Minority Before Ethnicity: Racial Precariousness as the Primary Driver of Asian American Political Preferences

This study examines how multiple dimensions of identity-related perceptions shape political behavior among Asian Americans, a population frequently treated as internally homogeneous despite its profound ethnic and cultural diversity. Drawing on the debate between pan-ethnic homogenization and national-origin diversification, we argue that existing frameworks inadequately capture the full complexity of Asian American political perception by overlooking a third, theoretically consequential dimension: racial minority precariousness---the shared sense of structural vulnerability arising from being collectively racialized as a minority group within the American political order. We conceptualize Asian American perception as comprising three distinct but interrelated layers---pan-Asian consciousness, original country consciousness, and racial minority precariousness---and examine their joint and interactive effects on partisan preferences. Using data from the 2020 Collaborative Multi-racial Post-election Survey (CMPS), we construct latent perception measures via two-parameter logistic Item Response Theory (IRT) models and estimate their effects using hierarchical mixed-effects models with varying intercepts and slopes across sixteen Asian subgroups. The results demonstrate that racial minority precariousness is the most consistent and powerful predictor of political preferences across all subgroups, with stronger minority consciousness associated with lower support for Republican candidates and higher support for Democratic candidates. In contrast, pan-Asian consciousness yields no statistically significant aggregate effect---even in the heightened anti-Asian context of the COVID-19 pandemic---while original country consciousness exerts a smaller but meaningful influence that varies substantially across subgroups. These findings reveal that Asian American political behavior is best understood not through ethnic or geographic classifications alone, but through the lens of shared racialized experience. More broadly, this study advances a layered and interactive framework for analyzing identity and political behavior in populations that appear externally homogeneous yet are deeply internally diverse.