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Do citizens vote against incumbents who permit local immigration? Evidence from the Mariel Boatlift

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 February 2022

Daniel M. Thompson Open the ORCID record for Daniel M. Thompson [Opens in a new window]
Daniel M. Thompson*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
*
Corresponding author. Email: dthompson@polisci.ucla.edu
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Abstract

Does exposure to a mass migration event cause citizens to vote against incumbents? I offer an answer to this question by studying one of the largest acute periods of migration in the US, the case of the 1980 Mariel Boatlift during which roughly 125,000 Cubans fled to South Florida. I estimate the change in support for Republican presidential candidates in Miami using the synthetic control method and fixed effects regressions with a panel of county-level and archival precinct-level election results. I find that, while Miami voters dramatically increased their support of the Republican candidate in 1980, this shift was not a local consequence of the Boatlift. Instead, the evidence suggests that Cuban support for Reagan was not a local Miami response to the Boatlift—it happened in Cuban communities throughout the US—but it was most noticeable in Miami because Miami had the largest Cuban population in the US even before the Boatlift. I also present evidence that this change in Cuban voting may have been specific to Reagan and not a broader shift against incumbents or toward Republicans. These findings suggest that, in this case, direct exposure to migration did not lead citizens to dramatically change their voting behavior.

Keywords

American politicsclass and ethnicitypolitical economyracevoting behavior
Type
Original Article
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , October 2023 , pp. 728 - 745
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the European Political Science Association

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Footnotes

*

Daniel M. Thompson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. danmckinleythompson@gmail.com, http://www.danmthompson.com.

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