Download Immigrant Resentment and Voter Fraud Beliefs in the

Immigrant Resentment and Voter Fraud Beliefs in the U.S. Electorate
Adriano Udani
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
University of Missouri – St. Louis
[email protected]
David C. Kimball
Professor
Department of Political Science
University of Missouri – St. Louis
[email protected]
February 2, 2017
Abstract
Public beliefs about the frequency of voter fraud and support for restrictive voting laws in the
United States remain high among partisans. However, we know very little about the sources of
public beliefs about voter fraud. We identify conditions that should make anti-immigrant attitudes a
strong predictor of voter fraud beliefs. Using new data from a survey module in the 2014
Cooperative Congressional Election Study and the 2012 American National Election Study, we
show that immigrant resentment is strongly associated with voter fraud beliefs. Our findings further
show that while black resentment is a robust and reliable predictor, its effect and statistical
significance diminishes in the presence of immigrant resentment. Our results pose implications for
political science scholarship, as immigration matters beyond other race related concerns. The topic
of fraudulent electoral practices will likely continue to provoke voters to call to mind groups that are
politically constructed as “un-American.”
* We acknowledge the support of the University of Missouri Research Board and the College of
Arts and Sciences at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Earlier versions of this manuscript were
presented at the Survey Experiments Panel at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political
Science Association in Chicago, Illinois and at the 2015 Cooperative Congressional Election Study
Conference in Provo, Utah. We are grateful for the helpful feedback from our discussants, panelists,
and attendees.
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INTRODUCTION
Public concerns about voting integrity are more than an academic curiosity, since they are
frequently cited to support particular election reforms. In two recent Supreme Court cases, Purcell v.
Gonzalez (2006) and Crawford v. Marion County (2008), the majority decision accepted state arguments
that voting restrictions, such as photo identification and proof of citizenship requirements, are
needed to maintain public confidence in elections. Similarly, lawmakers frequently invoke public
concerns about voter fraud as the basis for new voting restrictions (Minnite 2010; Hasen 2012).
Indeed, people who believe that voter fraud is common are more likely to favor laws requiring
voters to show a photo ID before being allowed to cast a ballot (Wilson and Brewer 2013). Beliefs
about widespread voter fraud have filtered across the American mass public, despite evidence that
voter fraud occurs very rarely (Ansolabehere, Luks and Schaffner 2015; Minnite 2010; Fogarty et al.
2015; Ahlquist, Mayer, and Jackman 2014; Christensen and Schultz 2014; Levitt 2014).
Given that beliefs about widespread voter fraud are influential in driving public support for
voter restrictions, it is important to understand the sources of these beliefs. While the literature on
voter fraud beliefs is emerging, political scientists still know little about why people hold different
beliefs about how much voter fraud occurs. Upon taking office in 2016, President Donald Trump
called for a major investigation into voter fraud. Recently, President Trump has been the most
prominent proponent of voter fraud conspiracies. Typically, his claims are vague about the nature of
the alleged fraud, but when Trump has offered specifics he tends to blame immigrants as the
culprits. President Trump also centered his campaign for president around anti-immigrant rhetoric
and policy proposals, though Trump is certainly not the first Republican politician to frame
immigrants as criminals or fraudulent voters.
Three conditions in the United States are expected to produce a strong association between
anti-immigrant attitudes and public beliefs about voter fraud: (1) relatively high levels of immigration
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in recent years that make immigration a salient national issue; (2) an immigrant threat narrative in
political rhetoric that frame immigrants as criminals and undeserving of the rights of citizenship; and
(3) elite claims about voter fraud that incorporate elements of immigrant threat language. While we
test this theory on the United States we believe that anti-immigrant attitudes will be a potent
predictor of voter fraud beliefs in other countries where these conditions also exist.
In this study, our main objective is to examine the extent to which anti-immigrant attitudes
influence public beliefs about the frequency of voter fraud. Most of what we know about voter
fraud beliefs is informed by broader attitudes about American government institutions and electoral
outcomes. For example, some studies show that claims of voter fraud in the United States are
generally made by Republicans and claims of voter suppression are generally made by Democrats
(Hasen 2012). Other studies suggest that racial attitudes are also related to beliefs about fraudulent
elections (Wilson and Brewer 2013). However, even as Trump as well as other voter identification
(ID) proponents continue to use anti-immigration rhetoric in their voter fraud allegations, no study
has yet to theorize and empirically test whether anti-immigrant rhetoric would influence perceptions
of fraudulent elections.
We argue that a person’s animosity toward immigrants – particularly, immigrant resentment
– is a highly influential predisposition since its components reflect attitudes toward crime, deserving
membership in the polity, perceived threats to American traditions, and fears about losing political
influence. Recent political rhetoric frequently combines these elements by linking immigration with
crime and voter fraud in particular. We posit that similar attitudes are called to mind when people
attempt to enumerate instances of voter fraud in U.S. elections. By bridging the literatures on
immigrant threat and voter fraud together, our study is the first to theorize and test a link between
public attitudes toward election integrity and anti-immigrant attitudes.
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We report the results of two studies to examine the relationship between attitudes toward
immigrants and voter fraud beliefs. Our first study reports results from a survey module in the 2014
Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). We test an immigrant resentment hypothesis
along with dominant frameworks in political science. Our second study examines public perceptions
of election integrity in the United States using data from the 2012 American National Election Study
(ANES). In each study, we find that anti-immigrant attitudes strongly predict beliefs about voter
fraud. Our results provide important contributions to political science. Not only do we fill a gap of
understanding as to the origins of voter fraud beliefs, but we also show that immigrant resentment is
a strong and reliable predictor of voter fraud beliefs, outperforming conventional political
predispositions and contextual information effects.
We organize the paper as follows. First, we explain the reasons for which anti-immigrant
attitudes should be associated with voter fraud beliefs. We then provide an overview of scholarship
on public beliefs about voter fraud. Next, we present our data, methods, and evidence from our two
studies. Finally, we provide some concluding remarks about our results.
ANTI-IMMIGRANT ATTITUDES AND VOTER FRAUD BELIEFS
We identify two mechanisms that can produce an association between anti-immigrant
attitudes and beliefs about voter fraud in public opinion. One mechanism linking the two sets of
attitudes would be widespread empirical evidence of higher rates of voter fraud among immigrants.
However, available evidence suggests that non-citizen voting is extremely rare and less common
than other forms of election fraud, such as absentee fraud and ballot tampering by officials
(Ansolabehere, Luks, and Schaffner 2015; Kahn and Carson 2012).
