How Asians React to Discrimination Does Not Depend on Their Party Identification

Abstract

How do individuals respond to discrimination against their group? The authors help answer this normatively important question by conducting a survey with a large, national, quota-based sample of 2,482 Asians living in the United States during December 2020. In the survey, the authors provide respondents with truthful information about the increasing prevalence of anti-Asian discrimination in the United States during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic and ask them to write about what this makes them feel or think about life in America. Using automatic text analysis tools to analyze this rich, novel set of personal reflections, the authors show in this visualization that Asian reactions to discrimination do not meaningfully differ across partisan identification. These findings extend the large literature showing partisan differences in perceptions of racial discrimination and its effects by the general public and show at least one way in which partisan polarization does not influence American views.

Keywords

Asian American AAPI discrimination partisanship text analysis

How do individuals respond to discrimination against their group? A large literature shows partisan differences in perceptions of racial discrimination and its effects by the general public, but we know little about what drives perceptions among those being discriminated (Ruggiero and Taylor 1995). We contribute to this still nascent literature by conducting a survey with a large, national, quota-based sample of 2,482 Asians living in the United States. The goal of our survey, fielded from December 18 to 30, 2020, with Lucid Marketplace, was to understand how the increasing prevalence of anti-Asian bias in the United States during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has affected Asian views about the country. To examine this, we provided respondents with a short paragraph of truthful information about this recent wave of discrimination and asked them to write about what this makes them feel or think about life in America. Full details about the survey and the instrument are included in the supplementary file, along with more information about our analytical choices and additional findings.

Findings

Using a new automatic text analysis tool (Eshima, Imai, and Sasaki 2021) to analyze this rich, novel set of nearly 2,500 personal reflections, we show that Asian reactions to discrimination do not vary on the basis of party identification, in contrast to the literature that shows partisan differences in views about racial discrimination and its effects. We show that Asian reactions do not generally vary by substance (Figure 1) or by tone (Appendix). Importantly, respondents from all political backgrounds focus their responses primarily on prejudice and bias and spend little time talking about the potential political antecedents of this bias or the threats it poses to their individual security. In general, these findings depart significantly from the growing literature about how partisanship in America shapes a wide range of perceptions and policy preferences (Bisgaard and Slothuus 2018).

Figure 1.

Results from automatic text analysis of personal reflections across self-reported party identification.

Discussion

Anti-Asian discrimination has been on the rise throughout the United States since the COVID-19 pandemic began. In contrast to the large emerging literature about the influence of partisan affiliation on American perceptions, including perceptions of discrimination, our analyses show that Asians respond to these attacks similarly, no matter their political background. Collectively, our findings underscore that there are limits to the effects of partisanship in American life and that Asians across parties view the country much the same in light of increasing discrimination against their group. Future work should examine whether the differences we observe between our results and existing work on the relationship between party identification and perceptions of discrimination arise because we use a new approach or because we focus on the perceptions of Asians as opposed to other racial groups.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231211048023 – Supplemental material for How Asians React to Discrimination Does Not Depend on Their Party Identification

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231211048023 for How Asians React to Discrimination Does Not Depend on Their Party Identification by Kristo Leung, Ke Cheng, Junyao Zhang, Yipeng Cheng, Viet Hung Nguyen Cao, Shusuke Ioku, Masanori Kikuchi, Wen Long and Charles Crabtree in Socius

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Charles Crabtree

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Author Biographies

Kristo Leung is a master’s student in the Graduate School of Political Science at Waseda University. She is interested in public diplomacy, public opinion, and ethnic politics.

Ke Cheng is a biostatistician at CMIC Group.

Junyao Zhang is a master’s student in social data science at the University of Oxford.

Yipeng Cheng is an undergraduate student in the Department of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University. He is interested in the behavior of citizens’ normative consciousness in the context of international politics and experimental methods.

Viet Hung Nguyen Cao is a master’s student in the Graduate School of Political Science at Waseda University. He is interested in public opinion, international security, and territorial disputes.

Shusuke Ioku is a PhD student of political science at the University of Rochester. He is interested in international conflict and formal theory.

Masanori Kikuchi is a PhD student in the Graduate School of Political Science at Waseda University and a research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. His research interests broadly cover international security and cooperation, foreign policy, and public opinion.

Wen Long is a master’s student in the Graduate School of Political Science at Waseda University. She is interested in international relations and foreign policy.

Charles Crabtree is an assistant professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. His research focuses on the politics, sociology, and economics of discrimination.

References

Bisgaard

Martin

Slothuus

Rune

. 2018. “Partisan Elites as Culprits? How Party Cues Shape Partisan Perceptual Gaps.” American Journal of Political Science 62(2):456–69.

Eshima

Shusei

Imai

Kosuke

Sasaki

Tomoya

. 2021. “Keyword Assisted Topic Models.” Working paper. Retrieved September 13, 2021. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.05964.pdf.

Ruggiero

Karen M.

Taylor

Donald M.

1995. “Coping with Discrimination: How Disadvantaged Group Members Perceive the Discrimination That Confronts Them.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 68(5):826–38.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

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