Neil Visalvanich

Asian Candidates in America: The Surprising Effects of Positive Racial Stereotyping

Racial stereotyping has been found to handicap African American and Latino candidates in negative ways. It is less clear how racial stereotypes may change the fortunes of Asian candidates. This paper explores the candidacies of Asian Americans with an experiment run through Amazon Mechanical Turk as well as real-world evaluations of Asian American candidates using the Cooperative Congressional Elections Study. In my experiments, I find that Asian candidates do significantly better than white candidates across different biographical scenarios (conservative, liberal, and foreign). I find that, contrary to expectations, Asian candidates are not significantly disadvantaged from being immigrant and foreign born. My experimental results mirror my observational results, which show that Asian Democrats are significantly advantaged even when compared with whites. These results indicate that Asian candidates in America face a set of racial-political stereotypes that are unique to their racial subgroup.

It's All About Race: How State Legislators Respond to Immigrant Constituents

How do elected representatives respond to the needs of immigrant constituents? We report the results of a field experiment on U.S. state legislators in which the nativity, likelihood of voting, and race/ethnicity of a hypothetical constituent are independently manipulated. The experimental design allows us to contribute new insights by isolating the various elements that may impede the connection between immigrants and elected representatives. Moreover, we explore racial/ethnic identities beyond black and white, by including Latino and Asian aliases. Contrary to expectations, nativity and voting status do not affect responsiveness. Instead, legislator behavior appears to be driven by racial/ethnic bias. Whites benefit from the highest degree of responsiveness, with blacks, Hispanics, and Asians all receiving lower response rates, respectively. This bias follows a partisan logic. Hispanic constituents receive lower responsiveness primarily from Republican legislators, while Asians experience discrimination from representatives of both parties. We argue that this difference may result from Hispanic identity sending a stronger signal about partisan affiliation, or from a prejudicial view of Asians as outsiders. In this interpretation, rather than the model minority, Asians become the excluded minority.

Primaries and Candidates: Examining the Influence of Primary Electorates on Candidate Ideology

Primary elections in the United States have been under-studied in the political science literature. Using new data to estimate the ideal points of primary election candidates and constituents, we examine the link between the ideological leanings of primary electorates and the ideological orientation of US congressional candidates. We use district-level data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study and ideal point estimates for congressional primary election candidates to examine the role of primary electorate ideology in the selection of party nominees. We find that more extreme Republicans are more likely to win their party’s primary and that Republican and Democratic candidates are responsive to different electoral constituencies.

It’s all about race : how State legislators respond to immigrant constituents.

How do elected representatives respond to the needs of immigrant constituents? We report the results of a field experiment on U.S. state legislators in which the nativity, likelihood of voting, and race/ethnicity of a hypothetical constituent are independently manipulated. The experimental design allows us to contribute new insights by isolating the various elements that may impede the connection between immigrants and elected representatives. Moreover, we explore racial/ethnic identities beyond black and white by including Latino and Asian aliases. Contrary to expectations, nativity and voting status do not affect response rates. Instead, legislator behavior appears to be driven by racial/ethnic bias. Whites benefit from the highest response rate, while blacks, Hispanics, and Asians all receive lower rates, respectively. This bias follows a partisan logic. The low response rate for Hispanic constituents comes primarily from Republican legislators, whereas Asians experience bias from representatives of both parties. We argue that this difference may result from Hispanic identity sending a stronger signal about partisan affiliation, or from a prejudicial view of Asians as outsiders. In this last interpretation, rather than the model minority, Asians become the excluded minority.

Perceptions of Polarization: Examining Voter Responses to Candidate Extremity

In this paper we test whether voters are able to meaningfully perceive the ideological distance between their Congressional candidates. Using district level survey data from the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Elections Studies in conjunction with a new measure of candidate ideal point estimation, we examine whether voters can perceive the polarization of their Congressional candidates. We find there is a significant relationship between a candidates ideological extremity and a voters ability to perceive this extremity, and that this relationship is stronger with Congressional incumbents as well as Republican candidates. Our findings suggest that the Republican party label has become more ideologically informative for voters, which is in keeping with the ideological leanings of Republican candidates, who tend to be uniformly conservative. Democrats, on the other hand, are more ideologically disperse, and voters have a more difficult time ideologically placing their Democratic candidates.

Polarized Primaries and Polarized Legislators: Examining the Influence of Primary Elections on Polarization in the U.S. House

In this article we develop and test an electoral connection theory of congressional polarization. We theorize that ideologically extreme primary voters are one of the driving forces behind electoral polarization, and polarization among primary voters is reflected in the polarization of party nominees for the House of Representatives. We use district-level data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study and ideal point estimates for congressional primary election candidates to examine the role of primary electorate ideology in the selection of party nominees. We find that primary voters are more extreme than general election voters, and candidates who run in primary elections with more polarized electorates are likewise more polarized. We also find a significant interaction between extreme primary electorates selecting extreme primary candidates. Finally, we find that Republican and Democratic candidates respond to different electoral constituencies.