What’s In A Name? It Could Matter If You’re Writing To Your Lawmaker
Listen to this very interesting NPR story that reveals about what’s in a name, specifically Anglo versus Spanish names.
In recent years, social scientists have tried to find out whether important decisions are shaped by subtle biases. Researchers recently have trained their attention on a new group of influential people — state legislators.
Christian Grose, a political scientist at the University of Southern California, and graduate student Matthew Mendez wanted to see if state legislators were equally responsive to their constituents. For part of their experiment, the researchers sent emails to 1,871 legislators in 14 states with large Latino populations, asking the politicians what kind of documentation they needed to vote. They randomly assigned legislators to get the emails, but some emails came from a man named Jacob Smith, and others came from a man named Santiago Rodriguez.
There was a difference, and the difference had a partisan tinge to it. Democrats responded about the same to both names, but Republicans were more likely to respond to the man with Anglo name rather than the Latino name.
The researchers analyzed whether the Republicans in these states sponsored or co-sponsored voter ID laws. Now these are laws that are designed to reduce voting fraud. Critics of these laws have said that they disenfranchise minorities and others who are trying to vote for Democrats. Grose said that there was very strong correlation between Republicans who had failed to respond to the Latino constituent, and the ones who sponsored such laws. “Republicans who support voter identification are different than those Republicans who did not support voter identification,” Grose says. “Among those Republicans who did support voter ID laws, the Latino constituent was very unlikely to receive a response from their elected official. The difference was almost 40 percentage points, which is just one of the largest gaps I have ever seen.”
KJ