In 2016, Asian Americans represented the fastest growing racial minority group in the United States largely due to the flow of new immigration. As a result, Asian Americans are poised to be the next major bloc of new voters in the electorate. Yet, as a largely new immigrant group, institutional barriers—in particular, naturalization and registration—are important factors which need to be more thoroughly taken into account when explaining Asian American participation patterns. In this article, we show how scholars can adopt a different strategy of analysis that recognizes both institutional barriers to political participation through immigrant status and variation across national origin group. We argue that structural impediments to participation and national origin differences have not been fully accounted for in previous explanations of Asian American political participation. Our analysis shows that when Asian Americans are disaggregated by incorporation status (being registered to vote, eligible but not registered to vote, or noncitizen), we gain new insights about the factors that predict political participation. The findings from an analysis of 2016 election data feature the unique behaviors of Filipinos, Asian Indians, and the Vietnamese and highlight that second-generation Asian Americans are not necessarily more participatory than their immigrant counterparts.

Family and medical leave policy in the United States is often noted for its lack of wage compensation, but is also distinctive in its gender neutrality and its broad coverage of several types of leave (combining pregnancy leave with medical, parental, and caregiving leave). This article argues that the distinctive design of leave policy in the United States is explained by its origins in contestation over the civil rights policy regime that emerged in the 1960s. In the early 1970s, women's movement advocates creatively and strategically formulated demands for maternity leave provision that fit an interpretation of this new policy regime's antidiscrimination logic. Because of this decision to advance an antidiscrimination claim, advocates became committed to pursuing a leave guarantee on gender-neutral grounds, which in turn enabled the broad-coverage leave design. This case study suggests that scholars of social policy and American political development should pay greater attention to the impact of civil rights on social policy. This article also contributes to the study of policy development by providing an example of how political actors cross boundaries between policy domains during the policy making process and by presenting a reconceptualization of “policy regimes.”

In this article, we investigate why millions of northern white men volunteered to fight in the Civil War. Prior studies have found that Republican partisanship played a significant role in boosting Union enlistment but do not test the competing hypothesis that views about slavery and race motivated them instead. Such views were highly salient among party elites before and during the war, which was sparked by a presidential election between parties divided over the expansion of Black enslavement. However, among the white mass public, we argue that partisanship rather than race-related attitudes explains patterns of war mobilization. Linking Union war participation records with election returns, we show that county-level war participation is better explained by Republican partisanship rather than views about the status of Black Americans (as measured by support for equal suffrage referenda and the Free Soil party). Analyzing a sample of partisan newspaper issues, we further show that Republican elites de-emphasized slavery as they sought to mobilize mass war participation while antiwar Democrats emphasized antiabolition and white supremacy, suggesting each party’s elites saw antislavery messaging as ineffective or even detrimental in mobilizing mass enlistment. This analysis offers additional evidence on the power of partisanship in producing mass violence and sheds more light on political behavior during a critical period in the history of U.S. racial politics.

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