Monkey Cage occasional contributor Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan have won the $100,000 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order for their book “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Non-Violent Conflict. This is a very prestigious and well deserved award. More here and here.
Conservative data cruncher Charles Murray asks, “Why aren’t Asians Republicans?”:
Asians are only half as likely to identify themselves as “conservative” or “very conservative” as whites, and less than half as likely to identify themselves as Republicans. . . . 70% of Asians voted for Barack Obama in the last presidential election.Something’s wrong with this picture. . . . Everyday observation of Asians around the world reveal them to be conspicuously entrepreneurial, industrious, family-oriented, and self-reliant. If you’re looking for a natural Republican constituency, Asians should define “natural.” . . .
Asian immigrants overwhelmingly succeeded, another experience that tends to produce conservative immigrants. Beyond that, Asian minorities everywhere in the world, including America, tend to be underrepresented in politics—they’re more interested in getting ahead commercially or in non-political professions than in running for office or organizing advocacy groups. Lack of interest in politics ordinarily translates into a “just don’t bother us” attitude that trends conservative. . . .
A few years ago, I addressed neoconservative Norman Podhoretz’s argument that Jews should vote Republican:
A problem with Podhoretz’s argument is it proves too much. Why are Jews Democrats? Why is anyone a Democrat? Once you accept that conservative economic policies are good for growth, you’d think just about everyone would lean Republican on economic issues.
Murray’s argument is, unsurprisingly, more sophisticated and data-based than that offered by Podhoretz. In particular, Murray explicitly makes the economic argument that a financially successful person should want to vote Republican. From this perspective, Murray is not surprised that low or moderate-income Asians vote for Democrats but he’s surprised at the voting patterns of high-income Asians. Murray writes that Asians are more likely than whites to have “conservative-skewed professions” such as managers and engineers—-but there’s a bit difference, politically, between being a manager or engineer in a tech company in California, as compared to the comparable position in an oil company in Texas.
As we discuss in Red State Blue State, it’s the higher-income voters who are more likely to vote based on social issues. Murray writes:
Republicans are seen by Asians—as they are by Latinos, blacks, and some large proportion of whites—as the party of Bible-thumping, anti-gay, anti-abortion creationists. Factually, that’s ludicrously inaccurate. In the public mind, except among Republicans, that image is taken for reality.
I don’t know what Murray means by “except among Republicans.” Rick Santorum is a Republican, no? If he’s not a “Bible-thumping, anti-gay, anti-abortion creationist,” who is?
And consider Marco Rubio, a prominent Republican who got into a bit of trouble recently for either admitting he does not believe in evolution, or going to a lot of trouble to deny he believes in evolution. According to this site (which I found by googling Marco Rubio abortion), Rubio “opposed Sotomayor nomination based on her Roe support.” Here he’s quoted as saying “’America cannot truly fulfill its destiny unless’ it ends abortion.” Rubio also “supports amendment to prevent same sex marriage,” “supports banning homosexuals in the military,” and “opposes employment non-discrimination act.” Lots of Americans share these views and Rubio has every right to promote them—-but “anti-gay, anti-abortion creationist” pretty much covers it.
To put it another way, most Republican voters are not “Bible-thumping, anti-gay, anti-abortion creationists,” but many prominent Republican leaders are.
Where do Asian voters live?
One way to understand the Asian vote is to ask where these voters live. It’s not in Alabama.
According to this site, the states with lots of Asians are mostly pretty liberal. Here are the 10 states with highest %Asian:
Hawaii
California
New Jersey
New York
Nevada
Washington
Maryland
Virginia
Alaska
Massachusetts
And after that comes Illinois. And within these states I assume the Asians are likely to live in or near big cities.
At the bottom of the list, at less than 1% Asian, you have solidly Republican Montana, West Virginia, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Mississippi.
California alone is big enough that its 13% Asian represent a large proportion of all the Asians in the country. (Here’s a quick calculation: California has 38 million people, so 13% Asian comes to 5 million. The U.S. has 312 million people, 4.8% Asian, thus a total of 15 million.) A third of Asians in America live in California. And a bunch of the rest live in New York, New Jersey, and Hawaii.
This doesn’t by itself explain why Obama got so much of the Asian vote—-but it’s not a surprise that members of a minority group concentrated in urban areas on the Pacific coast and the Northeast are mostly voting for Democrats.
P.S. The commenters below add many helpful references. Let me emphasize that the above discussion is not intended to be the whole story. I’m just trying to put Murray’s claims in a political and geographic context.
The following is a guest post from M. Taylor Fravel, an Associate Professor of Political Science and member of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is cross-posted at The Diplomat.
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Following the conclusion of the 18thParty Congress, a new Politburo Standing Committee, the top leadership body of the Chinese Communist Party, has been named. Much of the recent commentary has revolved around whether or how China’s new leaders will pursue much-needed economic and political reforms. An equally important question concerns the future direction of Chinese foreign policy under Xi Jinping.
To repeat Zhou Enlai’s assessment of social upheaval in France in 1968, it is “too early to say.” Very little – if anything – from the backgrounds of these individuals can illuminate whether China will adopt a new approach to foreign relations in the coming five or ten years.
An assessment of China’s foreign policy under Xi is “too early” for several other reasons. Although general secretary of the party, Xi Jinping will not become head of state, or president, until the National People’s Congress in March 2013.
