Within the growing literature seeking to understand civic and political engagement among racial and ethnic minorities, our understanding of political behavior among American Indian and Alaska Native's (AI/AN) remains limited. We use the Current Population Survey Civic Engagement and Voting and Registration supplements (2006-2012) to compare AI/AN voter registration, voting, and overall civic engagement to other racial and ethnic groups and to assess whether factors that predict higher levels of civic engagement vary across these populations. We find a few key socio-economic status indicators that predict civic and political engagement uniquely for AI/ANs, but they are not consistently significant across all years or all types of political participation. We find marital status, age, household size, education, and veteran status to be important in predicting civic engagement for AI/ANs. However, for voting and registration, we find that family income, age, marital status, household size, and residential stability to be important contributors. Although we find AI/ANs are less likely to register and vote compared to non-Hispanic whites, we find that the difference is not statistically significant in congressional years, which may suggest that AI/ANs are engaged in local politics and vote for representatives that will represent their tribal interests in national politics.

The Obama administration has simultaneously marketed the prospect of providing undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship through comprehensive immigration reform and overseen mass deportations of mostly Latino immigrants. While it is clear that immigration policy was highly influential to Latino voters in 2012, it remains unclear how this political hypocrisy is being interpreted by Latino voters. As deportations have risen steadily during the Obama administration, there has been little research on how deportations and personal connections to undocumented immigrants have influenced the political attitudes of the Latino/a electorate. Using a nationally representative survey of 800 registered Latino/a voters administered in 2013, we explore the relationships between personal connections to undocumented immigrants and issue salience among Latinos as well as Latinos' views of President Obama. This study finds that registered Latino voters who know deportees and undocumented immigrants are more likely to report that they think the President and Congress should act on immigration policy versus all other policies. Moreover, Latino voters who know someone who is undocumented are less likely to have favorable views towards President Obama. This study has implications for our collective knowledge of how direct and indirect connections to policy outcomes influences the political behavior of the highly influential Latino/a electorate and how political and policy outcomes will be influenced in the future when a much higher proportion of the electorate have such connections.

The growth of the Latino community has increased levels of contact between this minority group and the predominately white majority. How does exposure to immigrants impact attitudes towards immigrants and immigration held by white Americans? We argue that previous work has not adequately tested the relationship posited by inter-group contact theory, whereby contact should shape policy attitudes. We test our theory drawing on the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). We find that among non-Hispanic whites, having a loved one who is a Latino immigrant improves attitudes towards immigrants as a group, which in turn is associated with declining support for punitive immigration policy. We likewise find that attitudes towards immigrants as a group mediates the relationship between proximal contact and policy attitudes. We draw on a variety of strategies to assess the robustness of the findings and to tease out evidence for the causal pathway we theorize is at work. As the demographics of the nation continue to change, growing closer to minority-majority status, understanding the factors that shape how white Americans regard their minority neighbors is of heightened importance.