Abstract
The Republican and Democratic Party engage the most active courtship in American politics, namely the repeated attempts to woo Latino voters. While the Latino population exhibits high levels of religiosity, presents itself as displaying more concern for family values, and evinces more conservative political attitudes around the issues of abortion, gay marriage and divorce, the majority of registered Latino voters affiliate with the Democratic Party. This paradox leaves the Republican Party having to court a population that espouses attitudes generally more reflective of its own platform. Population projections show that the Latino population will significantly grow over the coming years, increasing the Latino influence on American political institutions. This study examines the factors causing conservative Latinos to affiliate or lean toward the Democratic Party. Using data obtained from the Pew Hispanic Center, affiliation with the Democratic Party is modeled using crosstabulation and regression analysis with various broad casual inputs (affluence, familial status, attachment to the United States, demographics, culture and political attitudes). The statistical analysis is used to test several hypotheses from social identity theory regarding whether conservative Latinos see themselves as part of an “in-group” associated with the larger Latino population who are mostly Democrats, or if they see themselves part of an “in-group” based on religious identity. The results of the study demonstrate that eleven explanatory variables serve as predictors of partisanship (age, respondents with a Cuban and Mexican family heritage, income, respondents opposing the death penalty, respondents downplaying Latino discrimination, respondents opposing gay marriage, respondents with exposure to a place of worship speaking out on the issue of immigration, respondents believing the poor have it easy because of government assistance, respondents asserting religion is unimportant in influencing their political thinking and respondents considering themselves to be “Hispanic/Latino” before identifying themselves in terms of their country, religion or being an American. Both the regression and crosstabulation results support the hypothesis that conservative Latinos affiliate with the Democratic Party because the Latino population as a whole does. There was no evidence suggesting that conservative Latinos form partisanship based on religious identity. If party affiliation is based on social identity, Republican efforts to educate conservative Latinos about the Party’s platform are unlikely to succeed at recruiting more Latinos to the Republican Party.