NCoC: Appendix: Demography, Citizenship

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Appendix: Demography, Citizenship

Tale of Two Cities: Civic Health in Miami and Minneapolis-St. Paul

January 24, 2011

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Across both cities, rates of civic engagement are generally higher among citizens than non-citizens (Appendix Table 6). This likely reﬂects civic engagement being less of a priority for non-citizens who have only recently arrived in the United States. Interestingly in Miami, naturalized citizens were more likely to have donated money to charity and attended to public affairs than native-born citizens, and they were as likely to have voted as native-born citizens. That many naturalized citizens in Miami are Hispanic Cubans may explain some of this, although on donating money to charity, Cubans (as discussed above) were less likely to donate money.

Again, what stands out is that even when controlling for citizenship status, native-born citizens in Miami were still less likely to report participating in each activity (except for attending to public affairs) than those in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Thus, once more a simple demographic explanation—that Miami has more non-citizens than Minneapolis-St. Paul—cannot offer a full explanation for the differences in levels of civic engagement across the two cities.

Citizenship status is likely related to social status variables, however, for Miami even when we take into account other demographic groups, it remains signiﬁcant across several civic engagement indicators (Appendix Figures 7 and 8). Native-born citizens were more likely to be civically engaged than non-citizens on all the indicators (except for donating and attending to public affairs). However, the net effects were modest. Only for non-electoral participation and being connected to social networks did the net effect reach double digits. The largest effect was for being connected with social networks, with native-born citizens 30 percentage points more likely to report being frequently connected with social networks than non-citizens. The effects were also modest among naturalized citizens, with the highest being attending to public affairs, where naturalized citizens were 14 percentage points more likely than non-citizens to attend to public affairs. Interestingly, being a native-born citizen had no effect on this item.

Citizen/non-citizen differences were not as evident in Minneapolis-St. Paul. On only two items (volunteering and non-electoral activity) did the citizenship variable achieve statistical signiﬁcance. Citizens were 14 percentage points more likely to have volunteered and 21 percentage points more likely to have engaged in non-electoral activities than non-citizens. Of course, the net effects are very slight given the relatively smaller number of non-citizens in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Appendix: Demography, Race/Ethnicity • Appendix: Summary

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