Social Class, Economic Preferences & Self-Interest: Competing Paths to Class Partisanship & Voting
Channel: Havens Wright Center for Social Justice
Date: 2022-09-29

A lecture by Gary Segura examining the relationship between social class, economic preferences, and self interest that is expressed in voting behavior. Segura investigates whether (or not) party electorates are divorced from their social class, and if they are, whether this disconnection is consistently observable in all sub-populations of citizens. He also explores whether voting patterns that do not appear to align with social class location are the product of a distinctive modal path or the result of multiple processes.

Gary  Segura is Professor of American Politics and Chair of Chicano/a – Latino/a Studies at Stanford University, and principal and co-founder of the polling firm Latino Decisions™.  His work focuses on issues of political representation, and the politics to America’s growing Latino minority.  Among his most recent publications are “The Future is Ours:” Minority Politics, Political Behavior, and the Multiracial Era of American Politics, (Congressional Quarterly, 2011) and Latinos in the New Millennium: An Almanac of Opinion, Behavior, and Policy Preferences (Cambridge University Press, 2012).  Earlier work includes Latino Lives in America: Making It Home (2010, Temple University Press), “Su Casa Es Nuestra Casa: Latino Politics Research and the Development of American Political Science,” (2007), in the American Political Science Review, “Race and the Recall: Racial Polarization in the California Recall Election,” (2008) in the American Journal of Political Science, and “Hope, Tropes, and Dopes: Hispanic and White Racial Animus in the 2008 Election,” (2010) in Presidential Studies Quarterly.  Segura is one of three Principal Investigators of the 2012 American National Election Studies, is a past-President of the Midwest Political Science Association and the president-elect of the Western Political Science Association.  In 2010, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.