A second mechanism relies on three reinforcing conditions: (1) relatively high levels of
immigration that raise the salience of immigration in public opinion; (2) political rhetoric that often
paints immigrants as lawbreakers, thus priming attitudes toward immigrants when people think
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about criminal behavior; and (3) elite claims of voter fraud and non-citizen voting that sharpen the
link between anti-immigrant attitudes and crime and extends that association to beliefs about voter
fraud. These conditions are similar to Kinder and Kam’s (2009) theory about the conditions that
“activate” ethnocentrism as powerful force in public opinion. On the first condition, the United
States has experienced relatively high levels of immigration over the past twenty years, with most of
the recent wave of immigrants coming from Latin America and Asia (Hajnal and Lee 2011, 10;
Garand, Xu, and Davis 2015). Currently, the foreign-born share of the total population in the
United States is higher than it has been in almost one hundred years. As a result, immigration
attitudes are likely more salient among Americans than they were in the more distant past.
On the second condition, political rhetoric tends to feature an “immigrant threat” narrative
that links immigration to crime, job loss, and several other social and political maladies (Abrajano
and Hajnal 2015; Albertson and Gadarian 2015). The threat narrative, which is common in media
coverage and elite political rhetoric, is absorbed by many Americans and expressed as resentment
toward immigrants. Resentment takes the form of negative stereotypes about immigrants, fears
about cultural and political decline, and beliefs that immigrants are not equally deserving of political
rights. The immigrant threat narrative has been injected into several policy debates (Abrajano and
Hajnal 2015; Albertson and Gadarian 2015), where studies indicate that anti-Latino prejudice,
nativism, ethnocentrism, or anxiety about increased immigration influence public opinion (Brader,
Valentino and Suhay 2008; Kinder and Kam 2009; Schildkraut 2011; Knoll and Shewmaker 2015;
Albertson and Gadarian 2015).
In some quarters there is also a longstanding strain of anxiety about demographic change in
the United States, a fear that the country as they know it is slipping away. Public opinion on many
policies is “group-centric,” influenced by attitudes toward the groups that are targeted or most
affected by the policies (Nelson and Kinder 1996). As political rhetoric continues to construct
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immigration as a problem of social deviance (i.e. immigrants illegally crossing the border) (Haynes,
Merolla and Ramakrishnan 2016), we expect that citizens with higher levels of animosity toward
immigrants will also likely believe that the integrity of American civic traditions, such as voting in
elections, are deteriorating as the country becomes increasingly diverse. Thus, one impact of the
immigrant threat narrative is that when people think about criminal or deviant behavior they tend to
envision immigrants as likely perpetrators.
On the third condition, claims of voter fraud by non-citizens draw on and reinforce the
immigrant threat narrative in the United States. The immigrant threat narrative claims, for example,
that immigration leads to more crime and drains public resources in areas such as health, education,
and welfare. This fuels stereotypes of immigrants as incompetent, untrustworthy and undeserving of
government assistance (Garand, Xu, and Davis 2015). We argue that voter fraud beliefs may reflect
people’s insistence that immigrants are undeserving of the full benefits of democratic citizenship.
Elite rhetoric about voter fraud is often vague, but when a specific mechanism is provided it tends
to focus on allegations of non-citizens voting in elections (Fogarty et al. 2015). For example,
President Trump claims that he lost the popular vote in the 2016 election because millions of
undocumented immigrants participated illegally in the election (House and Dennis 2017). In
congressional testimony, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach alleged that “the problem of aliens
registering to vote is a massive one, nationwide” (Kobach 2015). To this end, claims that noncitizens are illegally registering and voting in American elections likely reinforce the same negative
stereotypes about immigrants and also suggest that voter restrictions – which theoretically have
nothing to do with immigration – are nevertheless another domestic policy that has been
“immigrationalized” by political elites (Garand, Xu, and Davis 2015). As voter fraud involves
allegations of people breaking the law and cheating the system, these conditions suggest that people
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with anti-immigrant attitudes are more likely to believe that voter fraud occurs, even forms of voter
fraud that do not necessarily involve non-citizens (H1).
Other research suggests that voter ID proponents direct immigrant resentment toward
Latinos. African Americans and Latinos are less likely than whites to possess a valid photo ID
(Barreto, Nuño and Sanchez 2009). Zoltan Hajnal, Nazita Lajevardi, and Lindsay Nielson (2017)
find that among states that have strict ID laws, Latino Americans and Asian Americans have the
lower turnout than non-Hispanic whites and African Americans. Studies suggest that the projected
growth of Latino and Asian Americans will further prompt legislative efforts to preserve status quo
political arrangements (Hicks et al. 2015; Bentele and O’Brien 2013).
Recent data from the National Asian American Election Study show that only a small
fraction of Asian Americans are targeted for their votes (Lee 2016), which fits with other research
that documents how the two dominant parties and political candidates tend to not mobilize
members of the Asian American community (Lien, Conway, and Wong 2003; Lien, Conway, and
Wong 2004; Wong 2008). In contrast, shared ethnicity and competitive co-ethnic candidates have
mobilized many Latino voters (Barreto 2006). The 2000 and 2004 presidential elections also featured
both major parties engaging in a stark competition for Latino voters (Garcia 2003; Segal 2004), with
candidates relying on political advertisements specifically targeting Latinos more than general party
advertisements (DeFrancesco Soto and Merolla 2006). Studies also find that naturalized Latino
voters reinvigorate and bring a higher level of enthusiasm into the U.S. political system, as they are
“politically baptized” in contexts where the stakes are higher (Barreto 2006; Ramirez 2002).
Developing ways in which to suppress the Latino vote would give Republicans a partisan
advantage in close elections. Immigrants – especially those who are framed as criminals – have
become an easy target population that strategic politicians use to craft policies to achieve political
goals (Schneider and Ingram 1993; Newton 2008). When Americans imagine a stereotypical
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immigrant, studies suggest that they tend to envision a Latino (Burns and Gimpel 2000; Dunaway,
Branton and Abrajano 2010; Gilliam and Iyengar 2000; Merolla, Ramakrishman and Haynes 2013)
while visual cues involving “Latino-looking” people elicits restrictive attitudes among U.S. voters
(Brader, Valentino and Suhay 2008). As such, attitudes toward immigrants of color, particularly
Latino immigrants, should be more closely associated with beliefs about voter fraud.
