Numerous scholarly assessments have shown that African American religious 6 In comparison, Latinos hold 5%, Asian Americans 1.25%, and Native Americans less than 1% of the total Congressional makeup. In particular, empirical work has infrequently addressed the role that African American clergy play in guiding the political opinions of their congregations. (2008) argue that studies of opinion dynamics within minority communities must define "elites" in a way that includes not only political actors who are part of the formal institutions of local, state and national government, but also individuals, such as community organizers, church leaders, media personalities and heads of interest groups, who have historically been influential by operating outside of these channels (Gaines 1997, Cohen 1999, Dawson 2001, Harris-Lacewell 2004 Unfortunately, there has been very little research assessing the impact that these less traditional elites have on public opinion within the black community. As a result, Lee (2002) and McClain et al. 6 If members of minority groups are likely to look to leaders who share their racial or ethnic background for guidance about political issues, therefore, they are probably looking beyond the halls of Congress. Scholars of race and ethnic politics would do well in the future, therefore, to acknowledge the complex ways that racial and partisan characteristics condition an individual’s response to elite messages.
Testing hypotheses derived from elite opinion theory, this paper finds that no one interpretation of elite opinion theory can fully account for perceptions of commonality across racial groups. In order to explore the potential for opinion leadership on perceptions of commonality, this paper employs a survey experiment embedded in the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. This oversight is surprising given that so-called “elite opinion” theory has become “virtually orthodoxy” within political science.
Despite a fairly voluminous literature on where these feelings come from, however, relatively little is known about how elite messages influence individual-level perceptions of intergroup relations. Even elite opinion theory's preeminent scholar, Zaller, conceded that elite opinion theory was unlikely to be useful in studies of African-American attitudes because "blacks evaluate … information in light of somewhat different leadership cues" (1992,92).įeelings of commonality are central to the formation of multiracial political coalitions. While scholars have pointed to a wide variety of reasons for the limited generalizability of elite opinion theory, including the excessively restrictive definition of "elites" used in most elite opinion studies (Lee 2002 McClain 2008), the unique historical experiences faced by minority groups in the US (Dawson 1994) and the relatively new arrival of Asian and Latino immigrants (Hajnal and Lee 2011), there is little disagreement that elite-driven accounts of public opinion have traditionally struggled to account for the attitudes of non-whites. Second, research has suggested that elite opinion theory may have trouble explaining the dynamics of minority public opinion (Dawson 1994 Hajnal and Lee 20 McClain 2008 White 2007).
Examples of these “New Latino Destinations” (Suro and Singer 2000) include cities such as Atlanta, Georgia Charlotte, Greensboro-Winston Salem, and Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee and Greenville, South Carolina. Not only have new Latino populations migrated to urban and suburban locations in the South, they also have settled in small towns and rural areas, reinforcing projections of the “Latinization” of the American South. They bring ethnic and cultural diversity to areas previously defined exclusively as black and white. This settlement of Latinos in the South is no more than ten to fifteen years old, and new immigrants from Mexico and Latin America are settling in states like North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee (Durand, Massey, and Carvet 2000). The South has undergone a particularly dramatic alteration in terms of racial composition, with six of seven states tripling the size of their Latino populations between 19. Although much of the media and scholarly attention has focused on demographic changes in traditional Latino immigrant destinations such as California, New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona, the rapid growth in Latino populations is occurring across the nation. Latinos are the fastest growing population, and in 2000, Latinos replaced African Americans as the largest minority group in the United States. The United States is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse as a function of immigration, both legal and illegal, from Asia, Mexico, and Latin America.
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