The Precarious Position of Immigrants

Author(s):  
Heath Brown

This chapter explores the demographic shifts that took place between 2000 and 2012, which saw the composition of immigrants in the United States change greatly. Despite growing in number over the last three decades, immigrants have participated in politics at lower levels than other U.S. citizens. This chapter examines the gap in immigrant voting with the help of important findings from political behavior and political sociology research. This literature shows how varied immigrant politics are in the United States and also suggests why nonprofit engagement in elections should draw more attention. The chapter also examines how political institutions, especially nonprofit organizations, have advanced and sometimes slowed immigrant voting.

Author(s):  
Maureen A. Craig ◽  
Julian M. Rucker ◽  
Jennifer A. Richeson

Do demographic shifts in the racial composition of the United States promote positive changes in the nation’s racial dynamics? Change in response to the nation’s growing diversity is likely, but its direction and scope are less clear. This review integrates emerging social-scientific research that examines how Americans are responding to the projected changes in the racial/ethnic demographics of the United States. Specifically, we review recent empirical research that examines how exposure to information that the United States is becoming a “majority-minority” nation affects racial attitudes and several political outcomes (e.g., ideology, policy preferences), and the psychological mechanisms that give rise to those attitudes. We focus primarily on the reactions of members of the current dominant racial group (i.e., white Americans). We then consider important implications of these findings and propose essential questions for future research.


2021 ◽  
pp. 089976402110573
Author(s):  
Zongchao Cathy Li ◽  
Yi Grace Ji ◽  
Weiting Tao ◽  
Zifei Fay Chen

This study investigated nonprofit organizations’ (NPOs) emotion-based content strategies on Facebook and publics’ engagement behaviors. More than 52,000 Facebook posts and corresponding comments were collected from the top 100 NPOs in the United States. The emotion-carrying status and valence of the messages were analyzed with computer-assisted sentiment analysis procedures. Results confirmed emotion-carrying posts and posts with negative emotions led to increased public engagement as indexed by the volumes of likes, shares, and comments. The presence of emotions and valence of the NPOs’ posts were also found to have a diffusion effect on user comments.


2021 ◽  

Politics in the United States has become increasingly polarized in recent decades. Both political elites and everyday citizens are divided into rival and mutually antagonistic partisan camps, with each camp questioning the political legitimacy and democratic commitments of the other side. Does this polarization pose threats to democracy itself? What can make some democratic institutions resilient in the face of such challenges? Democratic Resilience brings together a distinguished group of specialists to examine how polarization affects the performance of institutional checks and balances as well as the political behavior of voters, civil society actors, and political elites. The volume bridges the conventional divide between institutional and behavioral approaches to the study of American politics and incorporates historical and comparative insights to explain the nature of contemporary challenges to democracy. It also breaks new ground to identify the institutional and societal sources of democratic resilience.


Author(s):  
Micheal L. Shier ◽  
Lindsey McDougle ◽  
Femida Handy

ABSTRACT   The literature suggests that nonprofit organizations provide civic benefits by promoting engagement within local communities. However, there exists minimal empirical evidence describing the ways in which nonprofits actually undertake this role. In order to address this omission, we conducted interviews with personnel of nonprofit organizations in one rural community in the United States. Our preliminary findings indicate that nonprofit organizations promote civic engagement through programs and activities that: 1) engage volunteers and donors; 2) bring community members together; 3) collaborate with organizations within and beyond the community; and 4) promote community education and awareness. Together, these findings help to develop a working model to understand the civic footprint of nonprofit organizations with methodological implications for future research that would seek to measure the extent to which nonprofits promote civic engagement. Il est normal de supposer que les associations à but non lucratif favorisent l’engagement du citoyen dans les communautés locales. Cependant, il existe peu de données empiriques sur la manière dont ces associations assument véritablement ce rôle. Pour combler ce manque, nous avons mené des entretiens semi-directifs approfondis auprès du personnel d’associations à but non lucratif dans une petite communauté rurale aux États-Unis. Nos résultats préliminaires indiquent que ces associations motivent les citoyens à s’impliquer quand elles offrent des programmes et des activités qui : 1) intéressent les bénévoles et les donateurs; 2) rassemblent directement ou indirectement les membres de la communauté; 3) collaborent avec d’autres associations tant au sein de la communauté qu’au-delà de celle-ci; et 4) encouragent l’éducation et la conscientisation communautaires. Ces constats aident à établir un modèle pour mieux comprendre la présence civique des associations à but non lucratif dans les communautés et indiquent une piste à suivre pour des recherches futures qui examineraient l’influence de ces associations sur le niveau de participation civique.


2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 871-872
Author(s):  
Leah Haus

Faced with similar economic circumstances, France and the United States adopted different immigration policies at various times in the twentieth century. Jeffrey Togman asks why. To account for this variation in public policy outcome, he points to the different structure of political institutions in the two countries.


1990 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
John S. Odell

The international trade problems of the 1980s stimulated an expansion of scholarship on trade policies by economists and political scientists. At least four distinct theoretical perspectives weave their way through recent literature that concentrates on the United States—emphasizing market conditions, policy beliefs and values, national political institutions, and global structures, respectively. New studies in each of these traditions advance beyond the work of their predecessors, but none of the perspectives has yet proved adequate as a single unifying vehicle. Nevertheless, we can also see clear movement toward a synthesis, with single works blending insights from several traditions. Thus, the books under review do not all fall neatly into the familiar exclusive categories of “economics” or “political science.” The emerging synthesis needs strengthening in several ways, including the development of “conditioning hypotheses” that will reduce remaining apparent confusions.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mounir Karadja ◽  
Erik Prawitz

We study the political effects of mass emigration to the United States in the nineteenth century using data from Sweden. To instrument for total emigration over several decades, we exploit severe local frost shocks that sparked an initial wave of emigration, interacted with within-country travel costs. Our estimates show that emigration substantially increased the local demand for political change, as measured by labor movement membership, strike participation, and voting. Emigration also led to de facto political change, increasing welfare expenditures as well as the likelihood of adopting more inclusive political institutions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Ana Luisa Calvillo Vázquez ◽  
Guillermo Hernández Orozco

It was sought to know the meaning of deportation for Mexicans who were returned from the United States in the last decade, based on their ideas, attitudes, and beliefs, from the educational approach and the analysis of content as a methodological strategy. Empirical material consisted of 25 digital narratives from the public archive “Humanizing Deportation,” six in-depth interviews conducted between 2016 and 2017 in Tijuana, Baja California, and five historical testimonies located in bibliographic sources. Findings show that post-deportation irregular re-emigration underlines a political behavior of resistance that suggests the existence of a culture of deportation, which differs from the culture of migration and the culture of clandestine border crossing, even though the current penalty for illegal reentry has inhibited or postponed these practices.


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