Urban Voters, Racial Attitudes, and Context : A Multilevel Analysis of the 2005 Los Angeles Mayoral Election

Does context alter the impact on urban vote choice of racial attitudes and other individual-level variables? It is well understood that voting in urban mayoral elections is strongly influenced by both racial group identity and racial attitudes about group conflict or cooperation. Also, there is a wealth of research indicating that voting and racial attitudes are influenced by an individual's contextual environment. However, because of the lack of quality exit poll survey data that includes contextual information, it is difficult to study contextual effects on the relationship between individual attitudes and urban vote choice. In this paper, I develop multilevel random intercept logistic regression models of vote choice using individual and census level contextual variables, in order to determine the effects on vote choice of individual racial attitudes and the contextual environment of race/ethnicity