PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Michael S. Lewis-Beck
AU  - Mary Stegmaier
TI  - The Hispanic Immigrant Voter and the Classic American Voter: Presidential Support in the 2012 Election
AID  - 10.7758/RSF.2016.2.3.09
DP  - 2016 Jun 01
TA  - RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences
PG  - 165--181
VI  - 2
IP  - 3
4099  - http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/2/3/165.short
4100  - http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/2/3/165.full
AB  - In their classic 1960 work, Angus Campbell and his colleagues offer a model to explain political behavior. They posit a funnel of causality, whereby the causal flow moved from remote long-term forces, such as socio-demographics and party identification, to more immediate short-term forces, such as issues and candidates, finally arriving at the vote choice itself. This explanation has withstood the test of time in studies of the United States and other democracies. The question at hand in this article is how Latin American immigrants comport themselves in the national political environment of the United States. Can the political preferences of Hispanic immigrants be explained pretty much the way the political preferences of native-born Americans can be explained? In other words, does the funnel of causality apply to them? Our findings, based on analysis of 2012 American National Election Study and Latino Immigrant National Election Study survey data, indicate that it does.