Beyond Pan-Ethnicity: Responsiveness of Elected Officials to Asian American Subgroups

• Published date: 01 July 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X221139758
• Author: Yat To Yeung
• Date: 01 July 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2023, Vol. 51(4) 543–554

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X221139758

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Beyond Pan-Ethnicity: Responsiveness of

Elected Off‌icials to Asian American Subgroups

Yat To Yeung

Abstract

Are American elected off‌icials equally responsive to all Asian subgroups? Asian American is one of the major racial/ethnic

groups in the United States and is currently the fastest-growing racial group. However, studies on the representation of Asian

Americans are limited. Studies also commonly view Asian Americans as a single, hom ogenous group and omit the heterogeneity

within this unique population. I argue that to understand any racial/ethnic group better, we should look into the ethnic

subgroups and examine them as separate populations. I conducted an audit experiment in this study and sent emails to more

than 2000 state legislators, manipulating senders’names to represent different Asian subgroups. I f‌ind that none of the

subgroups received a lower response rate than white constituents, regardless of the off‌icial s’racial group and partisan aff‌iliation.

However, Korean constituents were less likely to receive a friendly response than white and Vietnamese constituents. The

results also show that Latino and Black legislators were less friendly in their emails and less responsive than their Asian and white

counterparts. This study sheds light on the heterogeneity of racial/ethnic groups, which scholars have routinely overlooked.

Keywords

Field experiment, discrimination, Asian American, state legislators, responsiveness

Are American elected off‌icials equally responsive to all Asian

subgroups? Even though Asian American makes up a substantial

proportion of the population in the United States, their repre-

sentation has gotten much less attention. Despite the growth in

using audit experiments to examine political representation and

discrimination (e.g., Broockman, 2013;Butler & Broockman,

2011;White et al., 2015), to my knowledge, Asian American is

not included in all but one of the audit experiments that examine

the responsiveness of the elected off‌icials. Gell-Redman et al.

(2018) use Chinese to represent Asians in their study and f‌ind

bias from representatives of both parties. However, the study did

not look at or compare several Asian subgroups. This study seeks

to make the f‌irst step to address such weakness and continue the

recent scholarly effort to disaggregate Asian Americans into their

national-origin groups (e.g., Leung, 2021;Ramakrishnan et al.,

2018;Sadhwani, 2020;Sui & Paul, 2017).

The current environment provides a critical opportunity to

study the representation of Asian Americans because of two

competing expectations. On the one hand, the development of

COVID-19 has spurred the growth of racism towards Asians,

with one-f‌ifth of Asian Americans and Pacif‌ic Islanders

experiencing a hate incident in 2020 and a total of 10,370

reports from all 50 states since March 2020.

1

Former pres-

ident Trump has repeatedly tweeted messages that promote

xenophobia, such as the “Chinese virus”and “kung-f‌lu.”

Both presidential candidates in the 2020 election have

received criticism from Asian American activists due to the

xenophobic messages in their campaign advertisements.

2

The

trade tensions between the US and China have further fos-

tered the public’s negative attitudes toward China, particu-

larly among Republicans (Pew 2019). The trade war and the

pandemic have led to an increase in hostile attitudes and

actions against Asian Americans. Politicians from the Re-

publican party, in particular, had increased their mention of

China in social media, often linking China with words such as

“Chinese virus,”“trade war,”“propaganda,”and “spy”(Pew

2021). Therefore, one may expect Asian Americans, par-

ticularly Chinese, to be discriminated against by the public

and elected off‌icials. The personal bias of the off‌icials against

minorities that have been observed (Costa, 2017) could be

primed in this political environment.

On the other hand, Asian Americans make up a signif‌icant

portion of the electorate in some geographic regions, particu-

larly in California, Hawaii, and New York (Wong et al., 2011).

The size of their population may increasingly become decisive

The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

Corresponding Author:

Yat To Yeung, The George Washington University, 2115 G St NW,

Washington, DC 20052-0058, USA.

Email: ytyeung@gwu.edu