Superficial Equality: Gender and immigration in Asian American political participation

ABSTRACT

Asian American men and women have voted at roughly similar rates across the last three presidential elections. This sets Asian Americans apart; women in America have generally voted at higher rates than men since the 1980s. The women in politics and immigrant incorporation literatures suggest that pathways to participation may be distinct for women and men. Yet, there is scant attention to gender in studies of Asian American political participation. As a result, little theoretical or empirical foundation exists for explaining why the gender gap in participation is so different for Asian Americans. To better understand this puzzle, we analyze pooled data from the National Asian American Surveys of 2008, 2012, and 2016. The data show that women are less likely to vote than men once we account for variables related to resources, mediating institutions, and immigrant incorporation. We also demonstrate that Asian American women who are foreign-born citizens are less likely to participate across a range of modes of political action, and across ethnic groups. We argue that this is evidence that gender and ethnicity simultaneously condition the processes of immigrant political incorporation, and the study of gender gaps must be approached more broadly as a political and comparative phenomenon.

KEYWORDS:

• Asian Americans
• gender
• elections
• voting
• immigration
• intersectionality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Figures are for the U.S. population aged 25 and older and for the “Asian only” category.

2 Several studies have argued that this racial voting gap is actually a reflection of a gap earlier in the political process, wherein eligible Asian Americans register to vote at disproportionately lower rates (Lien 2001; Xu 2005; Wong et al. 2011).

3 The measure of voting likelihood is prospective. NAAS survey respondents were asked to characterize how likely they were to vote, and their responses over the course of three presidential elections were collapsed into a dummy variable indicating whether they were likely to vote, or not. For question wording in each year of the survey, see Appendix: NAAS Question Wording.

4 On the decision not to weight our regression analyses, we follow Winship and Radbill (1994), who note,

Although sampling weights must generally be used to derive unbiased estimates of univariate population characteristics, the decision about their use in regression analysis is more complication. Where sampling weights are solely a function of independent variables included in the model, unweighted OLS estimates are preferred because they are unbiased consistent, and have smaller standard errors than weighted OLS estimates. (230)

The variables (nativity, education, etc.) used in generating NAAS weights are controlled for as independent variables in our models (see also Gelman 2007; Bollen2016)

5 Employment status taps into resource and socialization differences rooted in wage-based work (Jones-Correa 1998; Min 2001). On the role of language in political incorporation, see Guerra (1988), Portes and Zhou (1996), and Ramakrishnan (2005)

6 The default category here is identifying as a political Independent. For a fuller discussion on the empirical choices in examining the influence of party affiliation with Asian Americans, see Hajnal and Lee (2011).