COMPETING EXPLANATIONS
While we mainly argue that people’s anti-immigrant attitudes influence their beliefs about
voter fraud in U.S. elections, there are other plausible explanations. Most of what we know about
voter fraud beliefs is informed by broader attitudes about American government institutions and
electoral outcomes. Following we discuss the dominant frameworks to explain voter fraud beliefs.
Partisanship
Partisanship should also be a strong predictor of public opinion about electoral integrity.
The partisan nature of election reform debates is fueled by a common belief that voting restrictions
will reduce voter turnout, thus helping Republican candidates and hurting Democratic candidates
(Hasen 2012; Kropf and Kimball 2012). Studies show that Republicans and conservatives are more
likely to support voting restrictions like photo ID and proof of citizenship laws than Democrats and
liberals (Ansolabehere and Persily 2008). Thus, it is not a surprise that Republicans tend to believe
that voter fraud is a more serious and frequent problem than Democrats (Wilson and Brewer 2013).
It is also possible that Republicans genuinely care more about election fraud, as messages from
political elites influence public confidence in elections (Vonnahme and Miller 2013). Voter fraud
fears are pushed almost exclusively by conservatives and Republican elites (Dreier and Martin 2010;
Hasen 2012) while liberal groups and Democratic Party elites spread concerns that voting
restrictions may disenfranchise some voters (Atkeson, Adams and Alvarez 2014; Bowler and
Donovan 2016; Hasen 2012). In addition, most voter restrictions are either enacted or introduced by
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predominantly Republican-dominated state legislatures (Hicks et al. 2015). If partisans in the mass
public internalize messages coming from respective party elites (Zaller 1992), then that may also
explain the partisan divide in public concern about voter fraud, beyond partisan views toward
immigration and immigrants. We expect that Republicans are more likely than Democrats and
Independents to believe that voter fraud occurs frequently in U.S. elections (H2).
Political Knowledge and Media Consumption
Other research shows that only a subset of partisans would be familiar of elite debates
concerning voter fraud and voter identification restrictions. Some findings indicate that conservative
media outlets connect Republican ideological beliefs about elections with their estimates of voter
fraud. Elite rhetoric about voter fraud concerns is more prominent on Fox News than other news
sources (Dreier and Martin 2010), which suggests that people who watch Fox News are more likely
to believe that voter fraud occurs very often, even after controlling for their partisanship (H3).
Others find that education and political knowledge tend to reduce public concerns about election
fraud (Wolak 2014; Gronke 2014). This would suggest that people with more political sophistication
are less likely to believe that voter fraud occurs (H4). However, political knowledge may have
different effects on partisans. Partisans who follow politics and know their party’s respective policy
positions will also be likely to adopt their stereotypical party stance on voter fraud. Findings show
that Democrats with low political knowledge are more likely to support voter restrictions that ask
prospective voters to show their photo before casting a ballot (Udani forthcoming). Given the
evidence on political knowledge, we expect that among partisans with higher political knowledge,
Republicans are more likely than Democrats to believe that voter fraud occurs (H5).
Racial Resentment and Identity
Alternatively, people’s animus toward African Americans should also influence their beliefs
about election integrity and voter fraud. Numerous studies indicate that attitudes toward African
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Americans influence public support among whites for several different policies (Kinder and Sanders
1996; Mendelberg 2001; Tesler 2012). Political debates and campaigns often include symbols and
phrases (such as “welfare queens”) that increase the salience of racial attitudes and associated
emotions when people form opinions about issues of the day (Banks and Valentino 2012).
Indeed, studies have provided evidence that racial resentment is a strong predictor of public
support for voting restrictions (Wilson and Brewer 2013). Highly charged debates about voting
restrictions in the United States include references to African Americans. For example, in the 2008
presidential election, the McCain-Palin campaign developed a web ad that accused Association of
Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) of conducting a fraudulent voter registration
drive for then Senator Barack Obama. The public discourse surrounding voting fraud at the time
became racialized by pundits reported that voter fraud occurred disproportionately in “urban” areas
and scrutinized ACORN’s role of registering minority and poor voters. More recently, months
before the 2012 election a member of the local board of elections and chairman of the Republican
Party in Franklin County, Ohio, argued that voting procedures should not “accommodate the urban
– read African American – voter-turnout machine” (Rowland 2012). As such, we also expect that
people with higher racial resentment will also believe that voter fraud occurs (H6).
Other studies suggest that the voting experience and the legacy of voter restrictions in U.S.
elections should structure differing beliefs about voter fraud. Bowler and Donovan (2016, 346)
argue that Democratic voters, especially people of color, are cognizant of their party’s dominant
narrative that voter identification laws “degrade the integrity of elections by disproportionately
affecting groups of voters known to affiliate with the Democratic Party.” In addition, poverty, status
quo political arrangements, and interactions with law enforcement have disproportionately pushed
people of color to the margins of the U.S. democracy and political candidate campaigns, cultivating
political cynicism and resistance (Cohen and Dawson 1993; Rocha, Knoll and Wrinkle 2015; Weaver
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and Lerman 2010). To this end, these findings suggest that people of color, and their pessimism
toward a political system that has been unresponsive to their political voices, should be more cynical
about the conduct of elections (H7).
In addition, one’s identity as an American may influence optimism toward election
administration. Studies suggest that those with high levels of national pride tend to offer more
positive assessments of electoral integrity (Schildkraut 2011; Wolak 2014). To this end, we suspect
that voter fraud beliefs will be lower among not only voters who are highly patriotic (H8), but also
are native-born residents whose family were all born in the United States (H9).
Electoral Integrity and Efficacy
When registration and voting procedures operate smoothly the public is more likely to
believe in the integrity of elections. Studies provide some evidence that public confidence in
elections is shaped by the performance of election administrators at the state level (Bowler et al.
2015) and at the local level (Hall, Monson, and Patterson 2009; Gronke 2014). There is less evidence
that state election laws influence public concerns about election integrity. For example, the adoption
of photo ID requirements in several states does not appear to alleviate public concerns about voter
fraud (Ansolabehere and Persily 2008; Bowler et al. 2015). These findings still suggest that public
confidence in election administration should lower voter fraud beliefs (H10). Additionally, there is
strong evidence of a sore loser phenomenon in voter fraud beliefs. That is, supporters of winning
candidates (regardless of party) express more confidence in election integrity than supporters of
losing candidates (Sances and Stewart 2014; Beaulieu 2014; Wolak 2014). We anticipate that Romney
voters in 2012, for example, should be more likely than Obama voters to think that voter fraud
occurs very frequently (H11). Lastly, voters with higher levels of political efficacy and trust in
government tend to be more sanguine about election fraud in the United States (Gronke 2014;
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Wolak 2014; Uscinski and Parent 2014). This suggests that such dispositions should lower voter
fraud beliefs (H12).
