Latinos are a large and growing portion of the US population but are less numerous among participants in politics than their numbers would suggest. Predictions of the future rates of participation among Latinos depend heavily upon understanding the causes of current rates. A substantial proportion of the disparity in participation rates between Latinos and non-Latinos can be accounted for by the numbers of noncitizens and by other factors related to a large pool of immigrants, differences in socioeconomic resources, and the young age distribution of Latinos. However, these summary statements obscure differences across types of participation. They also obscure differences across Latinos of different national origins. Much of the analysis done to date of the Latino National Political Survey (LNPS) has made clear that Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans, and Cuban-Americans can differ as much from each other as members of each group differ from non-Latinos. This paper uses the LNPS data to examine the factors related to different types of political participation among US Latinos of different national origins. Borrowing from the standard participation literature, we consider the impact of resources, engagement, and recruitment.

The Latino population provides an especially useful case for testing hypotheses about the impact of mobilization upon activity. Political leaders have actively appealed to Latino ethnicity both in structuring political competition and in seeking support. I have proposed elsewhere that the success of such appeals in increasing participation will hinge in large part upon whether or not the targeted public believes itself well-represented by the leaders. The LNPS contains several items relevant to perceived representation. This paper will use the LNPS data to test the effect of perceived representation upon political participation, while taking account of the other factors that affect levels of activity.

We have been collaborating in a panel study of commuter behavior in southern California which has been running since winter 1990. 1 We were interested in setting up a panel so that we could study the dynamics of commuting behavior, especially in a situation where the environment was changing (with, for example, road construction and new Air Quality Management District (AQMD) regulations). The present paper focuses upon the design and implementation lessons we have learned from this project, leaving substantive and econometric conclusions for other papers (see, e.g., Brownstone and Chu, 1992; Kim, 1992; and Brownstone and Golob, 1992). 

The survey instrument involves detailed reporting of the home-work-home trip chain, with summaries of general mobility and alternative choices for a recall period of two weeks. The survey also gathers information on attitudes concerning transportation, perceptions of incentives provided by employers to limit solo driving trips, past experiences with transit and ridesharing, and social, economic, and demographic questions.

We have been collaborating in a panel study of commuter behavior in southern California which has been running since winter 1990. We were interested in setting up a panel so that we could study the dynamics of commuting behavior, especially in a situation where the environment was changing (with, for example, road construction and new Air Quality Management District (AQMD) regulations). The present paper focuses upon the design and implementation lessons we have learned from this project, leaving substantive and econometric conclusions for other papers (see, e.g., Brownstone and Chu, 1992; Kim, 1992; and Brownstone and Golob, 1992).

The survey instrument involves detailed reporting of the home-work-home trip chain, with summaries of general mobility and alternative choices for a recall period of two weeks. The survey also gathers information on attitudes concerning transportation, perceptions of incentives provided by employers to limit solo driving trips, past experiences with transit and ridesharing, and social, economic, and demographic questions.

Since this project was conceptualized as a pilot study, we have engaged in modifications more freely than we might otherwise. The details of the initial instrument design can be found in Golob and Golob (1989). While we did not carry out formal experimentation, we nonetheless believe that some things worked well while others created unforeseen problems. We discuss, first, construction of the sample, second, efforts to deal with attrition, third, modifications of the instrument, fourth, an attempt to obtain contextual measures, and, fifth, accounting and timing problems.

How does experience with nominally democratic electoral institutions shape the politics and stability of new democracies? Since at least the beginning of the Third Wave, new democracies have sprung up in countries with vastly different electoral experiences; many non-democracies adopted impressively diverse arrangements of nominally democratic electoral institutions that operated with varying degrees of competitiveness, affording substantial diversity to the institutional legacies inherited by emerging democracies. I assess the degree to which these different legacies impact the political dynamics of new democracies. Does institutional legacy affect levels of participation in new democracies? Does it help explain why some emerging democracies restrict political rights and civil liberties? And most importantly, does institutional legacy make democracies more (or less) likely to face a return to authoritarian rule? Building upon recent advances in the comparative study of authoritarian electoral institutions, I define competitive institutional legacies based on the extent of electoral competition in the preceding regime and apply an original operationalization of the concept to a dataset of 58 new democracies that emerged between 1975 and 2003. In order to answer the questions put forth above, I combine this data with data on regime durability, government crackdowns, and political participation in young democracies. With this new dataset, I conduct cross-national analyses to examine how these key dependent variables vary across democracies with different institutional legacies. The results indicate that legacies of robust, competitive elections lead to more stable new democracies; all else being equal, experience with competitive elections reduces the chances of a return to non-democratic rule, stems the tide of government restrictions on political rights, and prepares citizens to become active participants in the electoral process.

There is limited solid evidence on the determinants of partisan preference among Latinos in the United States. This study makes use of the Latino National Political Survey to explore the partisanship of Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans on the mainland and, in comparison, that of non-Latino whites (Anglos). We particularly focus upon the relationships between learning, demographic factors and partisanship. Our national data generally validates the overall pattern of preferences found in more limited studies: strong Republican Party preferences among the Cuban-Americans and Democratic partisanship within the other two groups. We also find that the demographic correlates of preference vary substantially across these ethnic groups. One result that does hold for all three Latino groups is an increase in Democrat Party identification with experience of U.S. politics (as measured by age or time in the United States). This result supports a learning-theory view of Latino partisanship. We also find that those Latinos who are more integrated into their ethnic culture are more likely to support the party dominant for their group. When we turn our attention to factors that distinguish independents from partisans, we find fewer differences across groups. Higher education and older age tend to be associated with partisanship as has been found for the general US population. For both direction and independence, religion matters for Anglos and Puerto Ricans but not the other two groups. Finally, we examine strong versus weak attachment among partisans and again find age effects. This research demonstrates how learning theories of partisan identification can be elucidated by analyzing an understudied sub-population of Americans. It also underscores the importance of resisting the impulse of grouping all Latinos under a single heading in the study of their political behavior.

The peer-reviewed papers gathered here are representative of the work presented at the first graduate student conference organized by the Center for the Study of Democracy, in February 2005. The conference focused on the development of democracy to better understand the fundamentals of the process. The conference drew submissions from Ph.D. candidates from seven schools in the Southern California area, covering a range of disciplines, methodologies, geographic concentrations and substantive questions about democratic development in the "established" democracies, consolidating democracies, or democratic transitions.