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

Visalvanich, Neil

doi:10.1177/1065912916674273

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

Visalvanich, Neil

Authors

Dr Neil Visalvanich neil.visalvanich@durham.ac.uk
Associate Professor

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

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Copyright Statement
Visalvanich, Neil (2016) 'Asian candidates in America : the surprising effects of positive racial stereotyping.', Political research quarterly., 70 (1). pp. 68-81. Copyright © 2016 University of Utah. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.