Dr. Phillips’ substantive focus on Asian American and Latinx communities is propelled by the understanding that the democratic character of a polity is revealed most clearly when examining the experiences of marginalized groups. She is particularly interested in distinctive trajectories of immigrant political incorporation, both across racialized and ethnic groups, as well as within them. Her scholarship in this area argues that gendered and racialized processes inform group members’ capacity to participate in democratic processes in both elite and mass politics.

  • In this paper, we develop a theory of intersectional substantive representation of and by immigrant communities grounded in two concepts: representational orientation to constituents and representational activity to achieve goals. We argue that Asian American women and Latinas are more likely than Latinos and Asian American men to hold an “embedded” orientation to politics, and view community networks and ties as deeply intertwined with the way they frame their identities and goals as representatives. We test our theoretical expectations regarding formal legislative processes by analyzing bill sponsorship by Asian American and Latina/o Democrats serving in state legislatures from 2014-2017, and draw on a set of interviews with Latina/o and Asian American legislators to argue that our findings account for a wider range of experiences related to overlapping group identities than previous scholarship focused on race and gender alone.

  • Asian American men and women have voted at roughly similar rates across the last three presidential elections. This sets Asian Americans apart; women in America have generally voted at higher rates than men since the 1980s. The women in politics and immigrant incorporation literatures suggest that pathways to participation may be distinct for women and men. Yet, there is scant attention to gender in studies of Asian American political participation. As a result, little theoretical or empirical foundation exists for explaining why the gender gap in participation is so different for Asian Americans. To better understand this puzzle, we analyze pooled data from the National Asian American Surveys of 2008, 2012, and 2016. The data show that women are less likely to vote than men once we account for variables related to resources, mediating institutions, and immigrant incorporation. We also demonstrate that Asian American women who are foreign-born citizens are less likely to participate across a range of modes of political action, and across ethnic groups. We argue that this is evidence that gender and ethnicity simultaneously condition the processes of immigrant political incorporation, and the study of gender gaps must be approached more broadly as a political and comparative phenomenon.

  • Women and immigrants are overrepresented among frontline workers who have been deemed essential during the pandemic in the United States. Yet, current theorizing in political science around attitudes towards Covid-related policies has rarely integrated nativity, gender and occupational positioning as central explanatory factors. Using an intersectional theoretical framework and data from a first of its kind survey of two of the largest immigrant national origin groups, we find that nativity, essential worker status and transnational activities are related to vaccine attitudes in ways that are distinct across Filipina/o and Mexican American women and men. While essential work status and transnational sending are positively associated with vaccine acceptance at the whole sample level, we see differences in magnitude and direction across these race-gendered subsets. Unlike prior studies in political science focused on largely native-born communities, we also do not find that partisanship is consistently related to vaccine attitudes. This study contributes to the development of theories of political attitude formation and incorporation that account for the diversity of the American polity writ large, as well as within key subgroups of the population.