Immigrants and ( Non-) Voting

Socio-economic theories have long been the cornerstone of political participation studies. However, these theories are incomplete and particularly unsuited to explaining behavior found within immigrant minority communities. While increases in age and education provide skills that ease political participation, if these variables do not concurrently socialize an individual to stronger beliefs about the efficacy of voting and democratic ideals, they will not result in the expected higher participation levels. Prior studies over-simplify the effects of socio-economic status on political participation. Here, evidence is presented that socio-economic status variables merely provide the skills necessary for political activity in a suitable political context. Socialization determines how these skills will be manifested. Turnout rates for American elections have generally lagged behind those in other democracies (Burnham 1965; Powell 1986). After peaking in 1960, American turnout has steadily declined. The near quarter drop translates into millions of non-voters, and arguably poses a threat to democracy. Paradoxically, the best predictors of turnout at the micro-level—age, education, and income—have increased during the same period giving rise to a participation “puzzle” (Brody 1978). The older, better educated, and wealthy are more likely to vote; yet, as the American public has become, on average, older, more educated, and wealthier, turnout has bafflingly plummeted. This “participation puzzle” has produced a wide array of proposed solutions. Interestingly, these solutions retain the assumptions of the puzzle and support the generalizability of its claims. A challenge to the soundness of the puzzle’s underlying structure—the fact that, barring mediating factors, increases in age, education, and income should always correlate with higher participation levels, can scarcely be found. Indeed, the notion that increases in socio-economic status correspond directly to an increased inclination to vote has long been assumed to apply equally across every sector of the population and in a fashion that proves oblivious to time. This view, however, is An earlier version of this paperwas presented at the annualmeeting of theMidwest Political Science Association, 1997. I would like to thank seminar participants at Georgetown, Northwestern, and theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for helpful advice in the formation of this article. I also owe a debt of thanks to Bruce Cain, Louis DeSipio, Brian Gaines, Jim Gimpel, Paul Kellstedt, Douglas Rivers, Todd Shaw, Barry Weingast, and three anonymous referees for their insightful and helpful comments. 1Education is still widely regarded as amechanism throughwhich skills are provided. This is evident from recent awardwinning publications such as Education and Democratic Citizenship in America (Nie, Junn, and Stehlik-Barry 1997). In addition, Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (1996) have also recently argued that education has no independent effect upon voter turnout. Instead, the role of education in voter turnout is to increase political information and political interest. People with higher education are more politically engaged and thus vote at higher rates.