Turnout, Status and Identity in Los Angeles: Mobilizing Latinos to Vote in Two Contrasting Neighborhoods

We conducted a hybrid placebo-and-control design field experiment with a rolling protocol in the June 2010 California primary election. The voter pool included registered Latinos living in East Los Angeles, a working class neighborhood in Los Angeles County, and Montebello, a neighboring middle class city. We tested the turnout effects of Latino and American identity-based messages that encouraged voting among Latino citizens who live in these two majority-Latino communities. A separate placebo condition encouraged Latinos in these two neighborhoods to recycle. All voters who were successfully contacted by telephone, or for whom messages were left at their home, received a follow-up postcard that emphasized the treatment message while also highlighting whether or not they voted in the previous general election (November 2008). Overall, the experiment was a clear success. Preliminary results indicate significant effects of both treatment messages (compared to the placebo) in Montebello. In East Los Angeles, consistent with expectations, only the Latino message moved Latinos to vote in greater numbers. * Funding for this project was provided by Stanford University's office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education. Our thanks go to Joe Tafoya, who provided invaluable help in organizing and executing the phone bank, and Melina Abdullah, who generously provided office space at California State University, Los Angeles, where we conducted the phone bank. We also thank Lisa Garcia Bedolla for helpful feedback on the project design, and Holger Lutz Kern for guidance on using ThreeGroups software to analyze three-group experiments (with baseline, placebo and treatment conditions). We also thank Donald Green, Victoria Shineman and Matt Barreto for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. All errors, of course, remain our own. 1 Field experiments spanning more than a decade have demonstrated decisively that getout-the-vote (GOTV) efforts can move significant numbers of Latinos to the polls, even when those efforts are targeted at low-income voters with low propensities to vote. Nonetheless, and despite evidence from observational studies and laboratory experiments that suggest the power of linked fate and Latino candidates in providing a boost to Latino turnout, previous mobilization experiments using Latino vote records have not found significant differences between GOTV messages that emphasize ethnic solidarity as compared to more generic messages such as civic duty or those that emphasize the closeness of an election. This scholarship, considered together, poses a paradox: how can feelings of linked fate or the presence of a Latino candidate on the ballot motivate Latino turnout while blandishments to vote that emphasize the need for Latinos to exercise their political power are no more powerful than generic encouragements to participate? Does priming Latino identity matter, or does it not? The study presented here—a field experiment conducted in two majority-Latino communities in Los Angeles County in June 2010—resolves the paradox by introducing variation in neighborhood context and its influence on affective attachments to Latino group identity. We build on work by Lisa Garcia Bedolla (2005), who interviewed Latino residents of East Los Angeles and Montebello and found that a positive Latino group identity, as opposed to a Latino group identity that is stigmatized, was more important than socioeconomic status in explaining individual political engagement and turnout. We return to the same two communities—the working-class but empowered neighborhood of unincorporated East Los Angeles and the middle-class and less cohesive Montebello—to test the effect of messages that cue identity on the subsequent decision to vote. Using a combined rolling protocol and placebo design to maximize efficiency, voters who were contacted by phone were invited to vote with either a message that cued their