STUDY 1: VOTER FRAUD BELIEFS IN THE 2014 CCES
In this study, our main objective is to test whether voter fraud beliefs are associated
specifically with anti-immigrant attitudes while controlling for relevant political dispositions
discussed above. We use survey data from a module of 1,000 respondents to the 2014 CCES. The
survey was conducted online by YouGov and included a pre-election wave conducted before the
November elections and a post-election wave fielded after the elections. To understand the
deterimants of voter fraud beliefs, we collect data on respondents’ political attitudes and social
characteristics before the election, and then measure their voter fraud beliefs after the election.
Description of our variables is provided in the online appendix.
Public perceptions about election fraud can be measured on several dimensions: (1) who is
committing fraud – individual voters or election officials; (2) the frequency of fraudulent acts; and
(3) the significance of fraudulent acts. We focus primarily on measures that ask respondents how
frequently four different types of individual voter fraud occur in the United States, which were
previously used in the Survey of the Performance of American Elections (Stewart 2013). These
items, measured in the post-election wave, ask how frequently non-citizen voting, voter
impersonation, double voting, and ballot tampering occur. We randomize the order of fraudulent
activities that participants view. Our sample is similar to prior surveys in terms of baseline beliefs
about voter fraud and support for photo ID laws (see Table A-1 in online appendix). Responses are
coded from 1 to 4 with the most frequent category at the high end of the scale. An exploratory
factor analysis of the four items reveals just one factor, with the item dealing with official vote
tampering producing the weakest factor loading. Excluding vote tampering, the other three items
form a reliable scale (α = 0.92). There is also relatively little variation in respondent beliefs about the
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frequency of each type of voter fraud (see Table A-2 in online appendix). This suggests that people
hold general beliefs about voter fraud and do not distinguish between different sources of voter
fraud. Our voter fraud index is created by averaging the responses to each of the three items.1
Higher scores on the scale indicate beliefs that voter fraud occurs more frequently.
To investigate whether animosity toward immigrants predicts beliefs about voter fraud, we
create several measures of attitudes toward immigrants based on questions in the pre-election wave
of the survey. We create a measure of immigrant resentment based on six questions that tap into
dimensions involving cultural beliefs, group conflict, political influence, and different forms of
resentment. To test the robustness of immigrant resentment, we also employ other indicators of
negative attitudes toward immigrants. We measure affect towards illegal immigrants with a feeling
thermometer and preference for unequal group relations with a social dominance orientation scale (α
=0.79). Our immigrant resentment scale generates solid correlations with the thermometer rating of
illegal immigrants (r = -0.44) and the social dominance index (r = 0.69).
The components of the immigrant resentment scale are able to capture whether people
believe immigrants increase crime and whether they deserve equal membership. In addition, the
components measure perceived threats to American traditions, and fears about losing influence and
standing in American politics. As such, we argue that as citizens have been socialized to think of
voting and participating in elections as American civic traditions, we anticipate that the topic of
fraudulent electoral practices will call to mind groups that are politically constructed as un-American
and a concern about Anglo culture being changed by immigration. Further, we anticipate that voter
fraud beliefs will be influenced by more than just affect and preference for unequal group relations.
In predicting beliefs about voter fraud, we also measure relevant social and political
dispositions from the pre-election module of the 2014 CCES. First, we create a black resentment
1
Bowler and Donovan (2016) also use these three items to construct a voter fraud scale.
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scale (α = 0.75). Second, we create a patriotism scale using two questions on the importance of
being an American and how good a person feels seeing the American flag (α = 0.86). Third, since
elite rhetoric about voter fraud concerns is more prominent on Fox News (Dreier and Martin 2010),
we measure how often participants watch Fox News. In addition, we also use five questions on type
of media usage to gauge overall media consumption. We also control for income, education, party
identification, political knowledge, age, sex, and race. Income is measured with 16 categories of
family income ranging from having less than $10,000 to having more than $500,000. Education is
measured with 6 categories of educational attainment ranging from having no high school degree to
having a post-graduate degree. We use three dichotomous variables to delineate between Democrats,
Independents, and Republicans. Political knowledge is measured with two questions asking
participants whether they know which political party controls the U.S. House of Representatives and
U.S. Senate (α = 0.80). We then use a set of dichotomous indicators to designate respondents who
identify as female, black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, Mixed, and Other. Because of a history
of resisting the Voting Rights Act, we control for whether a respondent lives in the south as defined
by the U.S. Census. Lastly, we measure generational differences with respondent age and
generational status. The CCES allowed respondents to choose which of the following categories
best describes them: immigrant citizens, immigrant non-citizens, first generation, second generation,
and third generation. We use dichotomous indicators for each category, but exclude third
generation. The base category in our statistical models of voter fraud beliefs consist of respondents
who identify as white, male, Republican, and third generation Americans with low political
knowledge, media exposure, income, education, racial resentment, immigrant resentment, and who
does not live in the south. We code each independent variable to a 0-1 scale to measure the relative
impact on the dependent variable.
Results
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Table 1 in the Appendix displays the OLS coefficients and robust standard errors from the
separate models of voter fraud beliefs. We also plot point estimates with their 95% confidence
intervals in Figure 1. Few indicators are consistently significant predictors of voter fraud.
Respondents who live in the south are more likely than those who do not to believe that voter fraud
occurs frequently. Most models provide strong evidence that political sophistication matters, as
individuals with higher political knowledge and education have lower voter fraud beliefs. The results
provide some evidence that nationalism strongly predicts voter fraud, but its directional effect is
inconsistent with theoretical expectations. We find that higher levels of patriotism are significantly
associated with more frequent voter fraud beliefs. Patriotism remains influential after controlling for
partisanship, but the statistical significance of its coefficient washes away after introducing the
resentment measures into models.
[Insert Figure 1 About Here]
Our results also provide evidence for partisan effects and the influence of conservative
media outlets. Voter fraud beliefs are also significantly higher among people who watch Fox News
than those who do not. The influence of Fox News, though, diminishes after resentment indicators
are added to the model. The results from our models also show that Democrats are less likely than
Republicans to believe that voter fraud occurs frequently. After controlling for black resentment,
Democrats’ voter fraud beliefs are still significantly lower than Republicans. The size of the
coefficient on the Democrat indicator is cut in half, suggesting that black resentment mediates the
effect of partisanship on voter fraud beliefs. The effect of Democratic identifiers marginally
diminishes after controlling for immigrant resentment, but maintains statistical significance at the .05
level. This suggests that partisan differences in voter fraud beliefs are partly mediated by racial
attitudes and anti-immigrant attitudes.
