Asian Pacific-American Campaigns, Elections, and Elected Officials
James S. Lai a1, Wendy K. Tam Cho a2, Thomas P. Kim a3andOkiyoshi Takeda a4 a1 Santa Clara University a2 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign a3 Scripps College a4 Aoyama Gakuin University
Introduction: The Emerging Political Status of Asian-American Elected Officials
Research on Asian-American elected officials is scarce, but Asian-American officeholders are not. The National
Asian
Pacific
American
Political
Almanac (Lai and Nakanishi 2001) lists hundreds of Asian Americans who hold elected offices in national, state, and local governments, in addition to a number of appointed officials and judges. Furthermore, increasing numbers of Asian-American, political candidates run for national and state-level offices (Cho 2000a; Lien forthcoming), and there have been periodic Asian-American political movements (Wei 1993). Nevertheless, Asian-America political leadership and Asian-Americans' roles in campaigns have often been overlooked in the discussion of minority politics, in part due to the community's relatively young and largely foreign-born population (Brackman and Erie 1995).
