The politics of deracialisation: South Asian American candidates, nicknames, and campaign strategies

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on the deracialisation strategies of South Asian American candidates for elected office. We argue that there is a distinct pattern among these candidates in terms of the type of representation they embody, as well as their personal choices including using non-ethnic nicknames in their campaign materials. These nicknames assist voters, especially in low-information elections, by signalling the ethnicity of candidates – or the lack thereof. Using data collected by the authors from 1956 to the present – the first such attempt to create a national database of South Asian American candidates – we employ a logistic regression to examine the effect of using a non-ethnic nickname on the likelihood of attaining electoral success. Our findings suggest that candidates who used a non-ethnic nickname were at least 25% more likely to win an election. This effect increased as we moved from local to federal contests.

KEYWORDS:

• South Asian American
• Indian-American
• diaspora
• America
• USA
• campaigns
• elections

Acknowledgements

A previous version of this article was presented at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. The authors acknowledge the assistance and support of Rosalee Clawson, Pei-te Lien, Rudy Busto, and the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Shyam Krishnan Sriram is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA.

Stonegarden Grindlife is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

ORCiD

Shyam Krishnan Sriram http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2164-3550

Notes

1. It should be noted that South Asian American politicians are not the only ones to use nicknames and that candidates from all backgrounds and ethnicities have used nicknames during their political careers (e.g. Newton Leroy ‘Newt’ Gingrich). However, we could not identify any literature that looked at the political effectiveness of using nicknames, which will perhaps provide the basis for a future paper.

2. ‘The word “desi” comes from Sanskrit and means “from the country” or “of the country.” It's used by South Asian immigrants to refer to someone or something from the Indian subcontinent and its diaspora. The word implies shared values and bonds’ (Kurwa 2008).

3. Deracialization is not to be confused with what Hayano (1981) and more recently Aoki (2013) have termed ‘disidentification’ or the calculated move by a specific ethnic group to ‘discourage identification’ with another ethnic group.

4. BallotPedia, Google, the Indian American Leadership Initiative (IALI), LinkedIn, ‘News India Times’, ‘Non Resident Indian (NRI) Internet’, ‘Sepia Mutiny’, the United States India Political Action Committee (USINPAC), and Wikipedia.

5. http://apaics.org/resources/political-database/

6. Nakanishi and Lai (2014–2015); Nakanishi (2011–2012); Nakanishi (2007–2008); Nakanishi (2003–2004); Nakanishi and LaForteza (1984); and Nakanishi (1978, 1979, 1980, 1982).

7. Seventy-seven per cent of the candidates ran as Democrats.

8. Our database also included 10 candidates who were biracial or for whom their ethnicity and religious preferences were unknown or unclear. The particular politics of multiracial Asian Americans is a specific topic that we could not address in this paper, but are working on a future project solely on that issue.