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Introduction
Since the extension of the Voting Rights Act to Latinos in 1975, Latinos have been
gaining a more solid and unified foothold in the American political system. Nevertheless, Latino
political participation in the voting arena is low in comparison to this group’s population size.
The “sleeping giant” may not be fully awake, but it is at least making audible rumblings. And
these rumblings have not gone unnoticed by the two major political parties, especially given that
states with a high concentration of Latinos also have a large number of electoral votes, such as
California, Florida, New York and Texas. The 2000 presidential election signaled that both
candidates and parties have woken up to smell the café.
Qualitative evidence shows that Latinos have begun to figure prominently in partisan
campaign media strategies (Subervi-Velez and Connaughton 1999; Subervi-Velez 1992; Buehler
1977). The 2000 presidential election has been noted as the most vigorous and concerted effort
yet to target the Latino vote (Garcia 2003). Both Gore and Bush spoke Spanish in appearances
before Latino organizations (Garcia 2003). Bush held the first statewide bilingual town meeting
in California. The major candidates also campaigned heavily at Latino events and in Latino
communities (Barreto, de la Garza, Lee, Ryu and Pachon, 2002). Both candidates also attempted
to directly appeal to Latinos through political ads aired in Spanish. They also used ethnically
angled
1
outreach strategies with English language advertisements that pictured minorities.
Up until now there has been a lack of quantitative evidence to corroborate the qualitative
evidence of Latino political mobilization by political elites. Without a quantitative analysis, we
know little about the effect of these strategies on Latinos. Research on Latino political
mobilization has only considered the mobilization effects of direct group contact (de la Garza
and Abrajano 2002; Shaw, de la Garza, and Lee 2000). These studies do not look at the most
common type of mobilization—namely political advertisements. Furthermore, these studies
generally do not differentiate the impact of mobilization by different parties.
The mobilization effects of campaign advertisements on Latino turnout have yet to be
addressed. Are political advertisements effective in mobilizing Latino voters? Do ethnically
angled advertisements exert a distinct effect on the political mobilization of Latinos? What is
the effect of the tone, topic, and sponsorship of the advertisement? These are but a few of the
questions that must be considered in developing a better understanding of both Latino political
mobilization and campaign effects, more generally.
This paper utilizes data on political advertisements aired during the 2000 U.S.
Presidential election to test the impact of campaign media strategies on Latino turnout. While
there exist many forms of participation, we will limit our focus to turnout. Even more
specifically, our universe of interest will be only that of Latino citizens. In short, we show that
political ads had significant effects on the likelihood of turnout, though the impact varied based
on the context, tone and sponsor of the ads.
In the next section, we will review the relevant literature on turnout, Latino turnout, more
specifically, and the effects of political ads on turnout, more generally. We will then delineate
our theory and relevant hypotheses. After the presentation of our data and methods we will
discuss the models and results. We conclude with a discussion of the results and directions for
future research.
1
A term coined by Federico Subervi-Velez (1986) to indicate the intentional political targeting of an ethnic group
through the mass media.
Convention