2004), Kam (2007), McConnaughy et al. (2010), Weaver (2012), Aguilar (2015).
In what follows, we drop the term “looking” from our descriptions of candidate appearance.
A detailed description of the methodology used to build the sampling frame for this study is provided in Marcelli (2014).
To our knowledge, no research to date has examined the relationship between party labels and candidates’ phenotypic appearance in Mexico. We chose to present independent candidates in order to avoid contaminating the treatment with additional, potentially conflicting signals about party identification.
Nayarit is one of the smallest Mexican states by population, and thus has contributed only a small share to overall Mexico-U.S. migration. While we did not capture respondents’ state of origin, it is likely that almost none were natives of Nayarit.
Participants were informed, at the time of recruitment, that they could choose not to answer any survey item.
The differences between these two conditions and the control group are also significant in a regression including the same controls that appear in Table 1 (results not shown).
More than 60% of this sample had lived in the U.S. more than 20 years.
Age, Sex and Education were all set to their median values.
In regression results, not shown but included in the online data and analysis file, we also show that subjects in the control condition (those who saw no candidate image) demonstrated no statistically significant relationship between time in the U.S. and preference for the target candidate. This further reinforces our contention that the findings in support of our Hypothesis 3 are driven by subjects’ reactions to the experimental cue, and not by differences in the political views of more recent and more experienced migrants in our sample.
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Acknowledgements
In addition to the funders mentioned above, we also acknowledge the support of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies and the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies. The project could not have been carried out without the efforts of Enrico Marcelli, Allison Van Vooren, Wayne Cornelius, and all of the students who participated in the 2013–2014 round of the Mexican Migration Field Research Program. We thank Seth Hill, Ricardo Ramirez, Tom Wong, Will Terry, and seminar participants at the 2014 MPSA, APSA, and PRIEC meetings for helpful comments. The standard disclaimer applies.
This work was supported by Grants from the AVINA Foundation and the University of Arizona’s Borders Program, whom the authors gratefully acknowledge. Replication materials are available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/2PAZJX
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A Appendix
A Appendix
See Appendix Table 2, Figs. 6, 7.
A.1 Randomization Check
In this randomization check, we examine whether there are differences in the observable characteristics of our respondents, grouped by treatment assignment category. If such differences existed, it would be evidence that there was a systematic breakdown of our randomization and assignment regime. No such differences exist, neither as reported here in Table 2, nor in a likelihood ratio test (not reported) in our analysis.
A.2 Ideology Through Time
A possible concern is that the primary driver of our results for differential evaluation of candidate ideology through time might result from different ideology profiles being present among our sample of Mexican-born residents of San Diego County. There is no evidence to suggest an association between SDCMIHLSS participant’s time in the US and reported ideology. As we report in Appendix Fig. 6 neither a split by binned ideology (in the left panel) nor a full recover of the data (in the right panel) give any support to such a theory.
There is no effect of time in U.S. on ideology. The left panel coarsens ideology and bins. The right panel reports all the data, and fits a moving smoothed moving average estimate of 7-point ideology across number of years in the U.S.
A.3 Knowledge of Party Systems in Mexico
Density plots show respondents’ assessments of the target candidate’s ideology (based on a seven point scale). Values are grouped by respondents’ assessment of the political party that the target candidate would most likely be affiliated with
Each of the overlaid density plots shows the distribution of ideology values attributed to the candidate. The values are grouped according to the respondent’s answer to the question, “If [the target candidate] were affiliated with a political party, which party do you think it would be?” In other words, the values plotted in red (medium shade) show how respondents who presumed the candidate belonged to the left-leaning PRD described the candidate’s ideology. The figure shows that, while there is substantial variation in the attributed ideology of the candidate, respondents are generally reliable in classifying the main political parties of Mexico along the ideological spectrum.
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Aguilar, R., Hughes, D.A. & Gell-Redman, M. Phenotypic Preference in Mexican Migrants: Evidence from a Random Household Survey. Polit Behav 41, 187–207 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-018-9445-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-018-9445-9