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Asian Americans are widely believed to be passive and compliant participants in the U.S. political process-if they participate at all. In this book, Pei-te Lien maps the actions and strategies of Asian Americans as they negotiate a space in the American political arena. Professor Lien looks at political participation by Asian Americans prior to 1965 and then examines, at both organizational and mass politics levels, how race, ethnicity, and transnationalism help to construct a complex American electorate. She looks not only at rates of participation among Asian Americans as compared with blacks, Latinos, American Indians, and non-Hispanic whites, but also among specific groups of Asian Americans-Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Koreans, Asian Indians, and Vietnamese. She also discusses how gender, socioeconomic class, and place of birth affect political participation. With documentation ranging from historical narrative to opinion survey data, Professor Lien creates a picture of a diverse group of politically active people who are intent on carving out a place for themselves in American political life.

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.

Extant research on immigrant incorporation pays little attention to variations among immigrants from the same ethnic origin. A main purpose of this study is to address this research void by exploring how differences in the pre-emigration socialization context for immigrants from a politically divided homeland may affect their participation in mainstream-oriented and homeland-regarded politics. I posit that experiences Asian immigrants have in different political systems before crossing the Pacific may result in different relationships they maintain with their homeland as well as different attitudes toward homeland government and policies they develop after the crossing; and this, in turn, may affect how much they participate in politics on both sides of the Pacific. However, through the process of resocialization, I also suggest immigrants' political behavior may be influenced by their degree of exposure to the host society as well as by their connectedness with its institutions. Using data from the 2007 Chinese American Homeland Politics survey, I focus on the experiences of US immigrants of Chinese descent from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong to test these hypotheses.

AbstractThis study addresses the scholarly debate between assimilation and transnationalism through analyses of public opinion data collected mainly in California and from residents of Chinese descent whose families originated from the Chinese mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere in Asia. It explores the empirical relationship between Chinese Americans' concern about the political condition of the ethnic homelands in Asia and their patterns of political participation in the United States. Not all transnational concerns are equal. This study distinguishes between the democratic-oriented and nationalist-oriented transnational political behavior. It also separates voting registration from other types of political participation. A main argument of this study is that the relationship between political assimilation and transnational linkages depends both on the nature of the transnational political concern and on the type of political participation. Transnational political concerns are found to influence the degree of participation in regime-influence (e.g. making campaign contributions) but not system-support (e.g. voting registration) acts. Also, only those homeland concerns that are consistent with US foreign policy interests such as regarding the democratic future of Hong Kong after the 1997 transition are found to have a positive impact on participation.

AbstractThis paper discusses results of in‐depth follow‐up interviews conducted with selected individuals of Chinese descent residing in Los Angeles and San Francisco who were previously chosen at random to participate in the 2000 and 2001 Pilot National Asian American Political Survey. A total of 15 male and female informants who had migrated from Taiwan, mainland China, and Hong Kong were interviewed in Mandarin Chinese. They were asked to compare the performance of the US Government with that of the government in their respective ethnic homeland. They were also asked to explain their reasons for supporting a certain US political party, ideology, and type of candidate. In addition, they commented on the state of political participation or the lack of it among Chinese Americans. Finally, they explained the complexity of their ethnic self‐identification and experiences of racial discrimination. Their responses were interpreted within the context of the historical formation of the Chinese American community as well as the summary results of the mass opinion survey. The results help dispel myths about Chinese Americans being politically indifferent and irrational. They help illuminate the possible relationships among ethnic identity, homeland politics, and political participation in the host land. They also provide exciting insights into improving the survey instrument for a majority immigrant and non‐Anglophone population.

This research assesses the significance of race and ethnicity in the participation of Asian Americans in recent U.S. elections. It reviews the major characteristics of the nonwhite, multiethnic population in recent census surveys and discusses the necessity for voting behavior research to address effects of international migration on eligibility issues in voting participation. Results from analyzing U.S. Current Population Survey Voter Supplement files, 1994–2000, indicate that Asian Americans' apparent deficit in voting participation among voting-age persons can be reduced, removed, or even reversed when restricting analyses only to eligible persons. Multivariate analyses controlling for a set of institutional, contextual, and individual factors show that being Asian and foreign born may have the net effect of increasing voting registration, while being U.S. born and Asian may have the contrary effect, compared to non-Hispanic whites of comparable background. Nativity is not significant in impacting turnout among registered Asians as a whole, but U.S.-born Asians are less likely to turn out compared to their white counterparts. Among other findings, being foreign born may enhance the registration likelihood for Chinese, Korean, and Asian Indian American citizens and the turnout likelihood of registered Korean Americans.