My work has focused on the attitudes and participation of marginalized populations and their strategies for attaining power, broadly defined. Reflecting UC Irvine's interdisciplinary culture, I tend to look across the social sciences and employ a mixture of methodologies in my efforts to better understand the role and meaning of the United States -- its people, institutions, and policies -- in a global perspective.
Projects
American Politics
- The Role of Ethno-Symbolic Nationalism and Transnationalism in the Incorporative Process
Fig 1. The symbolic constituency. This graphic depicts California's 68th Assembly District (in red) overlaid by survey results of Vietnamese Americans in Orange County showing where they believe "LIttle Saigon" lies geographically (in yellow). Through 2010, AD68 was represented by the first Vietnamese American to be elected to the California Legislature, Republican Van Tran. In legal terms, "Little Saigon" constitutes only a 1.5 mile stretch along Bolsa Avenue in the city of Westminster.In this project, I have attempted to understand how immigrant first generations go about incorporating in the US political system -- and the role that "home" plays in this process. My focus has been on Vietnamese Americans. Over the last nine years, I have conducted telephone surveys in Orange County and the San Francisco Bay Area and collected data in the cities of Westminster, Garden Grove, Santa Ana and San Jose. In 2005, I spent six months in Saigon under the US Fulbright Program in an effort to understand the meaning of ethnicity, the nature of transnationalism and the dynamics of diaspora politics. I have also conducted archival research at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor and Camp Pendleton in North San Diego County to document the policies concerning refugee resettlement and the US/Vietnam diplomatic relationship.
I published some initial findings on candidate strategies and racial bloc voting in Perspectives on Politics and Journal of Politics and touched upon interracial coalition building with Latinos and whites in Race/Ethnicity. Findings from the surveys appear in a 2007 APSA paper with Hiroko Furuya and an Amerasia article with Nadine Selden, then of the San Jose Mercury News, on the 'generational gap' in political attitudes. A chapter in a volume with Pei-te Lien on Asian American transnational politics discusses the role of diaspora nationalism -- what Furuya and I call "Saigon Nationalism" -- and presents some attitudinal data on how opinions toward Vietnam are (and aren't) changing. A recent paper in Amerasia asks whether Little Saigon is, in fact, a place at all -- and whether it may be better thought of as a label representing a nation, as exemplified by the movements that have mobilized on its behalf.
Fig 2. Cracking Little Saigon. Using data from UC Berkeley's Statewide Database, this graphic depicts the cracking of Vietnamese American voter concentrations (in green and blue) across the 23rd, 24th and 25th Assembly Districts in the San Jose area. The pattern is similar in Orange County.- Independents and Change in the Two-Party System
Fig 3. Question wording effect on Time/CNN/Yankelovich/Gallup trend in third party support. One of the defining characteristics of American politics is its two party system and its obduracy. The purpose of this research has been to understand the nature of attitudes and behavior outside of it -- why Americans, in an age of alleged polarization, continue to identify themselves as something other than "Democrat" or "Republican." Among the things I have been interested in are the large proportions who regularly tell pollsters they want a third party when, in fact, only small proportions ever vote for alternative candidates.
Fig 4. Regional dimension of the vote for Ralph Nader.Published work from this project has focused on the motivations behind third party candidates for state legislature and Congress. Two essays examining the vote for Ralph Nader in 2000 and 2004 appeared in Paul Herrnson and John Green's, Multiparty Politics in America, 2nd Edition (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002) and The State of the Parties, 5th Edition (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). I examine the impact of the blanket primary reform in California in a chapter, "Openness Begets Opportunity," for Bruce Cain and Liz Gerber's, Voting at the Political Faultline (University of California Press, 2002).
Comparative Politics
- Attitudes and Values in Greater Asia and the Pacific Rim
Fig 5. How Chinese perceptions of the US change when their exposure to the world (through culture and social interactions) increases. This graphic depicts the preliminary results of a model used to account for societal perceptions of foreign states, using data from the AsiaBarometer project.Representing 3 in 5 of the world's citizens and the fastest growing economies on Earth, the Asian Pacific has been famously described as the 'cauldron of civilizations' -- a region with unparalleled ethnic, linguistic, religious and political diversity. With survey research becoming global in recent years, the questions being raised today about Asian attitudes and identities -- whether, for example, the region can integrate -- are becoming friendlier to comparative examination. In this project, I am working with Takashi Inoguchi in the analysis of data collected from over 30 Asian societies and the United States, focusing on questions of inter-state and intra-civilizational perceptions, the impact of globalization on cross-national attitudes and the use of Western survey measures in Asian contexts.
A workshop draft, later presented at AAPOR, examines the "Clash of Civilizations" hypothesis.