Description
As the United States approaches a “minority majority,” such that over 50% of the population will be part of a minority racial or ethnic group, understanding the effects of ethnic diversity becomes increasingly important. The present work examined if areas that have greater ethnic diversity, i.e., context diversity, will show greater support for the Democratic candidate in presidential elections. As a function of cognitive liberalization, areas with a more ethnically diverse population are predicted to evidence greater cognitive flexibility, in line with the United States Democratic party ideals. If this is the case, then areas with greater context diversity may be expected to vote at a higher rate for the Democratic presidential candidate than areas with lesser context diversity. Ethnic diversity was assessed at the county level using the context diversity measures of Black representation, variety, and integration, computed with the American Community Survey 5-year data. Cognitive liberalization was represented by county-level Need for Cognitive Closure from Project Implicit’s public Race IAT dataset. County-level vote for Obama in 2008 and 2012 is publicly available. Metrics for each election year were averaged within a county and only those that had valid and complete metrics for both 2008 and 2012 were retained for analysis (N = 297). Results indicated that, as predicted, places that had ethnic groups more equally represented had lower needs for closure and, in turn, voted in higher proportions for Obama. Places that were more integrated, however, had higher needs for closure, and in turn voted in lower proportions for Obama. The proportion of people in a county who were Black had mixed relationships. It is suggested that proportional equivalence of ethnic groups may not evoke threat and therefore has positive impacts on cognitions, whereas where groups live may have the opposite effect. This thesis suggests that community ethnic diversity can impact both norms, in the form of need for closure, and collective behaviors, in the form of voting. Further, different forms of community diversity may support multiple structures of interaction. Complex environments appear to impact everyday behaviors in equally complex ways.