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We also obtain evidence that suggests that partisan cues play a role in shaping voter fraud
beliefs. Developing interactions between political knowledge and party, we find that political
knowledge moderates a partisan effect. Figure 2 provides the marginal effects of party on voter
fraud beliefs across political knowledge. All other values are held at their mean or median values.
The results show that partisan beliefs about voter fraud are indistinguishable at lower levels of
political knowledge. However, increasing political knowledge polarizes partisan attitudes that reflect
stereotypical stances on voter fraud. Among the politically knowledgeable, voter fraud beliefs are
higher among Republicans than Democrats.
[Insert Figure 2 About Here]
Our results from Models 4 and 5 show that individuals with more racial animus toward
African Americans are more likely to believe voter fraud occurs frequently. As our voter fraud
beliefs scale has a range of four points, a change from low to high black resentment moves a person
more than 25 percent of the way across the range of voter fraud beliefs in Model 4. We also find
that black resentment has a relatively weaker effect in a model that includes our immigrant
resentment scale. However, other statistical models that test interactions with black resentment
provide some evidence that black resentment has a larger effect on the beliefs of Republicans than
Democrats (-0.61, t=-1.89, p<0.59). Models with interactions with race also provide stronger
evidence that black resentment has a larger effect on whites than Hispanic (b=-0.98, t=-1.70,
p=0.09), Asian (b=-2.40, t=-5.58, p<0.001) and mixed-race (b=-1.07, t==2.12, p=0.03) identifiers.
The results of our analysis provide strong evidence that Americans who are highly resentful
of immigrants also tend to believe that voter fraud occurs frequently. Even after controlling for
other relevant political dispositions, we find that immigrant resentment has the largest effect on
voter fraud beliefs (see Figure 1). A one-unit increase in immigrant resentment is associated with a
0.96 increase in the voter fraud scale (t=4.80, p <0.001). To better visualize the impact of immigrant
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resentment, we plot the marginal effects of immigrant resentment while holding all other indicators
at their mean and median values (see Figure 3). A change from the minimum to maximum values of
the immigrant resentment scale translates into a 48% shift along the full range of voter fraud beliefs.
In substantive terms, this is equivalent to a person changing from believing voter fraud occurs
infrequently to occasionally. The results do not provide any evidence for immigrant resentment as a
moderator of party identification or race.
[Insert Figure 3 About Here]
Further analysis shows that immigrant resentment is a strong predictor of each item in the
voter fraud beliefs scale (see Table 2 of Appendix). In each model, immigrant resentment has the
largest effect size among all other predictors, including black resentment. Immigrant resentment has
the strongest effect on believing that noncitizen voting occurs very frequently in U.S. elections (b =
3.10, t=5.57 p < 0.001). This is not a surprise, since non-citizen voting is the one type of voter fraud
that specifically implicates immigrants. Yet, the results are also consistent with our main hypothesis
and the implications of Garand, Xu, and Davis (2015): even when asked about forms of voter fraud
that do not necessarily involve non-citizens, people with anti-immigrant attitudes are still more likely
to believe that voter fraud occurs.
As Trump continues to publicly claim that millions of illegal immigrant voters cost him the
popular vote, it raises another empirical question: are voter fraud beliefs associated with negative
attitudes toward particular immigrants? To answer this question, we leverage a question wording
experiment that we conducted in a survey module of 1,000 respondents in the 2014 CCES. All
respondents were asked to use a thermometer rating to indicate how cold (0) or warm (100) they feel
about Irish immigrants. Then, respondents were randomly assigned one of three group thermometer
rating questions on African, Chinese, and Mexican immigrants. Measuring attitudes toward Irish
immigrants creates a useful baseline against which to compare the effects of the other immigrant
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groups. We then examine the association between the different immigrant group ratings and voter
fraud beliefs while controlling for other competing explanatory variables proposed in this study. We
provide the results of our regression models with immigrant group thermometer ratings as
predictors in our online appendix (see Table A-7).
We find that feelings toward Irish immigrants are unrelated to beliefs about voter fraud. In
contrast, when asked about the other immigrant groups, people with colder feelings toward those
groups are more inclined to think that voter fraud occurs very frequently. Our findings further show
that voter fraud beliefs are significantly higher among people with less receptive views toward illegal
immigrants, specifically Mexicans (b = -0.34, t=-2.06, p = 0.041). This suggests that voter
restrictions, which depress turnout among voters of color (Hajnal et al. 2015), are being mobilized
by tapping into public animosity toward immigrants of color.
[Insert Figure 4 About Here]
STUDY 2: ELECTION INTEGRITY MEASURES IN THE 2012 ANES
We have two main objectives in our second study. First, we build upon our first study
showing that voter fraud beliefs extend beyond racial animus to immigration concerns, using
different measures of election fraud beliefs. Second, we aim to further show that immigrant
animosity biases a person’s perception of election integrity even after controlling for many
covariates, including general orientations toward the political system and “sore loser” feelings from
the 2012 November elections. To this end, we further test our hypotheses using the 2012 American
National Election Study (ANES) data. We again provide a more detailed explanation of our
measures in the online appendix. The 2012 ANES Time Series Study includes questions in the postelection wave that ask how often in our country “votes are counted fairly” and “election officials are
fair.” We focus on these two items as dependent variables because they come closest to the election
fraud allegations that frequently appear in election reform debates in the United States. We code
18
both variables so that higher scores indicate a stronger belief that elections are fraudulent. Less than
one-third of respondents believe that votes are counted fairly “very often,” and less than one-quarter
believe that election officials are fair “very often.”
We examine two measures of hostility to immigrants as our primary independent variable of
interest. One is an anti-immigration scale based on responses to six ANES questions on
immigration. Each item was recoded to a 0-1 scale, with higher values indicating greater antipathy
toward immigrants, and the six variables were averaged together to form an anti-immigration scale
(α = 0.75). We also create an ethnocentrism scale based on stereotype questions that ask the degree
to which particular groups (Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians) are “hard working” and
“intelligent.” Following the method used by Kam and Kinder (2012, 328), the average rating for outgroup members is subtracted from the in-group rating on each trait. Then the two trait comparison
measures are averaged together to create an ethnocentrism scale (α = 0.69). Higher scores indicate
greater hostility to racial and ethnic out-groups. We expect ethnocentrism and anti-immigration
attitudes to be positively associated with the election integrity variables.
