Acculturation, Identity, and Latino Politics

Latino political behavior has long defied scholarly expectations, producing persistent political diversity that the field's dominant frameworks cannot explain because they were designed to predict collective unity, not individual-level variation. This study introduces the Bidimensional Acculturation Model (BAM) to political science, which treats heritage and American cultural attachments as independent dimensions and identifies four distinct acculturation orientations (culture-affirming, bicultural, demicultural, and assimilationists), and tests whether these orientations produce distinct political profiles using the 2006 Latino National Survey (N = 4,785). The findings confirm that acculturation orientations significantly differentiate ideology, partisanship, and immigration attitudes, with the strongest effects on immigration, and that biculturals, who represent 68% of the sample and are invisible under existing approaches, exhibit a distinct political profile. These results establish psychological acculturation as a theoretically necessary construct for understanding Latino political diversity and offer a framework applicable to immigrant-origin political behavior more broadly.