Asian and Latino American Political Conceptualization: A Dual-Concept Model

• Author: Bang Quan Zheng
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X221132479
• Published date: 01 March 2023
• Date: 01 March 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2023, Vol. 51(2) 182–196

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X221132479

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Asian and Latino American Political

Conceptualization: A Dual-Concept Model

Bang Quan Zheng

1

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Abstract

A central challenge for citizens is to understand how their political system works. The classic “Levels of Conceptualization”

measure proposed in The American Voter provided an answer for White Americans in the 1950s, but has limited relevan ce today

for citizens of non-European ancestry. Expanding on the work of Campbell et al., this paper develops a measure of Political

Conceptualization that combines views about parties and candidates with views on personal identity and ethnic fairness. The

measure is based on open-ended responses in a survey of Asian Americans and Latinos. Results show how, across these quite

different domains of politics, citizens vary in their Political Conceptualizations from narrow and concrete to broad and abstract.

Results highlight the challenge for political organizers in building coalitions among citizens who vary in their unde rstanding of

how politics works.

Keywords

political socialization, political cognition, politicized identity, latent variable modeling, Asian American and Latino politics

Introduction

Tens of millions of recent Asian American and Latino im-

migrants to the United States and their children have become

strong partisans and regular participants in the political

process. Their turnout rates in presidential elections now

approach those of native-born Americans and, in contrast to

most White Americans, they lean toward the Democratic

Party (Hajnal & Lee, 2011;Huddy et al., 2016;Sears et al.,

2016;Wong et al., 2011). The question addressed in this

paper is how these new citizens –in particular, Asian

Americans and Latinos –understand the political system and

their place in it.

The leading answer to this question for White citizens was

proposed by Campbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes in their

classic work, The American Voter (1960). In their “Levels of

Conceptualization”typology, these scholars argued that only

a small fraction of Americans understood politics as most

elites did, as a battle of opposing ideologies, liberal and

conservative. Most Americans, rather, thought about politics

in less abstract and more concrete terms. The modal voter

viewed parties in terms of the benef‌its they confer on groups

such as business, working people, and farmers. The next

biggest cluster of citizens viewed politics in even more

concrete terms, perceiving the parties simply as purveyors of

good or bad times. At what the University of Michigan

scholars took to be the lowest level of conceptualization, a

still substantial fraction of Americans offered no political

content when asked about the two parties and their candi-

dates, commenting instead on such matters as mudslinging,

campaign lies, and a candidate’s divorce.

The American Voter’sfour-level scheme makes a useful

starting point for analysis of how Asian Americans and

Latinos understand the American political system. Like other

Americans, members of these groups care what values the

parties stand for, how the parties are organized, and which

party is more likely to deliver valued group benef‌its and good

times (Alvarez & Garcia Bedolla, 2003;Huddy et al., 2015;

Uhlaner & Garcia, 2005). But as a tool for characterizing how

these groups think about politics, the typology has a glaring

def‌iciency: It takes no account of ethnicity. Lewis-Beck et al.

(2008) has pointed out the def‌iciencies in conceptualization

of partisanship and politicized identity. This shortcoming

ref‌lects the typology’s creation in the 1950s when most voters

were White and largely unconscious of ethnicity. Conditions

are obviously different today for Asian Americans and La-

tinos. Most of these new citizens are conscious of their an-

cestry, feel that they have suffered discrimination because of

1

School of Government & Public Policy, Social Sciences #315, University of

Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

Corresponding Author:

Bang Quan Zheng, School of Government and Public Policy, 1145 E. South

Campus Drive, P.O. Box 210027, Tucson, AZ 85721-0027, USA.

Email: bangquan@arizona.edu