This Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Minority Post-Doctoral Fellowship will support an underrepresented student at the post-doc level in an independent two year research project under the sponsorship of David O Sears at the University of California, Los Angeles. The post-doctoral student has proposed a research project on the effects of race, mobility, and political mobilization on electoral participation. It consists of three components: 1) national field experiment to determine the effect of contact on the participation rates of low propensity voters across three election cycles; 2) determinants of self-reported mobilization by race and ethnicity using a validated post-election multilingual survey; and 3) analysis of the role of residential mobility on participation and mobilization efforts, by race and ethnicity. The research project is situated at the intersection of the political mobilization and minority politics literatures by examining the role of mobilization on participation rates of racial and ethnic minorities. In particular, it seeks to understand the source(s) of the distinct rates of participation among and between different racial and ethnic minorities. While mainstream literature participation focuses on socio-economic characteristics as determinants for mobilization, much of the minority politics literature focus on the effects of political context that affects elite mobilization strategies. This project incorporates both theoretical underpinnings, but suggests that technological innovations and the availability of consumer data have allowed elites to modify their political strategies and therefore micro-target their mobilization efforts. It makes the case that as the determinants of participation and mobilization change, so too should existing theories in political behavior. The goal is to pose research questions and propose the methodological innovations that will shed new light on questions of participation and mobilization. The research has important policy implications on understanding the conditions under which increased political participation of minorities could occur.
