1. Who Really Loses in American Democracy?
- Author
-
Yoshinaka, Antoine and Grose, Christian R.
- Subjects
- *
DEMOCRACY , *UNITED States elections , *VOTERS , *HISPANIC Americans , *DATA analysis , *EXIT polling (Elections) - Abstract
In a recent APSR article, Hajnal (2009) explores the question of who loses in American democracy, and finds that African-American voters are significantly more likely than white voters to vote for a losing candidate in recent U.S. elections. This finding is extremely troublesome, as it suggests that African Americans' voices are systematically being shut out of the political process. We revisit this question and show that Hajnal's analyses are too broad in their scope, and that they do not account for the sampling procedures unique to each national exit poll. When we disaggregate his results on the basis of each election year, weight the data according to each exit poll's probability sampling weight, cluster standard errors to take account of the first-stage precinct-wide sampling frame, and examine a longer time period, we arrive at different conclusions. We find a surprising number of elections where minority voters are more likely than whites to vote for a winning candidate. However, we also find many elections where minority voters lose, and we find that Hajnal overestimates the extent to which Latinos and Asian Americans win in some U.S. elections. We conclude that the picture of "who loses" in American democracy may not be as bleak as Hajnal suggests for African Americans, but may be somewhat less positive than he suggests for Latinos and Asian Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2011