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Foreign-Born Voting Behavior in Local Elections: Evidence From New Immigrant Destinations

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American Politics Research

Published online on

Abstract

Approximately half of immigrants to the United States are now settling directly in cities and towns with little prior history of immigration. Because this dispersed settlement pattern is so recent, we know little about the political behavior of naturalized citizens in these new immigrant destinations. This article begins to fill this gap by exploring the determinants of foreign-born voting in municipal elections using a new dataset that combines official voting information from the state of Utah with demographic information about Utah residents from the Utah Population Database (UPDB). We hypothesize that in addition to individual-level predictors of prior experience with democratic politics and community attachment, the size of cities and their form of government will also affect the likelihood that foreign-born citizens will turn out to vote in local elections. We use multilevel modeling techniques to test these hypotheses and find that prior experience with democratic politics, whether in the United States or in their home country, along with the city-level characteristics of city size and form of government, are powerful predictors of foreign-born voting in local elections. Moreover, we find that while large cities experience lower levels of turnout for all citizens, the negative effect on participation is strongest for foreign-born citizens.