December 2, 2020 | Noon to 1:00 PM EDT
Angela Ocampo
How do perceptions of belonging or lack of belonging to American society influence political interest and political engagement? To date, there have been few inquiries that systematically investigate notions of perceived belonging to U.S. society and the political ramifications of these predispositions. This project addresses this puzzle and investigates how a sense of perceived social inclusion or exclusion influences political engagement among Latinos, the largest, one of the fastest growing and most pivotal groups in American politics. By bridging literatures in political science, sociology and psychology, this book project offers a novel framework centering on the idea that notions of belonging are fundamentally tied to political attitudes and political behavior for members of marginalized groups. I argue that members of marginalized groups develop different understandings of inclusion in the U.S. according to their every-day experiences, and that these perceptions have the potential of conditioning their political attitudes and political behaviors. To advance this argument, this multi-method project, leverages surveys, experiments and in-depth interviews. I develop a new set of items to measure perceptions of inclusion and exclusion from U.S. society. I examine these items in over six state and national surveys including the 2016 and 2020 Collaborative Multi-racial Post-election Surveys (CMPS) as well as the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Relying on multiple survey experiments, I assess the extent to which elite messaging can shift perceptions of belonging, and how shifts in these predispositions have behavioral consequences. Belonging and claims of membership have been at the core of the political struggle of racial and ethnic groups in America, but as a psychological construct the notion of perceived belonging has received little attention in political science. Through a novel framework rooted in interdisciplinary perspectives and by empirically testing a new measure of perceived belonging to U.S. society, this project makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the factors that shape political behavior among members of marginalized and stigmatized groups.