Does county-level implicit national exclusion predict political participation among Asian Americans?

Abstract

Objectives: Asian Americans are often perceived as perpetual foreigners even when they are born and raised in the country. Such national exclusion is particularly evident when considering implicit biases that reveal American is more strongly associated with White than Asian identity. In the current research, we examined if living in a region where people implicitly associate American nationality more strongly with White over Asian identity predicts the political participation of Asian Americans living within the same region.

Method: Data from 36,838 participants through Project Implicit between 2004 and 2008 provided context-level information on implicit and explicit national exclusion (i.e., American = White belief), while data from 3,748 Asian Americans through the 2008 National Asian American Survey provided an index of political participation.

Results: Using data from 61 U.S. counties, multilevel modeling revealed that in counties with higher levels of implicit national exclusion of Asian Americans, Asian Americans reported higher (not lower) political participation. This effect emerged even after controlling for several additional county-level variables. Similar analyses using an explicit measure of context-level national exclusion yielded convergent findings.

Conclusions: Asian Americans reported greater political participation in counties with higher aggregate-levels of implicit and explicit American = White associations. Possible mechanisms accounting for the unexpected and counterintuitive relation between the national exclusion of Asian Americans and political participation among Asian Americans are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).