(Bounded) Political Friendship? Test of Panethnic Processes for Asians in the US

• In Event: Influence of Identity on Political Perceptions and Outcomes (Virtual Session)

Abstract

There has been growing scholarly attention to group processes and political behavior of Asian Americans – a group that not only has been increasingly and consistently leaning toward the Democratic Party, at least evidenced in the past few presidential elections, but also projected to comprise a significant portion of the future American electorate. Importantly, Asians in the US are pan-ethnic whereby members of various national-origin groups with distinct cultural backgrounds come to cooperate across subethnic lines and exhibit cohesion under a common collective identity. Given these, this project examines how pan-Asian American identity can be maintained, as well as undermined, and how it affects political behavior of Asians in the US. To address these questions, the present study primarily relies on a series of laboratory experiments in which participants play a repeated trust game where they can see national-origin information of the randomly paired other in each round when deciding how much to send or return. Here, the subjects’ decisions to send their endowment (i.e., trust the other) and return the received amount (i.e., reciprocate the exhibited trust) are assessed as behavioral indicators of panethnicity. Specifically, the current research investigates how these behavioral outcomes are affected by not only preexisting group identifications, but also different types of group-based discrimination posed to them. Finally, political consequences of the panethnic processes are also explored – in particular, with respect to group-oriented political preferences.

Author

• Shawn Kim, Stony Brook University