Creating Panethnicity: How Discrimination and Ethnonational Identity Affect Racialized Political Alignments

Abstract

Panethnic and ethnonational attachment are identities that may dictate political alignments. Various ethnonational groups are nested within a panethnic label, and each ethnonational group has a complex history in terms of their experiences of immigration and generational status. I ask the following research questions: How do experiences of racial discrimination, demographic characteristics, and ethnonational diversity affect panethnic identity formation? How does this panethnic identity formation ultimately affect political alignments? The diverse experiences of ethnonational groups affect how they incorporate into the United States and participate in politics. Panethnicity may matter for political behavior in some contexts or ways, particularly how panethnic groups, racialized others, and larger institutions view and interact with one another. I conduct a comparative, quantitative analysis of Latino/a and Asian American panethnicity through a U.S. context. I argue that panethnic and ethnonational attachment are two identities that may dictate political alignments and that there is a complicated “inherent tension” (Okamoto and Mora 2014) between them. In this project, I examine publicly available data from the 2016 Collaborative Multi-racial Post-election Survey (CMPS 2016). My analytic approach includes OLS regression models, multinomial logit models, sensitivity tests, and multilevel modeling analyses. I expand on the existing literature on panethnicity and political sociology by addressing how political behavior is a part of a racialized process in terms of identity formation.