This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: As the 2026 midterm elections draw near, candidates are often focused on currying favor among particular demographic groups. A new study of Asian American ethnic subgroups in the U.S. indicates that political segregation is just one form of spatial isolation that may be shaping Asian Americans' voting behavior and living environments.
The study's authors—Ting-Syuan Lin, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Yongjun Zhang, a professor of sociology and affiliate of the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University—say that while Asian Americans in the U.S. are often considered to be a single racial group, they comprise several ethnic subgroups—including Chinese, Filipino, Japanese and Vietnamese Americans—that differ markedly in their political orientations, socioeconomic resources and migration histories. Lin and Zhang used voter data to explore segregation by race, income and party affiliation among 33 million registered voters in New York and California, with a particular focus on the 2.55 million Asian American voters in these states. The work is published in the journal Population, Space and Place.
Asian American ethnic subgroups also differ in where they live and the racial, economic and political makeup of their neighborhoods. Yet their differences are often obscured in research that treats them as a single homogeneous group, according to Lin and Zhang, who compared residential segregation among Asian Americans as an aggregate group with that of white, Black and Hispanic voters, and examined differences among six of the Asian American subgroups in the U.S. using individual-level voter data. Research that focuses on concentrations of Asian Americans in enclaves—neighborhoods with high concentrations of a particular ethnic group—and ethnoburbs, defined as similar communities in suburban areas, limits understanding of how race, income and politics collectively influence these groups' living experiences, Lin said.
"Since income and race often line up with political affiliation, political segregation may overlap with racial or income segregation, but they are not necessarily the same thing," Lin said. "With increasing attention focused on political polarization, and on whether voters choose to relocate to areas with people who share their politics, we wanted to explore these patterns among Asian American subgroups as a first step toward understanding how their residential environments might affect voting behavior." For the purposes of the current study, isolation and segregation refer to the extent to which individuals are exposed to neighbors from the same social groups. And, unlike many prior studies, the current study defines neighborhoods through geographic proximity rather than fixed administrative boundaries, allowing a flexible measure of segregation across multiple dimensions that more closely captures voters' living environments, the researchers said.
Since California and New York are two of the most populous and diverse states, Lin and Zhang based the study on these states' 2021 voter data—which included residential addresses, party affiliation and demographic information. Lin and Zhang mapped the geographic distribution of Asian American registered voters across the counties in the two states and examined differences among their six largest national-origin Asian subgroups—including Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese and Filipino Americans. Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. d research that matter—daily or weekly.
Using geocoded voter locations, Lin and Zhang constructed an individual-level spatial isolation index—a tool that Zhang refined in a previous project—that measured racial, income and partisan isolation for each voter based on their 1,000 nearest neighbors who are registered voters. When the team examined isolation at aggregate group levels, their initial analyses indicated that racial isolation was highest among white voters, followed by Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans. However, isolation by voters' party affiliation—identified as Democratic, Republican or other—was highest among Black voters followed by Hispanic voters.
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