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Given barriers generated by racism, direct appeals for political solidarity should resonate strongly among racial and ethnic groups. Yet, such appeals can be mitigated as those barriers are overcome and minorities assimilate into society. We examine the case of Mexican Americans during the Chicano Movement. At this time, many Mexican Americans were assimilating and finding a place in the social hierarchy while others argued against assimilation. An important example of racial identity politics came in 1972 when La Raza Unida Party [LRUP] fielded a candidate for governor in Texas. Counter to what standard theories of assimilation and acculturation would predict, Mexican Americans responded to this call for racial solidarity. Based on quantitative and qualitative evidence, we argue that the election revealed intense alienation among Mexican Americans from Anglo-dominated politics. However, Mexican American support for LRUP was uneven across Texas and reflected differing levels of economic attainment and incorporation. Keywords: La Raza Unida; Chicano movement; identity politics; political participation; Texas politics; third parties. DOI: 10.1080/01419870903006996

Most examinations of the sociodemographic group foundations of political party identification and party coalitions in the United States rely on national samples (e.g., the National Election Studies). Therefore, they fail to consider (a) state-to-state variation in the group components of party identification and party coalitions and (b) how state context structures this variation. We rely on media exit polls from the 1988, 1992, and 1996 elections to examine group influences on party identification and party coalitions across the large states. Although there are common threads across the nation in Democratic and Republican support, we find significant state-to-state variation in the nature of group influences on party identification. For many sociodemographic characteristics, group size conditions the importance of the characteristic for party identification, a finding consistent with a contextual theory of political behavior. A group's size and the partisan loyalty of its members interact to determine a group's importance to coalition building in a state.

Willingness to allow political outgroups to exercise First Amendment freedoms (group-targeted tolerance) is not always predictive of attitudes toward individual group members (individual-targeted tolerance). Taking research on individual-targeted tolerance as a point of departure, I test the general applicability of the distinction between group- and individual-targeted tolerance and examine the influence of information irrelevant to group-related beliefs and timing of group membership disclosure on judgments of individual group members. I find that individual members of unpopular groups are tolerated more than the group when individuated with a large amount of information and when their group membership precedes rather than follows individuating information. 'I certainly was prepared to dislike him ... but there he was--charming, intelligent, and agreeing with me on First Amendment Rights.' Marlene Roeder of the ACLU on David Duke's appearance on Tom Snyder's late-night talk show, Tomorrow (Wade 1987)

The prevailing view among scholars who study the former USSR is that party identification and party loyalty may take years, even decades to develop. The public has been characterized as anti-party, distrustful of political parties, and indifferent toward parties in general. Our data show that not only has party identification begun to develop, but that a majority of Russians and Ukrainians identify with one party or another and that they share attitudes and views of the political systems with party leaders. In addition, both party leaders and partisans in the general public have a sophisticated understanding of how the parties are arrayed along axes of political conflict and where they fit in the political spectrum.

This research examines the positive influence of democracy and economic liberalism on citizens' quality of life (QOL). The statistical analysis relies on extreme-bounds analysis, the Tobit-maximum likelihood estimator, and robust two-stage least squares to test this hypothesis. The relationship between democracy and QOL is a parabolic inverted U-shaped curve, so that democracy first enhances QOL and over time it hampers it. On the other hand, QOL strengthens democracy. QOL suffers from a market economy in middle-income countries. Openness to trade enhances QOL everywhere but sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. A market economy consolidates democracy everywhere else but sub-Saharan Africa. Openness enhances democracy around the globe, except in Latin America and the Middle East. Economic development and QOL exhibit a reciprocal normal U-shaped curve, whereas democracy and economic development are linearly dependent. These contradictory results cast some doubt on the pursuit of both democracy and a liberal economy in fostering development. The current pursuit of the liberal ethos can be destructive, and it is time to modify our vision of the furore.

A study analyzing the data from a national survey of high school students in the Netherlands in 1991, to examine the intergenerational transmission of political party preference, shows a fairly strong parental political socialization in the Netherlands. Politically homogenous parents are more successful in transmitting their political preference to their children. On the other hand, the heterogeneous parents are relatively less successful in transmitting their political preferences to their children.