We also control for similar partisan and ideological predispositions that we use in the 2014
CCES analysis. Both variables are coded so that we expect them to be positively associated with the
electoral integrity measures. In addition, we control for racial resentment by developing a scale with
four questions that ask about the status of blacks in American society (α = 0.80). Higher values
indicate higher levels of racial resentment, so we expect it to be positively associated with beliefs
about election fraud.
We also utilize the richness of ANES surveys to control for other dispositions that we were
unable to include in our CCES module. First, we control for electoral surprise, the inclination of
election losers, particularly unexpected losers, to grasp at poorly sourced claims of voter fraud
(Beaulieu 2014; Wolak 2014). To test this hypothesis, we create a dummy variable for respondents in
19
the pre-election wave of the survey who correctly predicted that President Obama would win reelection in 2012. This measure should be negatively associated with beliefs about voter fraud.
Second, those with higher levels of patriotism and confidence in government should also be more
confident in the fairness of elections (Wolak 2014). We combine four questions about government
corruption and waste to measure trust in government (α= 0.63). Higher values indicate more trust in
government. We measure patriotism with three items. We expect patriotism and trust to be
negatively associated with beliefs about election fraud.
The ANES data include a bevy of media exposure measures as well. Many ask which
newspapers, web sites, and radio and television programs respondents follow regularly. We compute
the average of 19 of these questions measuring exposure to conservative media sources to create a
conservative media consumption scale (α= 0.86). Similarly, we combined 19 items for liberal sources
into a liberal media consumption scale (α= 0.77). We control for general media consumption with a
separate set of questions that ask respondents how frequently they read a newspaper, watch TV
news, or get news from radio shows or web sites.
Additionally, we include external efficacy and voter turnout as additional independent
variables, since actual participation and efficacy should predict more positive assessments of election
integrity. Turnout is a dummy variable indicating whether the respondent reported voting in the
2012 election. We measure external efficacy by combining two items that ask respondents whether
government official care about their interests and whether they have a say over what government
does (α= 0.65). Both variables are coded in a way that we expect them to be negatively associated
with beliefs about election fraud. Fourth, we include a dummy variable for battleground states to test
whether exposure to the heaviest competition in the presidential campaign produces more positive
assessments of electoral fairness (Wolak 2014). Lastly, we test the election administration hypothesis
using data from a recent initiative that rates each state’s administration of elections based on several
20
indicators (Pew Charitable Trusts 2016). We use the summary rating, the Election Performance
Index (EPI), as a measure of state election administration in 2012. Higher scores indicate better
performance, so we expect EPI to be negatively associated with our election integrity measures.
The 2012 ANES is a mixed-mode survey, with some respondents carrying out the survey via
traditional face-to-face interviews and others completing the survey online. There is some indication
that interviewer-administered surveys are more prone to social desirability effects, producing more
positive assessments of government and elections (Atkeson, Adams, and Alvarez 2014). Internet
surveys tend to generate more negative assessments and may also yield more pessimistic evaluations
of electoral integrity. We include a dummy variable for the Internet mode to test this hypothesis.
Finally, we include controls for political knowledge, education, income, race, and ethnicity.
Since our dependent variables are ordinal measures we estimate an ordered logit model to
examine the predictors of beliefs about electoral integrity. Each of the independent variables except
for the Electoral Performance Index are scored on a 0-1 interval. For each dependent variable we
estimate one model with anti-immigration attitudes as our main predictor of interest and a second
model with ethnocentrism as the chief independent variable.
Results
Table A-6 in the appendix provides the results from models of election integrity ratings in
the United States. Our results provide additional evidence of a strong relationship between antiimmigrant attitudes and measures of electoral fraud beliefs. Anti-immigration attitudes and
ethnocentrism are potent predictors of electoral integrity beliefs, even after controlling for a host of
other factors. A one-standard deviation increase in the anti-immigration scale increases the odds of
negative evaluations by 22 percent on the “votes counted fairly” measure and by 21 percent on the
“election officials are fair” measure. The ethnocentrism scale yields a somewhat weaker but
statistically significant relationship with election integrity evaluations (14 percent and 19 percent,
21
respectively). Additionally, we find a stronger impact of ethnocentrism and anti-immigration
attitudes on voter fraud beliefs when the sample is restricted to non-Hispanic Whites. Among the
other independent variables, only political knowledge and trust in government produce stronger
associations with beliefs about electoral integrity.
Consistent with previous studies, we find that perceptions of election integrity are influenced
by broader pessimism toward government, mainstream politics, and election administration.
Individuals with less patriotism and trust in government are less likely to believe that votes are
counted fairly and election officials act fairly. We also find that people who did not vote in the 2012
elections and have lower political efficacy are more likely to produce negative evaluations of election
fairness. Finally, the results indicate that negative assessments of fair elections are more prominent
among people who live in battleground states than those living non-battleground states. These
findings are telling, since the one objective measure of election performance (EPI) is not
significantly related to beliefs about election fairness.2
Leveraging the oversampling of racial minorities in the 2012 ANES, we are able to examine
the election integrity ratings of non-Hispanic blacks and Hispanics. We show that African
Americans tend to report less positive evaluations of elections than white Americans. However,
when we interact immigrant resentment with race our results demonstrate that any effect of antiimmigration attitudes on voter fraud beliefs seems to be located primarily among non-Hispanic
white respondents. In Figures 5 and 6, we plot the predicted probability of election integrity
evaluations across group-based attitudes segmented by race. Generally, an increase in anti-immigrant
attitudes decreases the probability of holding positive evaluations of elections. Among individuals
with lower anti-immigration attitudes, white respondents are more optimistic about election integrity
2
When we control for other state performance measures, such as the frequency of registration and
absentee voting problems, we also find little to no relationship with public beliefs about election
integrity.
22
than black and Hispanic respondents. Yet, an increase in anti-immigrant attitudes has a larger effect
in diminishing optimism among whites than racial and ethnic minorities. Thus, white Americans
with strong anti-immigrant attitudes tend hold negative assessments of election integrity on par with
black and Hispanic Americans. Ethnocentrism has a similar large and negative effect on the election
fraud beliefs of whites, shown in Figure 6. Figure 6 also illustrates that blacks and Hispanics who
believe that whites are less intelligent and lazier than racial minorities are less likely to hold positive
assessments of election integrity. However, as they subscribe to the stereotype of white superiority,
blacks tend to give generally more positive evaluations of elections while Hispanics tend to believe
that votes are counted fairly very often.