In addition, who will hold key positions in China’s foreign policy system (waijiao xitong) remains unknown. The most important vacancy to be filled is the director of the Central Foreign Affairs Office (zhongyang waishi bangongshi). The post is currently held by Dai Bingguo, who is China’s highest-ranking official in foreign policy after the party’s general secretary. The CFAO coordinates policy within the party-state bureaucracy, always a challenge, and provides research and advice on foreign affairs to China’s top leaders. Other key posts to watch are the foreign minister, the head of the Taiwan Affairs Office and the head of the CCP’s International Liaison Department.
Finally, Xi and the new Politburo Standing Committee may not launch new initiatives of their own for perhaps one or two years – once key positions are filled, working relationships are formed among the new leaders, and power is consolidated.
Reading these news articles that slam more and more nails into the already-dead reputation of Hewlett Packard executive Meg Whitman, I keep thinking: what if she’d won her election a couple years ago and was now governor or senator or whatever she was running for? Then nobody would care that her company was falling apart!
Conversely, when Jon Corzine lost his reelection and reentered the business world, he left himself open to charges of acts of corruption that wouldn’t have been possible in congress or from the governor’s office.
But sometimes the immunity can go the other way. Jack Welch still has the street-cred to write Wall Street Journal editorials despite his history of data manipulation, but it’s hard to imagine he could be elected to public office, even if he wanted to. For another example, Al Sharpton was caught out on his lies in a well-publicized court case but that does not stop him from being bankrolled as a quasi-public figure.
Big names in politics and business get away with so much that it’s notable when the magic dries up and their statements get taken with the same skepticism as would be applied, for example, to leaders of foreign countries that are not our allies.
I have no systematic thoughts on this right now but it seems worthy of study.
Since the election President Obama has received a wide range of unsolicited advice regarding his legislative relations as they pertain to his second term agenda and, most immediately, avoiding a plunge over the fiscal cliff. A fair number of the comments, in an echo of the pre-election punditry that ultimately led to Nate Silver selling three billion new books, suggest that the key to legislative success is not really policy, but personality. If only Obama were a warmer person, a better schmoozer or for that matter a better golfer, Congress would follow his lead and come to a deal. Much of this should involve hospitality, and better yet, food. [click to continue…]
In a nutshell, the uncertainty about Boehner’s bargaining position relative to his own caucus can generate sufficient incentives for him to “act the diva,” and seem to hold court in a fashion befitting LeBron’s act leading up to “The Decision.” The simple explanation of the strategic incentives underlying this is that Boehner can utilize Obama’s uncertainty about Boehner’s bargaining ability to make it appear like, even if Boehner does “care at least as much as Obama” about resolving the fiscal cliff in an expeditious fashion, that Boehner can’t “deliver a deal” equal to Obama’s “reservation price” (or, in other words, that Boehner can’t get his caucus to agree to Obama’s demands). The implicit value to Boehner is that Obama, on the margin, will give in a little to secure what he perceives as the marginal certainty of securing a deal from Boehner’s copartisans. In other words, at the end of the day, as 2011 purportedly demonstrated, Boehner may ironically (but completely classically from a game theoretic vantage point) benefit from being able to portray himself (accurately or not) as not being able to corral his own troops. ”Sir, I told them gruel was sufficient to survive the night, but they simply insisted they’d die without gruyère.”
More at the link.
Lawless and I undertook a two-part study of gender stereotyping during the 2010 midterm elections.
We first conducted a detailed analysis of local newspaper coverage of House races in nearly 350 congressional districts across the country. Analyzing 4,748 articles, we found virtually no gender differences whatsoever.
News coverage of women was just as common as coverage of men. And the content of campaign stories was nearly indistinguishable across candidate sex. The frequency with which reporters referred explicitly to candidates’ sex or gender – for instance, noting how they dressed or their family roles – was the same for men and women. Paul Ryan, hustling to the tailor to get that suit taken in, wouldn’t be surprised.
That is Danny Hayes, describing his new research with Jennifer Lawless over at Wonkblog. More here, as part of the new “Polisci Perspective” feature.
Anjan Sundaram writes in Foreign Policy about the dangers posed by rebel group M23 in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They are fighting in a conflict that he says “threatens to redraw the map of Africa.” M23 are “powerful” , “well-equipped and professional.” They put on “a remarkable show of force over the weekend to move within a few kilometers of the provincial capital, Goma.” After Sundaram’s article was posted, M23 went on to take over Goma and then started making noises about continuing all the way to Kinshasa, 1000 miles to the East, to take over the country. This prospect was deemed credible in various news articles covering the conflict.
Well, you might think, surely this must be a very powerful rebel group, with tens of thousands of disciplined fighters, if they can roll over units of 40,000 strong Congolese army, backed to some limited extent by units of the 17,000 strong UN peacekeeping force, and plausibly threaten to go all the way to Kinshasa? Nope. According to Sundaram, “In the end, some 3,000 Congolese soldiers, backed by hundreds of U.N. peacekeepers with air power, were unable to contain M23 forces numbering in the few hundreds” (emphasis added).
The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Election
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Campaigns and Elections:
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Red State Blue State
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Regional Economic Voting
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The Political Economy of Trust
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