Local Determinants of Identity Salience and Political Engagement among Asians

• In Event: Race, Identity, and the Determinants of Asian American Political Behavior

Abstract

This paper aims to understand the importance of one’s community in shaping one’s racialized and political identity. In particular, I examine local determinants and characteristics that explain how Asians in the United States come to understand the concepts of “Asian” and “Asian American” and the political consequences of the construction of these identities. I develop a novel measure of Asian group density in geographic localities, capturing the relative group size of Asians and the relative group size of Asian national origin groups in a given area. These measures attempt to capture the importance of community in contributing and structuring one’s political preferences. I combine these measures with existing survey and administrative data on Asian political attitudes and behavior to identify the relationship between one’s community and the salience of one’s pan-ethnic identity on affecting political behavior and attitudes. I aim to answer two questions. First, what are the underlying factors that potentially explain why some individuals identify more (or less) strongly as Asian. Second, how this might subsequently affect their political engagement and propensity to vote, particularly for an Asian candidate? This study contributes to prior work on Asian political behavior by identifying salient macro-level factors that potentially explain the variation in turnout rates among different Asian national origin groups.

Author

• Jennifer Wu