Beyond Pan-Ethnicity: Responsiveness of Elected Officials to Asian American Subgroups

Are American elected officials equally responsive to all Asian subgroups? Asian American is one of the major racial/ethnic groups in the United States and is currently the fastest-growing racial group. However, studies on the representation of Asian Americans are limited. Studies also commonly view Asian Americans as a single, homogenous group and omit the heterogeneity within this unique population. I argue that to understand any racial/ethnic group better, we should look into the ethnic subgroups and examine them as separate populations. I conducted an audit experiment in this study and sent emails to more than 2000 state legislators, manipulating senders' names to represent different Asian subgroups. I find that none of the subgroups received a lower response rate than white constituents, regardless of the officials' racial group and partisan affiliation. However, Korean constituents were less likely to receive a friendly response than white and Vietnamese constituents. The results also show that Latino and Black legislators were less friendly in their emails and less responsive than their Asian and white counterparts. This study sheds light on the heterogeneity of racial/ethnic groups, which scholars have routinely overlooked.