Asian Candidates in America: The Surprising Effects of Positive Racial Stereotyping

Visalvanich, Neil

Abstract

Racial stereotyping has been found to handicap African American and Latino candidates in negative ways. It is less clear how racial stereotypes may change the fortunes of Asian candidates. This paper explores the candidacies of Asian Americans with an experiment run through Amazon Mechanical Turk as well as real-world evaluations of Asian American candidates using the Cooperative Congressional Elections Study. In my experiments, I find that Asian candidates do significantly better than white candidates across different biographical scenarios (conservative, liberal, and foreign). I find that, contrary to expectations, Asian candidates are not significantly disadvantaged from being immigrant and foreign born. My experimental results mirror my observational results, which show that Asian Democrats are significantly advantaged even when compared with whites. These results indicate that Asian candidates in America face a set of racial-political stereotypes that are unique to their racial subgroup.

Citation

Visalvanich, N. (2016). Asian Candidates in America: The Surprising Effects of Positive Racial Stereotyping. Political Research Quarterly, 70(1), 68-81. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912916674273

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Sep 7, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Oct 17, 2016
• Publication Date: Oct 17, 2016
• Deposit Date: Sep 7, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 26, 2016
• Journal: Political Research Quarterly
• Print ISSN: 1065-9129
• Electronic ISSN: 1938-274X
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 70
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 68-81
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912916674273
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1397979