Lexington's notebook | The Asian-American vote

Are white Americans unusually individualistic?

Researching the effectiveness of appeals to the common good

By Lexington

THERE is no mystery about the Republican Party's ambitions to win more Hispanic votes. Since the presidential election last November, Republicans have been arguing about whether new policies are the key to wooing Latinos, or whether—to borrow an old Ronald Reagan line—Hispanics are conservatives who just don't know it yet. Lots of bigwigs seem to be coming round to the idea of a hybrid approach, combining new policies on immigration with more familiar appeals to piety, love of family and hard work, all of which are hailed as natural Hispanic values.

The Republican debate about the Asian-American vote is at a much earlier stage. A panel at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference saw Asian voters mentioned in passing, but mostly as an example of the Romney campaign's failure to micro-target its message to different groups. This is a constituency that conservatives should be able to appeal to, argued John Fund, a conservative journalist. They constitute 3% of the overall electorate and are concentrated in some important swing states, he said, and both George Bush senior and Bob Dole won a majority of Asian-American votes in the 1992 and 1996 elections. But after that the vote steadily declined to the point that Mitt Romney won only 26% of that demographic. Mr Fund suggested a lack of effort might be to blame: Republicans only made a "full-court press" on the Asian vote in one state, Nevada in 2012, with multi-lingual campaign messages tailored to Asian community concerns, such as school choice.

Other conservatives seem a bit baffled by Asian-Americans, especially those whose affluence or small-business backgrounds make them look like natural Republicans.

In part, bafflement is a reflection of the block's diversity. Rock solid exit polling is hard to come by, but this large survey by the Asian-American Legal Defence and Education Fund (a broadly left-leaning group) points to big cultural and geographic differences in the 2012 presidential vote, reporting:

While three-quarters (77%) of Asian Americans polled voted for Barack Obama for President, as many as 96% of Bangladeshi Americans voted for Obama, compared to 44% of Vietnamese Americans. Support for policies including immigration reform also varied by ethnic group.

In addition, while Asian Americans in the Northeast voted for Obama at high levels (89% in PA and 86% in NY), as few as 16% of Asian Americans polled in Louisiana voted for Obama

This is a complex puzzle, which cannot be settled by a single blog posting. But a recent report by National Public Radio described a piece of academic research which, if at all accurate, may offer a partial explanation for the phenomenon of entrepreneurial, tradition-minded Asian-Americans resisting Republican messages.

The report by NPR's Shankar Vedantam—who has a knack for digging up interesting social-science research—pointed to experiments by sociologists at Stanford University, designed to test how different groups of Americans respond to appeals to consider the greater good rather than individual endeavour. One of the experiments in particular sounds intriguing. In Stanford's description:

In the third experiment, designed to test these motivational effects in relation to a pressing social issue, students were asked to give their opinions about a class on promoting environmental sustainability after viewing a website about the course.

When the course description emphasized interdependent behavior – working together, being adaptive and taking others' views into perspective – white American students predicted they would put less effort into the course and were less likely to agree that taking the course should be a university requirement than when the course description emphasized independent behavior – taking charge, being unique and knowing your own perspective.

Students also said they would be less motivated in the class, which explained why they supported the course less when their participation was framed in terms of interdependence rather than independence.

The researchers also found that, across the three studies, the motivation of Asian American students did not vary when interdependence or independence were invoked.

The authors noted that bicultural Asian American students are exposed to both mainstream American culture, which stresses independence, and East Asian culture, which stresses the value and importance of interdependence. As a result, appeals to think and act interdependently or independently were equally motivating.

A single piece of academic research cannot explain the voting behaviour of millions of Americans. Immigrant communities are also anything but static, evolving in complex ways over time. But the findings are worth pondering because the themes of liberty and individualism are so dominant in today's Republican Party. If at least some Asian Americans are actively resistant to such rhetoric, it may be a while before a conservative presidential candidate sweeps the Asian-American vote again.

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