[Insert Figure 5 About Here]
[Insert Figure 6 About Here]
As with our CCES study, controlling for group-based attitudes and other political
orientations seems to leave little room for partisanship and ideology to explain much variation in
voter fraud beliefs. Changing the coding of party identification to nominal categories, or removing
ideology from the equation, does not improve partisanship’s explanatory power. Our evidence
suggests that group-based attitudes account for some of the partisan differences in public beliefs
about voter fraud. We again find that exposure to conservative media outlets is associated with more
negative assessments of election integrity.
Meanwhile, after controlling for immigration attitudes we fail to find evidence that racial
resentment is associated with beliefs about election integrity. It appears that broader indicators of
out-group hostility (i.e. ethnocentrism) more reliably predict electoral integrity evaluations than the
more narrowly tailored racial resentment measure. Racial resentment studies have demonstrated that
if African Americans are disproportionately targeted by a policy and become central to public
discourse on the enforcement of such a policy, then public support for the policy tends to be shaped
23
by racial or black resentment. Due to the history of African-American disenfranchisement in the
United States, we do not expect people’s racial resentment to wash away in models of voter fraud
beliefs once they account for a person’s resentment of another racial or ethnic group. Rather, we
argue that voter fraud beliefs are context-specific, in which the public are more influenced by the
threat of newer voters coming into the electorate. Our theory posits that as more elites rely on
negative stereotypes of immigrants when discussing voter fraud and the need for voter restrictions,
then people’s anti-immigrant attitudes will be elicited more than their antipathy toward African
Americans when they evaluate proposed voting restrictions. Nevertheless, as voter ID critics such as
the NAACP and Attorney General Eric Holder have linked current voter restrictions to Jim Crow
laws, we also expect that some groups’ voter fraud beliefs will be informed more by their attitudes
toward African Americans than their attitudes toward immigrants.
CONCLUSION
Across two studies, we present strong evidence that group-centric attitudes toward
immigrants are associated with public beliefs about voter fraud. Using data from the 2014 CCES, we
show that immigrant resentment is a strong predictor of voter fraud beliefs. Using the 2012 ANES
data, we find that the effects of anti-immigration and ethnocentric attitudes remain robust across
different measures of election administration integrity. Both studies indicate immigration concerns
are associated with election integrity beliefs above and beyond the impact of traditional political
dispositions involving party, ideology, election administration, and racial animus.
We believe these findings are due to three reinforcing conditions in American politics
currently: (1) relatively high levels of immigration, (2) political rhetoric that frequently frames
immigrants as deviant and undeserving, and (3) elite claims that link immigration and voter fraud in
public opinion. While we test these ideas in the United States, we believe that immigration attitudes
may shape voter fraud beliefs in other countries where politics are roiled by immigration anxieties.
24
Our findings suggest that hostility toward immigrants is a reliable predictor of concerns
about voter fraud and thus a likely source of public support for restrictive laws such as photo ID
and proof of citizenship requirements for voters. This is likely the product of political rhetoric that
frequently links immigration, race and voter fraud, sometimes in a hyperbolic manner. Furthermore,
debates about proposed voting restrictions often focus on the anticipated impact of those policies
on minority groups. Thus, in a “group-centric” polity it should not be surprising that public beliefs
and policy preferences in the election law domain are shaped by public attitudes toward minority
groups.
The results are consistent with studies that show that racial animus structures voter fraud
beliefs (Wilson and Brewer 2013). Yet, our findings from the CCES also suggest that such
conclusions about black resentment are incomplete. That is, black resentment has a significant and
large effect, but only when immigrant resentment is not included in statistical models of voter fraud
beliefs. Findings from the ANES show that black resentment fails to reach statistical significance in
models of public election integrity attitudes, which include immigrant resentment (see Table 4). We
argue that these findings are largely attributed to the immigrant resentment scale capturing various
attitudes on whether immigrants increase crime, disrupt social and political norms, are undeserving
American members, and decrease the political influence of white Americans. These attitudes are not
measured in the black resentment scale, but are likely called to mind when respondents are asked
about how often people commit voter fraud.
In response to calls to use attitudes toward immigrants as explanatory variables (Hainmueller
and Hopkins 2014), our findings provide evidence that immigrant resentment is a strong and reliable
predictor of other attitudes concerning American political membership. While immigrant anxiety
increases trust in certain political actors, primarily Republican leaders (Albertson and Gadarian
2015), we find that immigrant resentment is associated with lower levels of trust in the integrity of
25
American elections. We also find significant relationships between measures of media exposure and
political knowledge and voter fraud beliefs. These findings also suggest that elite rhetoric might
provoke Americans’ pessimistic beliefs about election fraud.
We are aware that two national sample surveys are not ideal for making causal inferences and
do not provide the last word on this topic. Nevertheless, this study advances our understanding of
voter fraud beliefs. The gap in political science scholarship on voter fraud beliefs is due in part to a
dearth of survey instruments that include questions about restrictive voting policies, perceptions of
voter fraud, and attitudes toward immigrants all in the same survey. As such, prior studies produced
indirect analyses by using less reliable and valid demographic indicators of Latino or foreign-born
population growth as approximations of the threat or animosity that native-born feel toward
immigrants.
The role of animosity toward racial and ethnic minorities is underappreciated in scholarship
on public opinion about election fraud and voting reforms. Much of the existing literature
emphasizes partisan and ideological divisions among the electorate on photo ID laws, for example,
largely reflecting clear partisan divisions among elites on these issues. The partisan and ideological
differences are real, but photo ID and proof of citizenship requirements enjoy majority support
among all political stripes in the United States. Widespread support for these policies, and
heightened concerns about voter fraud, appear to be nourished by a reservoir of hostility toward
racial and ethnic minorities. Animosity toward immigrants may solidify public support for measures
to restrict participation of eligible voters in democratic elections. This is troubling, given that
legislators and courts lean heavily on public concerns about voter fraud as justification for new
election laws. These prejudices may extend to election officials themselves. A recent study (White,
Nathan and Faller 2015) finds that Latino voters receive less assistance from local election officials
26
than white voters. In any case, the topic of fraudulent voting practices will likely continue to
provoke voters to call to mind groups that are politically constructed as “un-American.”
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APPENDIX
Media
Consumption
Pol. knowl.
