Content area
Full Text
Since the 1970s, Latino politics research has evolved, alternately responding to real-world political events and demographic changes, embracing new and emerging trends in the broader discipline, and offering new insights of its own that contribute to the development of political science. In so doing, there have emerged both an intellectual foundation and a growing body of empirical results, each of which challenges long-held theories and findings in the discipline more broadly. Thus, Latino politics research is central in refining and broadening our understanding of American politics. Immigration, social marginality, and their uncertain status as a racial or ethnic minority make this population unique and raise important obstacles in applying existing interpretations and orthodoxies from the discipline's other traditions to this emerging and rapidly growing segment of American society. The major contributions of this line of inquiry are identified in five key areas: pluralism, group identity and mobilization, political participation, institutions and representation, and assimilation. We conclude with some thoughts regarding how the evolution of American society and its Latino population will pose important questions for future generations of political scientists.
The establishment of the American Political Science Association in 1903 occurred at a time of high immigration and, not coincidentally, during a period significantly influenced by Progressive Era ideas promoting institutional reforms that reflected theoretically informed responses to real-world developments like demographic change in the name of "good government." Several early APSA presidents expressed concern about the impact of these demographic changes on government (see, Goodnow 1905, 44; Shaw 1907,179-80). Lord James Bryce, the fourth APSA president, complained in The American Commonwealth about the evils of the spoils system driven in large part, he wrote, by "an ignorant multitude, largely composed of recent immigrants, untrained in self-government..." ([1888], 1995,577).
From their origins then, the consequences of racial/ethnic change and immigration for American democracy have been a leitmotif in political science. Over the last generation, spurred by increasing levels of Latino political participation and office holding, as well as by rapid population growth fueled in part by increasing immigration from Latin America, Latino politics research has been at the forefront of efforts to understand the implications of the changing roles of race and ethnicity and related demographics for American politics.
Three major political developments produced...