African-Americans and Latinos: Disparate Participation in U.S. Politics
By Francis Bartus
Posted 12/17/05
In contemporary American politics, two distinguishable minority groups have the potential to make a distinct impact on electoral and policy outcomes—Latinos and African-Americans. Comprising 13% and 12.7% of the population, respectively, Latinos and African-Americans behave very differently in U.S. politics (CQ Researcher 254). Nationally, both groups attempt to achieve favorable outcomes through various means of conventional political participation—with varying degrees of success. Notably, African-Americans appear more active in voting and office holding, and they also display more partisan unity, which allows them greater sway over current electoral outcomes. Latinos, on the other hand, are at a crossroads. Though they have overtaken African-Americans in sheer population, they have yet to emerge as a unified and effective electoral force. Nonetheless, both groups must overcome similar barriers in their attempts to galvanize—or even solidify—their position in the U.S. political system. Indeed, both groups must overcome the “free rider problem” as well as the discouraging notion of individual helplessness, two challenges which depend on factors such as regional population concentration. Through interest groups and political leadership in the two major parties, both African-Americans and Latinos are currently fighting to overcome these barriers in every conventional arena, from simple voting behavior to political office holding.
It can be argued that Latinos face far more barriers to electoral participation than African-Americans, chief among which is the relative difficulty of naturalization. Currently, 26.7% of the Latino population consists of non-U.S. citizens (Suro 2), which means that Latino politicians and interest groups must encourage their constituents to naturalize before they can participate. Unlike African-Americans, whose history of disenfranchisement lends the vote a crucial legitimacy, Latinos stem from a variety of backgrounds and hold different degrees of respect for the U.S. political system. Nonetheless, prominent Latino lobbying groups such as the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) have attempted to ease the burden of naturalization. Yet in the wake of September 11th, the nation’s renewed interest in national security has nullified many of their efforts. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which now encompasses the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, raises particular concerns among Latino organizations. Michele Waslin, Senior Immigration Analyst for the National Council of La Raza, the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the United States, warns that
Placing the immigration agency within a new mega-national security agency jeopardizes our country’s rich immigration tradition and threatens to make the already poor treatment of immigrants by the federal bureaucracy even worse.
Now, more than ever, Latinos must overcome many disincentives in order to naturalize and vote. After the attacks, authorities began to enforce a 50-year-old law requiring a change of address form to be filed within 10 days of moving, using it to deport suspected terrorists. Then, local police gained the authority to enforce immigration laws, the mere suggestion of which, Waslin writes, “has resulted in fear in Latino and immigrant communities resulting in increased unwillingness to cooperate with law enforcement, to report crimes, and to come forward as witnesses.” Ultimately, all of these factors pose noteworthy challenges to Latino political participation.
However, unlike African-Americans, Latinos hold a comparative advantage in the distribution of their population. According to Louis DeSipio, “Eighty-six percent of Latinos are concentrated in nine states,” ensuring “a sizable share of the statewide vote (68).” “Despite being only 4 percent of the voting population,” he writes, these Latinos are “cohesive voting blocs in states with 75 percent of the votes needed to carry the presidency (DeSipio 69).” Therefore, Latinos have the potential to hold greater sway over national elections. This helps Latino-interest groups to emphasize the notion that every individual vote counts.
Yet despite their comparative national disadvantage in terms of population dispersal, African-Americans wield many crucial advantages in voting. Firstly, they are almost all U.S. citizens. Secondly, the “free rider problem”—that is the idea that an individual may gain the benefits of a collective good without actually working to obtain said good—poses less of a challenge to African-Americans. This stems mostly from their history of slavery, disenfranchisement, and marginalization, which contributes to the perception that they must act on their own behalf—no other group will do it for them. The historical struggle for Civil Rights and the battle for African-American suffrage grants African-Americans a greater perceived interest in national electoral outcomes—perhaps providing “imperfect information” to the overall population.
