Partisans of Color: Categorization Threat and Asian American and Latino Party ID

• In Event: Identity's Role within Partisanship

Abstract

What motivates Asian Americans and Latinos to become Democrats or Republicans? These fast -growing demographics are heavily populated by immigrants who were partly socialized outside U.S., which dilutes the impact of parental socialization as the mechanism behind their partisanship. Nevertheless, Asian Americans and Latinos lend steadfast support to Democrats’ and Republicans’ electoral coalitions. We explain this paradox by reasoning that Asians and Latinos regularly navigate tense straits between their racial and American identities—two categories with major implications for their sense of belonging; and two categories that polarization has sorted along Democratic and Republican lines. We hypothesize that Asian and Latino operate by prioritizing their racial (versus national) identity, which motivates their allegiance to Democrats (versus Republicans). We leverage responses from major surveys of Asian and Latino adults since 2005 (N=20,327), revealing rich variance in these populations’ prioritization of their racial and national) identities. We also show that across samples, greater prioritization of racial (versus national) identity is substantially associated with Democratic allegiance (d~.30). We extend these results with two experiments (N=3,100) that establish the moderating influence of identity prioritization on expressions of partisan allegiance. We discuss our results’ practical and theoretic implications.

Author

• Efren Osvaldo Perez, University of California, Los Angeles