Pei-te Lien

ETHNICITY AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION: A COMPARISON BETWEEN ASIAN AND MEXICAN AMERICANS*

What is ethnicity and how does it matter for political participation? Previous research has shown that the participatory disparity of Asian Americans, as different from Latinos, cannot be explained with sociodemographic and group consciousness variables. Adopting the view of a growing body of scholars who think ethnicity is an evolving rather than a static phenomenon, this study proposes multidimensional measures of ethnicity for two immigrant groups. Reexamining part of the 1984 data set that contains a unique oversampling of Asian and Mexican Americans in California, it is found that the two groups, despite a huge socioeconomic gap, bear similar ethnicity and participation structures. For both groups, acculturation increases participation; attachment to homeland culture does not necessarily discourage participation; and the role of group consciousness is much more complex than previously conceived.

The Contours and Sources of Ethnic Identity Choices Among Asian Americans

How do individuals of Asian descent in the United States identify themselves in ethnic terms and why? The purpose of this research is to map the contours of ethnic self-identities among Asian adults and explain their identity preferences in this immigrant community of color. Copyright (c) 2003 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.

Group-Based Resources and Political Participation among Asian Americans

Scholars of minority political participation have shown significant interest in unraveling the complex but crucial role of group-basedresources. Although there is an emerging scholarship on Latinos, much of the work on group consciousness, group identity, and ethnic organizations is based on research on Black Americans. Increasing diversity in the United States brings necessary attention to expanding the model to the politics and participation of other non-White, multiethnic, and immigrant majority communities. Using a new and unique dataset designed to tap the political opinion and behavior of Asian Americans, the authors find that the usefulness of group-based resources for this rapidly expanding and heterogeneous population is contingent on the specific form of the resources and the mode of political participation.

Does the Gender Gap in Political Attitudes and Behavior Vary across Racial Groups

Past research on the gender gap in political attitudes and behavior has paid very little attention to the experiences of nonwhites. Particularly lacking are empirical studies involving Asians. How significant is the role of gender among Asians? How does gender gap in the extent of voting participation and direction of political opinions vary across racial groups? In this preliminary examination on the confluence of race and gender, this author tries to answer the research questions using a census survey and a national poll of multiracial opinions. Logistic regression results show that the significance of gender does vary across racial groups, but it also changes according to the behavior domain investigated. In the election of 1992, small but significant gender gaps in voting registration existed among whites and blacks, but not among Latinos and Asians. Gender was not useful to predict turnout among those registered for any race. When race intersects with gender to predict political orientation and public choice, few of the slope coefficients of the interactive terms are significant and those for Asian and black women bear an opposite sign to those for white women.

Asian Pacific-American Public Opinion and Political Participation

Studying Asian-American politics with public opinion data is a relatively new phenomenon. Only in the last decade have a number of surveys (collected mostly at the local or regional level) been taken, reflecting expanded interest in the growing Asian-American population and the development of ethnic sampling and interviewing techniques. In this article, the terms “Asian” and “Asian American” are used interchangeably. While most research on Asian-American political behavior focuses on voting, some work examines other forms of political participation. Recent scholarship concerns not only individual characteristics, but also contextual and institutional factors.

Gender, Race, and Descriptive Representation in the United States: Findings from the Gender and Multicultural Leadership Project

SUMMARY This research draws on the nations first comprehensive database of elected leadership of color to provide a multi-cultural, multi-office, and multi-state look at the contours and context of descriptive representation by race and gender and with women of color at the center of analysis. We find that key to the persistent trend of growth in elective office holding of the nations Black, Latino, and Asian American communities in recent decades is the expanding size of women of color elected officials. Compared to whites, gender gaps in descriptive representation are smaller among nonwhite groups. Although the proportion of nonwhite population may impact the degree of electoral success, we find parity ratios to vary by race, gender, level of office, and state. For example, states that have the highest share of the black population did not produce the highest level of representation of Black women. Finally, we find that gender differences within each race are generally significant, but far greater racial differences are found among men and women of color elected officials–especially at the municipal and school board levels of offices. We conclude that women of color have played a significant role in advancing descriptive political representation of people of color and of women in the United States as a whole.

The Voting Rights Act and the Election of Nonwhite Officials

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) is one of the most important—if not the most important—public policies developed over the last half century to increase access to the U.S. political system for people of color. The VRA also provides an important context for understanding the ascension of nonwhite groups into the elected leadership of the nation (Browning, Marshall, and Tabb 1984 ; Davidson and Grofman 1994 ; Menifield 2001 ; McClain and Stewart 2002 ; Segura and Bowler 2005 ; Bositis 2006 ). This essay assesses the present-day significance of the VRA for the political representation of communities of color by examining the implications of majority-minority districts and other key provisions in the VRA for the election of nonwhite officials in the beginning years of the twenty-first century.

Homeland origins and political identities among Chinese in Southern California

Abstract This research project seeks to understand the scope and sources of ethnic and other political identities among US residents of Chinese descent whose families originated from the Chinese mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia. In what ways, to which extent and why do these individuals from various homeland origins identify themselves politically in the United States? Informed by past research on ethnic identity formation and political transnationalism, this research analyses a large-scale public opinion survey of Chinese in Southern California to report the contours and sources of political identities and their relationship to homeland origins, transnational ties and adaptation experiences in the Unites States, while controlling for the influence of sociodemographic factors. By separating out socialization contexts and types of transnational practices, the findings provide important modification to the scholarship on immigrant assimilation and transnationalism.

Reassessing Descriptive Representation by Women and Men of Color New Evidence at the Subnational Level

This research uses the concept of intersectionality to help improve understanding of the relationship between race and gender as it pertains to the jurisdictional context of elective offices held by Blacks, Latinos, Asian-Americans, and American-Indians at the subnational level. Utilizing an enhanced version of a comprehensive data set associated with the Gender and Multicultural Leadership Project, we document more substantial evidence of ethnoracial descriptive representation in state and local offices than previously known as well as important variations by race, gender, level/type of office, and their intersections. To help disentangle the paradoxical position of political women of color, we discuss with three scenarios implications of jurisdictional context on building electoral coalitions across race or gender by women of color.

Structural and Contextual Factors Regarding the Accessibility of Elective Office for Women of Color at the Local Level

ABSTRACT Different from the majority of past research on gender gaps in political officeholding, we adopt an intersectionality framework and move beyond traditional individual factors to explore what implications certain elements in the political opportunity structure may have for women and men of color elected officials serving in county, municipal, and local school board offices. We argue that structural and contextual factors, such as type of institutions, election systems, and jurisdictional racial makeup, may influence the calculations women of color make concerning the accessibility of elective office. Using data from the Gender and Multiracial Leadership (GMCL) project, we find county offices to be the least, and seats on school boards the most, accessible to women of color. Of the types of electoral arrangements, we find multimember districts (MMD) to be the most significant variable predicting the likelihood of women of color in office. Although both Black and Latina women benefit from having a significant share of coethnics or nonwhites in jurisdictions, the two groups of women have an opposite relationship to their racial constituent makeup than that held by their male counterparts.