The Institutional Contexts of Registration, Voting--and Naturalization--in the United States.

While the assumption has been that voting barriers have been on the decline since the 1960s, this paper examines the effect of a new generation of registration and voting barriersâ??voter ID laws, provisional balloting, etc. Changes in federal law in 1993 and 2002, even while they have increased federal oversight over the voting process, also injected a great deal of new variation in how states and counties administer both registration and voting. Drawing on data from the 2004 Current Population Survey, this paper explores the impact of state-level electoral institutions on voting and registration on the population as a whole as well as on potentially vulnerable populations such as first generation immigrants, blacks, Latinos and Asian-Americans. The paper 1) argues that old barriers to participation haven't entirely faded away and that in fact new barriers, while perhaps not as pernicious as those in the past, continue to appear. 2) indicates that these barriers have real effects on electoral participationâ??and naturalizationâ??particularly for racial and ethnic minorities, linguistic minorities, and immigrants. And 3) makes a case for thinking about these policies as working in conjunction as parts of states' policy 'ecosystems,' such that policies in one arena (like voting) have effects in other arenas (like naturalization). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]