2022 Theses Bachelor's

The Impacts of Anti-Asian Discrimination on Recent Asian American Voting Behavior: Do Anti-Asian, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander violence and personal experiences of discrimination motivate Asian American turnout in federal general elections between 2000 and 2020?

Liu, Joyce Z.

In this thesis, I examine the relationship between the incidence of hate crimes targeting the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities and Asian American voter turnout in federal general elections between 2000 and 2020. Initially, I began my analysis by compiling data on anti-ANHPI hate crimes and all racially motivated hate crimes from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which I used to run linear regressions with Asian American voter turnout data from the United States Census Bureau. While I failed to observe a statistically significant relationship between anti-ANHPI hate crimes and Asian American turnout between 2000 and 2020, I found a weakly, albeit statistically strong, positive relationship between the incidence of all racially motivated hate crimes and Asian American voting behavior. I then proceeded into case studies of the salience of race and Asian American pan-ethnic identity in 2008 and 2016 Presidential Elections, using data from the 2008 and 2016 Pre-Election National Asian American Surveys, to find that listing race in their top three issues facing the country was associated with an increased likelihood of voting in 2016, but the opposite in 2008. I also engaged in case studies of the 2016 Presidential Election, using data from the 2016 Post-Election National Asian American Survey, that suggests that some forms of personal experiences of discrimination had statistically strong, significant correlations with Asian American respondents’ likelihood of reported voting, although there was no statistically significant relationship between attributing such experiences to racial discrimination and turnout. When separating out respondents by their state of residence, I found that personal experiences of discrimination had differing magnitudes and directional impacts on respondents’ likelihood of reporting voting that varied by state.