打印

作者

Loren Collingwood, Gabriel Martinez, Kassra A. R. Oskooii

来源

URBAN AFFAIRS REVIEW,Vol.59,Issue1,P.

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

摘要

IntroductionIn 1982, Tucson, Arizona, birthed the sanctuary movement, with John Fife, minister of Southside Presbyterian, declaring his church a sanctuary for immigrant refugees fleeing civil conflict in El Salvador and Guatemala (Collingwood and O’Brien, 2019; Lasch et al., 2018; Delgado, 2018). The movement spread to hundreds of houses of worship around the country and, by 1985, Madison, Wisconsin, became the first sanctuary city. While no single definition exists, sanctuary cities nearly universally have two common elements: the city has an ordinance that (1) forbids local law enforcement from inquiring into residents’ immigration status and (2) limits local law enforcement’s cooperation with ICE/federal immigration authorities (Gonzalez O’Brien, Collingwood, and El-Khatib, 2019a). Since Madison, the sanctuary movement has morphed into a national movement, with the largest cities in the country declaring themselves sanctuaries for the undocumented.However, despite being a broadly progressive city with a 2 to 1 advantage in registered Democrats, Tucson, the home of the sanctuary movement, is not a sanctuary city because its residents voted down (69.8% v. 30.2%) a local ballot initiative (Proposition 205) in 2019.1 In contrast to Democratic politicians on the national stage, a significant portion of local Democratic officials advocated against efforts to turn the city into a sanctuary for immigrants. They asserted that by making Tucson a sanctuary, the city may lose millions of dollars in state and federal funding. For instance, outgoing Democratic mayor, Jonathan Rothschild, penned a “vote no” op-ed in the Arizona Daily Star newspaper just three weeks before the 2019 vote, where he asserted: “If passed, Prop. 205 would harm our community in ways that have nothing to do with immigration. And, while intended to protect immigrants, it may actually make their situation worse.”2Given Tucson’s rejection of the sanctuary proposition, we consider whether local elite cues can override potentially powerful and conflicting national partisan cues and sentiments. Stated differently, can local elites still inform citizens’ voting behavior on highly salient policy issues? This question is important to answer because recent evidence suggests that local politics and voters’ understanding of issues has become increasingly nationalized (Hopkins, 2018), particularly with the rise of negative partisanship (Abramowitz and Webster, 2016). Nowhere does this nationalizing phenomenon seem to be more germane than in the case of sanctuary cities. Previously a local issue, President Trump thrust sanctuary cities into the national immigration debate in the early stages of his 2016 presidential run. Subsequently, public’s sanctuary attitudes polarized along partisan lines (Collingwood, O’Brien, and Tafoya, 2018; Casellas and Wallace, 2020), fitting with the trend of partisan sorting across the electorate (Mason, 2015; Lang and Pearson-Merkowitz, 2015; Abramowitz and Webster, 2016; Nicholson, 2012). However, in a progressive city where a clear majority of its citizens identify as Democrats, voters rejected a sanctuary ballot proposition.Our study addresses this puzzle by examining voting patterns in Tucson to shed light on the interplay between local and national political dynamics in explaining citizen’s vote choice on salient policy issues. We find that even in a broadly polarized national elite environment surrounding the topic of sanctuary cities—with Republicans resoundingly opposing them and Democrats supporting them—Democratic voters split their support on the proposition, which resulted in its downfall. Building upon scholarship on elite partisan cues, and an emerging scholarship on sanctuary cities and public opinion, we argue that Tucson’s sanctuary initiative failed because partisans were operating in a localized asymmetrical elite cues environment, where Republican voters received consistent one-sided elite messaging on sanctuary cities (ban them) and Democratic voters received conflicting co-partisan messages.3Using precinct-level voting data from the 2019 general election, our ecological inference (EI) analysis shows that Republican voters uniformly opposed Prop. 205, whereas Democrats neatly split on the initiative vote. Importantly, we find that the Prop. 205 outcome cannot be explained by disproportionate Republican turnout, which would undermine a mixed-cues explanation. Additionally, we show that in two other local contexts where elite Democratic party cues were nearly uniform, Democratic voters showed overwhelming support for sanctuary city ballot initiatives. Finally, we test the influence of mixed partisan cues on vote choice with a framing experiment among Democrats, which shows that respondents exposed to a Democratic elites are divided condition were statistically and substantially less supportive of sanctuary cities than were Democratic respondents exposed to a control condition.Our study contributes to the broad literature on partisan elite cues, voting behavior, local elections, and sanctuary politics. The findings help illustrate that even in the case of a salient policy issue with tremendous partisan sorting at the national level, the local political context can still exert significant influence on citizens’ voting behavior. Furthermore, this observation poses a challenge to the contention that policy positions taken by out-group party leaders—in this case, Trump’s well-known and publicized opposition toward sanctuary cities—can meaningfully induce in-group identifiers (i.e., Democratic voters) to take the contrary policy position (Nicholson, 2012). Instead, a significant portion of Tucson Democrats seem to have been more influenced by local in-party leaders’ mixed messages rather than clear out-party opposition from local and national Republican elites. Overall, Tucson’s sanctuary policy failure highlights the important ways in which local political contexts can still shape political behavior and provides a cautionary tale for political advocates who assume that national political narratives automatically supersede or translate into local political outcomes.In what follows we outline literature on partisan elite cues and how such cues apply to the study of sanctuary city politics and direct democracy measures in general. We then review the specific political context of Prop. 205 before outlining formal hypotheses. Next, we present our data, methods, and findings. We then discuss our experimental design and findings before concluding with final thoughts and suggestions for future research.