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Partisan Learning or Racial Learning: Opinion Change on Sanctuary City Policy Preferences in CA and TX

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2019

Loren Collingwood*
Affiliation:
University of California
Benjamin Gonzalez O'Brien
Affiliation:
San Diego State University
Joe R. Tafoya
Affiliation:
Depaul University
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: L. Collingwood, Department of Political Science, University of California, Riverside. E-mail: loren.collingwood@ucr.edu
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Abstract

Significant research indicates that attitude change is often a product of partisan learning. However, as the party system continues to rearrange around issues of race and immigration, and as new racial policy issues thrust onto the agenda, it is unclear whether voters learn to adopt racial policy attitudes more based on race/ethnicity or on party identification. We evaluate the partisan-learning model versus a racial-learning model with regards to public opinion on sanctuary cities/policies among survey respondents in CA and TX. Given President Trump's public antipathy toward sanctuary cities, we argue and show that negative partisanship is the most plausible vehicle for sanctuary city attitude change between 2015 and 2017. In this particular case, we find no support for a racial/ethnic-learning model.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 2019

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Footnotes

We wish to thank anonymous reviewers and the editors at the Journal of Race and Ethnic Politics for their comments and suggestions, which greatly improved the paper. We thank Mark DiCamillo and Douglas Ahler for providing IGS polling data.

References

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