Understanding Asian Hate in State Legislatures: An Electoral Connection

• In Event: Elections and Public Opinion in State Politics

Abstract

Recent work in digital politics has begun to explore the role of race and ethnicity in digital communications. This research, however, has not fully addressed how lawmakers interact with their Asian constituents and the broader Asian population. We take up this task by analyzing more than 3 million tweets posted by state legislators between 2020 and 2021, investigating state lawmaker messaging targeting Asian ethnic groups. This dataset encapsulates the Covid-19 pandemic which was a particularly contentious time period for Asian and Asian-subgroup populations in the US. As such we test whether the proportion of Asian populations effects politicians’ online political rhetoric. This work identifies tweets directed towards these communities, assesses their toxicity, and employs a state-of-the-art anti-Asian hate speech classifier. We find approximately 27,173 tweets that target Asian ethnic groups specifically. In an initial descriptive analysis of these targeted messages, 5,024 were classified as counter-hate speech, significantly outnumbering the 75 identified as actual hate speech. Notably, Democratic legislators consistently shared more anti-hate speech than their Republican counterparts, with substantial variation observed at the state level. For example, in California, over 50% of tweets about Asian communities by Democratic legislators were counter-hateful, and no Republican tweets in the state contained hate speech. In contrast, Arizona exhibited instances of hate speech from legislators of both parties. We also find that anti-hate speech and hate-speech is significantly associated with the proportion of Asian population at the state level. We will expand on these findings, and use a fixed effects model to understand the relationship between the proportion of Asian populations and the Asian related hate speech online at the district level. Our findings contribute to the understanding of how state lawmakers address Asian communities, in addition to shedding light on the rise in extreme speech from elected officials.

Authors

• Isaac Pollert, Penn State University

• Yuehong Cassandra Tai, Penn State University

• Nitheesha Nakka

• Lingyu Jack Fuca, The Pennsylvania State University