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Exploring Popular Sentiments of U.S. Ethnoracial Demographic Change: A Research Brief

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Abstract

This study analyzes July 2021 poll data of more than 5500 California registered voters to examine how a racially diverse sample of people in a politically significant and diverse state feel about U.S. projections of future ethnoracial demographic change. We commissioned and designed two survey questions to build on the few studies that delve into Americans’ sentiments about these projected shifts. The first item offers more response options than past research to explore popular sentiments about national projections of a “majority-minority” future. The second item asks respondents about which areas of society that they think these changes will affect. The descriptive analyses reveal considerable variation in sentiments about projected demographic futures, with many among this racially diverse sample of adults expressing positive views and few expressing negative views. Multivariate regression analyses indicate that racial attitudes and political partisanship are significantly associated with expressing positive, negative, and other sentiments about future ethnoracial diversity. In addition, Californians indicated that these changes are most likely to affect race relations and politics and political power in the future. These findings point to the salience of the sociopolitical and information environment surrounding how people interpret population data and demographic projections, and hopefully encourages more work in popular demography.

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Notes

  1. There were too few respondents who identified with two or more races or solely as Non-Hispanic Native American, American Indian, as alone to include these individuals in the analyses.

  2. Analyses carried out with the non-imputed data with complete cases and with 10 multiply imputed datasets indicate nearly identical results to those presented here.

  3. Identical analyses carried out with stratified samples of Latinos, Asians, and Whites, not shown, indicated that stronger racial identity was linked with a lower risk of selecting “neither positive nor negative” over positive sentiments for all three groups. There were too few African Americans in the sample to analyze them separately.

  4. Ancillary stratified analyses indicated that warmer feelings for Whites was significantly linked with views other than positive expressions for both Whites and Asians. For Latinos, warmer feelings for Whites distinguishes only between reporting “neither” and positive sentiments.

  5. Stratified analyses indicated that political partisanship was linked with sentiments for Latinos and Whites, but not for Asians.

  6. A partial explanation may be that this was a relatively highly educated White sample (Table 2); and more education is linked with expressing positive over negative sentiments (Table 3).

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Mark DiCamilo and other UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies staff for assistance with IGS question wording and data access and to Edward Vargas and Connor Sheehan for their feedback on earlier versions of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Transborder Studies, Arizona State University, PO Box 876303, Tempe, AZ, 85287-3502, USA

    Eileen Díaz McConnell

  2. Sociology, University of California, 410 Social Sciences Building, Berkeley, CA, 94720-1980, USA

    Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz

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  1. Eileen Díaz McConnell
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Correspondence to Eileen Díaz McConnell.

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McConnell, E.D., Rodríguez-Muñiz, M. Exploring Popular Sentiments of U.S. Ethnoracial Demographic Change: A Research Brief. Popul Res Policy Rev 42, 98 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-023-09840-9

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