The existence of cross-class families, where the wife's occupation is taken to be superior to that of the husband, has been seen as a challenge to conventional ways of allocating class positions to partners in the conjugal household. Data from the Social Change and Economic Life Initiative survey conducted in 1986 are used to estimate the numerical importance of such families. Three approaches to the class allocation of men and women in conjugal households are outlined: individual, conventional and dominance. The predictive validity of these approaches is then assessed with the dependent variable drawn from the domain of political party identification. The outcomes of the exercise suggest that the conventional approach may require some slight finessing with respect to female respondents in cross-class families who are active full-time in the labour market, but in the main still gives acceptable results.

Carmines and Stimson's theory of racial issue evolution has strongly influenced scholarly and popular interpretations of U.S. party politics. The central proposition of this theory is that racial attitudes have shaped the party loyalties of voters who have entered the electorate since 1964. Using data from the 1980 and 1988 American National Election Studies, this paper undertakes a test of the theory of racial issue evolution by examining the relationships between racial attitudes and party identification among white U. S. citizens. The evidence presented in this paper shows that racial attitudes had very little influence on party identification among either younger or older whites. Other issues, especially those involving the scope of the welfare state and national security, played a much larger role in driving many whites away from the Democratic party during the 1980s. Furthermore, racial attitudes had a negligible impact on whites' candidate preference in the 1988 presidential election.

This article investigates whether the entry of a greater number of women into the political arena could transform gender relations. The opinions of female and male New Democratic, Liberal and Parti quebecois candidates in the 1989 Quebec general election were polled, in order to clarify three main questions: Do the female candidates polled have opinions favourable to feminist demands? Do female and male candidates have the same opinions with respect to these demands? Do political party and political philosophy influence the opinions of each sex on feminist demands? The results show that, generally speaking, women have higher scores on a feminist index than men. More specifically, this gap between women and men varies in accordance with the thematics of feminism, and with political party and political philosophy.

In this paper we examine the acquisition of partisanship by immigrants and subsequent generations of Latinos and Asian Americans. The data we analyze are derived from a survey of California residents in late 1984. We find that the longer Latino immigrants have been in the United States, the more likely they are to identify as Democrats and to have strong party preferences. We find age-related gains in both Democratic support and in the strength of partisanship among subsequent generations of Latinos as well. In line with our hypotheses about their foreign policy concerns, the data also suggest that immigrants from China, Korea, and Southeast Asia become more Republican with increased exposure to American politics. Other Asian immigrants and subsequent generations of Asian Americans exhibit no such trends in either the direction of their party preferences or in partisan intensity.

Carmines, McIver, and Stimson (1987) argue that there has been a 'dramatic change' in the intergenerational transmission of partisanship and independence and that the growth in Independents is largely accounted for by 'unrealized partisans.' We show that both conclusions are a function of ignoring sizable numbers of families in which parents' partisanship is indeterminate. Unrealized partisanship has been an important cause of dealignment, but it accounts for much less than the entire increase in the proportion of Independents. Moreover, transmission rates within Independent families have been consistently high; since 1964 independence has been passed on to offspring more efficiently than partisanship. The scope and usefulness of Carmines et al.'s theory is thus undermined by its failure to accommodate several types of families that made a sizable contribution to the increase in the proportion of Independents over the past 30 years.

A mixture of ideology and new kinds of economic self-interest underlies the trend for Democratic Party affiliation among professionals. The new 'lifestyle economy' involves professional products and services geared to customers' diverse lifestyles and newer social norms in areas such as mental-health care, fashion, and television programming.

This article presents a model linking the structure of the party system with the political identification children develop during the political socialization process. According to this model, children acquire from their parents political labels that serve as voting cues. These cues can relate to a specific party (party identification), a group of parties, or a basic ideological position (usually in 'left' and 'right' terms). In every society, labels having greater heuristic value are more commonly transmitted from parent to offspring. The type of label with the heuristic advantage in each society is determined by the nature of the party system and, specifically, by three of its characteristics: number of parties, composition of the social cleavages, and degree of competitiveness. Some of the model's assumptions are tested with empirical data from Israel, providing a comprehensive account of the intergenerational transmission of partisanship and ideological orientations in Israel.

Introduction In a rather surprising twist, Quebec's two traditional major provincial parties, the Parti Quebecois (PQ) and the Parti Liberal du Quebec (PLQ), and an upstart third party, the Action [...]

because they are unlikely to be a perfect match of the existing electorate, in-migrants may form the basis for an alteration in the local partisan balance. This note discusses partisan change and the role migration may play within it, and identifies the conditions under which migration is likely to have its greatest effect. This effect is illustrated by an intensive analysis of a Sun Belt county which has witnessed both a wave of migration-based population growth and a dramtic change in the local partisan balance.