Journal Article Selection Criteria

For the journal articles, we focus on the top 25 political science journals in Garand and Giles's (2003) rankings. From these 25, we excluded eight journals that are primarily concerned with comparative politics and international relations or that focused on narrow sub-fields.³

Most of the remaining 17 were political science journals, but we also had two from sociology, one from economics, and two interdisciplinary journals. Seeking a greater comparison between interdisciplinary and political science journals, we added three interdisciplinary journals that ranked between 25 and 50—Politics and Society (#33), Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (#36), and Urban Affairs Research (#45)—giving us a total of 20 journals.

For these journals, we scanned all issues published from 1990 through 2003.⁴

We recorded the number of articles that dealt with APAs, as well as the number of articles that dealt with African Americans, American Indians, and Latinos.⁵

To examine trends beyond what is ascertainable from published articles, we turned to APSA meeting programs. We read final programs of the APSA meetings from 1990 through 2003 and identified papers that dealt with Asian Americans.⁶

We judged a paper as dealing with Asian Americans if the title included the term “Asian American(s),” a specific Asian American ethnic group name, or a phrase peculiar to Asian American history (such as Japanese American internment).⁷ We searched Annual Meeting programs of all sections except comparative and international politics. We searched only panels and posters and excluded lectures, business meetings, and receptions; we counted roundtables without papers only toward the number of APA panels and not for the number of papers.

Trends in APA Scholarship

As Table 1 shows, articles on APAs are relatively scarce, with no journal having more than 3% of its articles dealing with APAs. Even this percentage is an overstatement of the attention given to APAs, because a closer look of the 98 APA articles shows that well over half focused on APAs and other minority groups together, rather than APAs alone (breakdown not shown on the table; available from authors). Because the total number of articles published each year varies greatly by journal, Table 1 gives the percentage as well as the number of each journal's APA articles.

When examining the pattern of journal publications, perhaps the most interesting is the sizable gap between political science and other social science journals. The three journals that ranked highest in the number and percentage of APA articles (and the number and percentage of race articles)—Urban Affairs Research, Social Science Quarterly, and American Sociological Review—are all interdisciplinary or sociology journals. When we aggregate the numbers by discipline (Figure 1), we see that the interdisciplinary journals scanned contained considerably more articles on APAs, and on race and ethnicity broadly, than the political science journals.⁸

Table 1 also suggests that the concern made by Ávalos (1991) more than a decade ago still holds today: that young scholars studying race and ethnicity may endanger tenure and promotion chances because top journals publish few articles in these areas, while journals more likely to publish literature on race and ethnicity are ranked lower by peers. The APSR, flagship journal of the profession, published only one article on Asian Americans, while the two journals that published the most articles on race and ethnicity are ranked at number 25 or lower.⁹

When we examine the number of all articles on race and ethnicity, we find that interdisciplinary journals also had a far higher percentage of articles than did political science journals (Figure 2), a pattern observed by Ávalos over a decade ago (Ávalos 1991).¹⁰

Interdisciplinary journals' practice of featuring symposia on race and ethnicity greatly increased their numbers. The Annals of the American Academy and Social Science Quarterly featured a substantial number of articles on race and ethnicity this way.¹¹ Not surprisingly, the political science journal with the highest percentage of articles on race and ethnicity (PS) also publishes symposia; virtually all of the PS articles on APAs were published in a 2001 symposium, and a little over half of all the PS articles on race and ethnicity were published in symposia.

Table 2 shows the number of papers on APAs in the final programs of the APSA meetings from 1990 to 2003. As was the case with published articles on APAs, the number of papers that dealt with APAs is very small (less than 1% of the entire papers presented every year). With the exception of 1990 (in which two papers on the Japanese American internment were presented, probably echoing Congress's historic passage of the internment redress bill in 1988), there were only four papers on APAs at most before 1998. There was a jump in the number of APA papers in 1998, however, and at least seven papers have been presented every year since.

Although most of the APA papers we identified had “Asian(s)” or “Asian American(s)” in their title (rather than specific Asian ethnic group names) this does not necessarily mean that all Asian ethnic groups recognize a common identity. Scholars and activists often refer to a bias in favor of East Asian ethnic groups (i.e., Japanese, Korean, and Chinese Americans) in resources, recognition, and influence within the Asian American scholarly and political community. The ethnic breakdown of APA papers reflects that tendency; the East Asian ethnic groups were the focus of APA papers at least three times; papers specifically dealing with Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Native Hawaiians were presented only once. What is most striking is that we have not yet seen a paper on Filipino Americans and South Asians. Although Filipinos and South Asians are the second and third largest ethnic groups in the U.S. populations in the 2000 Census—1.9 million and 1.7 million, respectively (U.S. Census 2002)—their political activities have not received the scholarly attention that they deserve. This lack of research may reflect their ambiguous and often marginalized positions within the umbrella Asian American group. Yet Filipinos and South Asians are making significant electoral and other political progress at the local and state levels (Nakanishi and Lai 2003), if not on the national arena; this is one of the areas in which future APA political research needs to address.

Expanding the Study of Overlooked Groups

Institutional change probably helps to explain the post-1998 increase in APA papers at the APSA Annual Meeting that we saw in Table 2.¹²

In the latter half of the 1990s, the APSA Organized Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (REP) began to grow and offer substantially more opportunities for papers on APAs. Asian American politics specialists served as co-chairs of the REP program for the 1998 and 1999 conferences. The former saw the first panel that was entirely devoted to APA politics, while the latter helped bring together scholars who then formed the Asian Pacific American Caucus (APAC), an APSA Related Group. Since then, APAC has sponsored panels on APA politics, often working closely with the REP section. Further fueling the growth in APA studies was a new generation of scholars interested in Asian American politics, and a desire to combat the on-going backlash against Asian Americans in the wake of media reports on illegal campaign contributions from Asian donors to the 1996 Clinton-Gore reelection campaign.

In contrast, we have not discovered a clear upward trend in the number of APA articles published in the 20 journals we searched.¹³

Although there were some one-time increases in the number of articles on APAs (or articles on race, for that matter) when a symposium or guest-edited issue was published, articles on APAs and other articles on race are not evenly distributed across journals and years. Rather, as seen above, articles are concentrated in particular journals. The same tendency pointed out more than a decade ago by Ávalos (1991) on race, gender, and ethnicity articles, and by Kelly and Fisher (1993, 548) on articles on women, still continues today.

The continuing paucity of articles is probably in part due to factors which change slowly. The interests of faculty help shape the research interests of grad students and the choice of dissertations. Also important is the existence—or lack thereof—of data sets that junior faculty can use in their quest for publications and tenure. Survey data on Asian Americans is relatively scarce, although the situation is improving. The Pilot National Asian American Political Survey (PNAAPS), the first multilingual, multicity survey of Asian Americans, is likely to produce a surge of research the way that the Latino National Political Survey did in the past decade.¹⁴

In an encouraging sign, the APSR (which averaged just over one article on race per year in our study) recently published a qualitative and interpretative analysis of gender and race issues in Congress (Hawkesworth 2003). However, unless leading political science journals continue to give more space to studies of race and gender in politics, scholars who study these issues may find sociology and interdisciplinary journals more promising outlets for their work.