Racialized Partisan Sorting in the States: New Measures, Causes and Consequences

• In Event: Race, Party, and Geography

Abstract

Racial sorting along party lines in the United States over the last fifty years has been attributed to the nation’s increasing racial/ethnic diversity and, in turn, is proposed as a foundational cause of partisan polarization. Yet, outside of the well-established realignment of White partisan orientations in the South, the degree to which diversity has led to racialized partisan sorting at the subnational level, and its consequences, remains relatively unexplored. To address this shortcoming, and take advantage of the leverage provided by the states to examine the causes and consequences of racialized partisan sorting, we construct state-level estimates of the mean partisan affiliation of Whites, Blacks, Latinos and Asians, as well as the racial/ethnic composition of each major party, across the fifty states and over the last two decades using MRP procedures applied to data from the CCES and CMPS. The MRP estimates are then treated as a dependent variable in preliminary analyses of the role diversity plays in racialized partisan sorting, as well as an independent variable to explore the effects of sorting on descriptive representation, state public policy orientations and partisan polarization and identities. These new measures of partisan sorting and the results of the subsequent analyses contribute to our understanding of the role of racial/ethnic diversity in the American political system by demonstrating the variation in the degree to which state parties are racially sorted and demonstrating that partisan sorting has substantial political and policy implications.

Authors

• Robert R. Preuhs, Metropolitan State University of Denver

• Rodney E. Hero, Arizona State University

• Pablo Alberto Ortega Poveda, Arizona State University