However, a crucial factor influencing both groups voting behavior has been heretofore overlooked. Two interrelated indicators of political participation—socioeconomic status and education—act as barriers to both groups. 21.4% of Latinos and 22.1% of African-Americans fall below the poverty line (CQ Press 259); while White males average 13.3 years of schooling, Latino males average a mere 10.6 and African-American males lag behind at 12.2 years (Fry 1). Thus, both group’s political participation suffers. Community organizations such as MALDEF and the Black Alliance for Educational Options are working to overcome these barriers by promoting broader educational opportunities for underprivileged Latino and African-American children.
Polling data confirms these factors. In the 2004 elections, only 18% of the Latino population voted, versus 39% of African-Americans and 51% of Whites (Suro 8). Even those Latinos who were registered voted in relatively small numbers; while 69% of registered African-Americans and 75% of registered Whites voted, only 58% of registered Latinos voted (Suro 7). Between 2000 and 2004, registration increased by only 1% and voting only by 3% among both Latino and African-American populations (Suro 7), suggesting that voter registration and mobilization efforts have been only marginally effective, at best.
A second form of conventional political participation—party influence—exercises a crucial influence over Latino and African-American voting behavior. Most Latinos self-identify as Democrats—likely due to the same socioeconomic factors that affect African-Americans. Nonetheless, many Latinos subscribe to conservative social views, which could potentially be converted into political capital by Republican strategists. During the last two presidential elections, George W. Bush targeted polarizing social issues like abortion and gay marriage, managing to gain 34% of the Latino vote in 2000 and 40% in 2004 (Suro 15). If the Republican Party continues to perceive Latinos as potential swing-voters, they are likely to provide the necessary political entrepreneurship to galvanize political participation among Latino communities. Though some argue that Bush extended a hand to Latinos when he appointed Alberto Gonzales to Attorney General, groups like the NCLR blast the administration for its overall Latino hiring record.
Nonetheless, both groups display different amounts of inclusion within the two major parties and across the range of political offices. African-Americans make up 10% of the House of Representatives, which roughly corresponds to their 12% share in the electorate. Latinos make up only 6% of the House, which accounts for their 6% share in the electorate, but not their 13% share in the U.S. Population (Suro i). Additionally, African-Americans, who are much more firmly entrenched in the Democratic Party, boast the 44-member Congressional Black Caucus. The Democratic Congressional Hispanic Caucus, on the other hand, has only 21 members. Overall, the Black Caucus tends toward more unity and strength of purpose than the somewhat disunited Hispanic Caucus. Indeed, both groups are under-represented in the Senate, with some progress, notably the election of Barack Obama. African-Americans have also held more mayoralties of large cities than Latinos, mostly due to their high concentration in urban centers. In the introduction to his book, John Higham writes that “next to education, politics was the arena in which blacks made the most significant advances… and cities were the terrain on which those victories were won (22).”
Overall, both African-Americans and Latinos face barriers to conventional political participation; despite the fact that both groups compose roughly 13% of the U.S. Population, African-Americans make up more of the electorate and hold more political offices. Nonetheless, Latinos have made incremental gains, and given the current political climate, might mobilize more rapidly in the future.
Works Cited
CQ Press. Issues in Race, Ethnicity and Gender: Selections from the CQ Researcher. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2005.
DiSipio, Louis. Counting on the Latino Vote: Latinos as a New Electorate. The University Press of Virginia, 1996.
Fry, Richard. “Latinos in Higher Education: Many Enroll, Too Few Graduate.” The Pew Hispanic Center. 5 September, 2002. <http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/11.pdf>
Higham, John, ed. Civil Rights and Social Wrongs: Black-White Relations Since World War II. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.
Suro, Robert, Richard Fry, and Jeffery Passel. “Hispanics and the 2004 Election: Population, Electorate, and Voters.” The Pew Hispanic Center. 27 June, 2005. <http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/48.pdf>
Waslin, Michele Ph. D. “Counterterrorism and the Latino Community Since September 11” Cambio de Colores Conference 2003. 13 March, 2003. <http://www.cambiodecolores.org/Library/2003_Waslin_Counterterrorism.htm>