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Reviews
| The Racial Logic of Politics: Asian Americans and Party Competition. By Thomas P. Kim. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007. viii + 194 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $69.50 (cloth); $22.95 (paper).
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Thomas Kim draws on the pioneering work of Paul Frymer on party politics to explore how racism is entrenched in America's party system. He draws on multiple approaches to demonstrate that the political logic of two-party competition actually works against Asian American political interests. He seeks to translate "how cultural constructions of race are mediated through different institutional settings" (p. 127). |
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This book begins by exploring how the two-party system operates in the United States and its stable institutional features. Kim then positions Asian Americans in relationship to this two-party framework to argue that party leaders who seek to establish majority party power must incorporate existing racialized images of Asian Americans into their political strategic thinking. This has produced negative effects for Asian American political empowerment at the national level. Party elites understand that Asians and Asian Americans in the United States can be positioned outside the ideological boundaries of American consensus around liberal values. |
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While political parties are in theory anxious to capture new voters by drawing them into their fold, Professor Kim details how both parties, while welcoming their financial resources, have not welcomed Asian Americans fully into their coalitions. Political party elites are rational actors and evaluate the costs and benefits of inclusion. Asian Americans as distinctive ethnic groups and as a panethnic racialized group have historically been viewed as perpetual foreigners with greater allegiance to Asian homelands than to the United States. He examines the implications of this argument by conducting a careful analysis of the two dominant political parties following the campaign finance controversy after the 1996 presidential election to demonstrate how the logic of two-party competition led both parties to exclude Asian Americans from their party coalitions. Rather than inclusion, they used racialized discourse to place publicly Asian Americans outside the American ideological mainstream and away from their respective parties. |
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Kim next explores the decennial national census and issues such as redress and reparations for Japanese Americans to argue that, rather than focus on influencing party elites as a traditional interest group, Asian Americans should seek influence through the pursuit of congressional representation. The work of Congress is organized around institutional rules that generate counter-majoritarian opportunities which allow a solitary member of Congress to achieve significant political goals. Asian American members of Congress, although few in number, have been strategically positioned to make important improvements, such as how the census race question has been asked, that brought enhanced policy benefits to the community. Key legislative leaders, such as Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and the late Congressman Bob Matsui of California, were pivotal inside players who were able to shepherd important legislation through the maze of federal government institutions. |
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Professor Kim concludes by analyzing the political silence of Asian Americans during the campaign finance controversy. He argues that Asian American community leadership had spent years funding mostly powerful non-Asian politicians rather than trying to build strong community-based mass mobilizing efforts. This has hampered the long-term prospects of Asian American political power by diverting funding and limiting the election of a diverse set of Asian American political actors who could provide an alternative to the dominant Asian American elites. The Racial Logic of Politics: Asian Americans and Party Competition is a well-written, highly entertaining analysis of how the cultural construction of race mediates the political fortunes of Asian Americans.
Kim Geron
California State University, East Bay
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