Family income
Education
Age
Female
Black
Hispanic
Asian
NativeAmerican
Mixed
Other
Nationalism
Immigrant
citizen
Immigrant
non-citizen
First
generation
Second
generation
Live in South
Fox News
Democrat
Table 1. Results from Main Models of Voter Fraud
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
coef. (s.e.)
coef. (s.e.)
coef. (s.e.)
coef. (s.e.)
(5)
coef. (s.e.)
0.08 (0.16)
-0.17 (0.15)
-0.02 (0.15)
0.04 (0.15)
-0.23
0.25
-0.38
0.11
0.05
-0.10
-0.23
-0.44
(0.11)*
(0.25)
(0.18)*
(0.18)
(0.09)
(0.15)
(0.19)
(0.22)*
-0.31 (0.11)**
0.31 (0.22)
-0.30 (0.17)
-0.01 (0.17)
0.10 (0.08)
-0.25 (0.14)
-0.23 (0.17)
-0.53 (0.24)*
-0.29 (0.11)**
0.23 (0.22)
-0.38 (0.16)*
0.12 (0.17)
0.12 (0.08)
-0.04 (0.15)
-0.10 (0.19)
-0.44 (0.26)
-0.23
0.16
-0.30
0.11
0.09
0.13
-0.03
-0.51
0.84 (0.22)***
0.75 (0.31)*
0.59 (0.30)*
0.38 (0.27)
0.38 (0.27)
-0.16 (0.24)
0.32 (0.51)
0.87 (0.16)***
-0.09 (0.20)
0.04 (0.50)
0.49 (0.16)**
-0.04 (0.15)
0.02 (0.43)
0.35 (0.17)*
-0.04 (0.19)
-0.06 (0.40)
0.03 (0.17)
0.03 (0.18)
-0.06 (0.41)
-0.04 (0.17)
0.03 (0.17)
-0.07 (0.18)
-0.01 (0.19)
0.01 (0.18)
-0.03 (0.18)
0.46 (0.19)*
0.28 (0.16)
0.35 (0.20)
0.28 (0.25)
0.23 (0.23)
0.14 (0.14)
0.04 (0.11)
0.06 (0.12)
0.11 (0.13)
0.18 (0.13)
0.08 (0.10)
0.14 (0.09)
0.12 (0.09)
0.14 (0.08)
0.14 (0.08)
0.24 (0.09)*
0.20 (0.09)*
0.99 (0.11)***
0.22 (0.09)*
0.79 (0.13)***
-0.52
(0.10)***
-0.10 (0.14)
0.22 (0.08)**
0.67 (0.13)***
0.19 (0.08)*
0.60 (0.12)***
-0.25 (0.10)*
-0.22 (0.09)*
0.03 (0.15)
(0.10)*
(0.20)
(0.13)*
(0.16)
(0.08)
(0.15)
(0.20)
(0.29)
-0.19
0.24
-0.27
0.01
0.09
0.13
-0.01
-0.49
(0.10)
(0.19)
(0.13)*
(0.16)
(0.07)
(0.15)
(0.19)
(0.26)
Independent
-0.03 (0.13)
-0.00 (0.13)
Black
1.06 (0.15)*** 0.75 (0.16)***
Resentment
Immigrant
0.92 (0.20)***
Resentment
_cons
1.85 (0.19)*** 1.88 (0.18)*** 2.20 (0.20)*** 1.62 (0.21)*** 1.40 (0.21)***
2
R
0.124
0.251
0.308
0.379
0.406
adj. R2
0.103
0.232
0.288
0.360
0.387
N
777
767
740
740
740
Source: 2015 CCES. Note. Standard errors in parentheses. All indicators rescaled 0 to 1. Coefficients
obtained using OLS Regression.
Two-tailed: * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001
38
Table 2. Results from Model of Voter Fraud Beliefs Scale Components
Voting More
Someone
Noncitizen
Than Once
Else
Voting
coef. (s.e.)
coef. (s.e.)
coef. (s.e.)
Immigrant Resentment
1.75 (0.53)***
1.84 (0.48)***
3.10 (0.56)***
Black Resentment
1.57 (0.47)***
1.50 (0.39)***
1.84 (0.44)***
Democrat
-0.46 (0.26)
-0.47 (0.25)
-0.47 (0.23)*
Independent
-0.02 (0.34)
-0.03 (0.31)
0.05 (0.31)
***
***
Fox News
1.42 (0.33)
1.31 (0.31)
1.35 (0.34)***
Media Consumption
0.44 (0.41)
-0.12 (0.42)
0.06 (0.41)
Political Knowledge
-0.58 (0.25)*
-0.61 (0.24)*
-0.35 (0.26)
Family Income
0.57 (0.53)
0.36 (0.47)
1.02 (0.54)
Education
-0.71 (0.36)
-0.59 (0.32)
-0.72 (0.35)*
Age
-0.15 (0.45)
0.03 (0.41)
0.07 (0.44)
Female
0.12 (0.19)
0.22 (0.19)
0.30 (0.19)
Black
0.20 (0.35)
0.55 (0.43)
0.65 (0.44)
Hispanic
0.29 (0.50)
0.31 (0.46)
-0.25 (0.48)
-0.42 (0.74)
-1.30 (0.73)
Asian
-1.24 (0.61)*
Native-American
0.99 (0.71)
0.68 (1.26)
0.88 (0.61)
Mixed
0.17 (0.76)
0.22 (0.47)
-0.13 (0.56)
Other
-0.46 (1.08)
0.25 (1.06)
0.17 (1.12)
Nationalism
0.15 (0.51)
-0.12 (0.37)
0.07 (0.49)
Immigrant Citizen
0.08 (0.44)
-0.13 (0.50)
-0.18 (0.43)
Immigrant Non-Citizen
0.72 (1.38)
0.70 (0.30)*
0.34 (0.35)
First Generation
0.14 (0.37)
0.55 (0.34)
0.23 (0.32)
Second Generation
0.24 (0.22)
0.43 (0.20)*
0.29 (0.22)
_cut1
0.74 (0.60)
0.22 (0.59)
1.38 (0.61)*
_cut2
2.34 (0.61)***
1.85 (0.60)**
2.96 (0.62)***
***
***
_cut3
4.34 (0.61)
3.95 (0.60)
5.02 (0.63)***
N
740
739
737
Source: 2015 CCES. Note. Standard errors in parentheses. All indicators rescaled 0 to 1. Logit
coefficients are given, with positive coefficients indicating a belief of voter fraud occurring very
often. Reesults obtained using ordinal logistic regression.
Two-tailed: * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001
39