New Asian American Voters: Political Incorporation and Participation in 2016

• Date: 01 December 2019
• Author: Kumar Ramanathan,Jane Junn,Natalie Masuoka
• Published date: 01 December 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912919843342
• Subject Matter: Mini-Symposium: Identity Politics and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912919843342

Political Research Quarterly

2019, Vol. 72(4) 991 –1003

© 2019 University of Utah

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DOI: 10.1177/1065912919843342

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Mini-Symposium: Identity Politics and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

Asian Americans today are the fastest growing racial

group in the United States. This growth is due primarily

to immigration, meaning that Asian Americans are more

likely to be foreign-born or citizens by naturalization

compared with members of other racial and ethnic groups.

Diverse in terms of race, national origin, citizenship, and

migration trajectories, Asian Americans are a highly

dynamic population defying simple explanation.

Nevertheless, studies of voting and other types of politi-

cal behavior have often analyzed Asian national origin

groups together and focused on the role of individual-

level resources such as education and income. This strat-

egy has resulted in the persistent finding that Asian

Americans underparticipate relative to relatively high

levels of socioeconomic status and reinforces the charac-

terization of Asian Americans as apolitical nonvoters

who are politically quiescent. How can scholars reframe

their approach to the study of Asian American political

behavior that better integrates the complex dimensions of

the population we know to exist? If we engage in creative

strategies for studying Asian American political behavior,

can we learn new insights about this community and the

degree to which they are being incorporated into the

political system?

The political participation literature’s focus on indi-

vidual-level characteristics alone misses the other impor-

tant structural conditions that can advantage or

disadvantage individuals from engaging in the U.S. polit-

ical system. In the case of Asian Americans, the structural

features that strongly condition their political participa-

tion are naturalization and registration. Although scholars

of Asian American politics have long highlighted this

argument (see, for example, Lien 2001; Wong et al.

2011), empirical analyses typically account for these

structural features by including control variables in a

multivariate model. Being an American citizen is thus

conceived of as an individual-level resource for participa-

tion in politics. This approach is appealing inasmuch as

identifying a positive and statistically significant coeffi-

cient on a dummy variable denoting citizenship can be

843342PRQXXX10.1177/1065912919843342Political Research QuarterlyMasuoka et al.

research-article2019

1University of California, Los Angeles, USA

2Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

3University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA

Corresponding Author:

Natalie Masuoka, Department of Political Science, Bunche Hall,

University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.

Email: nmasuoka@ucla.edu

New Asian American Voters:

Political Incorporation and

Participation in 2016

Natalie Masuoka1, Kumar Ramanathan2, and Jane Junn3

Abstract

In 2016, Asian Americans represented the fastest growing racial minority group in the United States largely due to

the flow of new immigration. As a result, Asian Americans are poised to be the next major bloc of new voters in the

electorate. Yet, as a largely new immigrant group, institutional barriers—in particular, naturalization and registration—

are important factors which need to be more thoroughly taken into account when explaining Asian American

participation patterns. In this article, we show how scholars can adopt a different strategy of analysis that recognizes

both institutional barriers to political participation through immigrant status and variation across national origin group.

We argue that structural impediments to participation and national origin differences have not been fully accounted

for in previous explanations of Asian American political participation. Our analysis shows that when Asian Americans

are disaggregated by incorporation status (being registered to vote, eligible but not registered to vote, or noncitizen),

we gain new insights about the factors that predict political participation. The findings from an analysis of 2016 election

data feature the unique behaviors of Filipinos, Asian Indians, and the Vietnamese and highlight that second-generation

Asian Americans are not necessarily more participatory than their immigrant counterparts.

Keywords

Asian American politics, 2016 election, voting, nonvoting behavior, immigration