About me...
My name is Chinbo (pronounced Chin-bo). It means "true treasure" and "progressive" in Korean. I earned my PhD at the University of Michigan. My research in American politics addresses political behavior, public opinion, and political incorporation with an emphasis on race, ethnicity, and immigration. I use survey and experimental methods in my research. I received my B.A. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2018-2019, I was a Pre-Doctoral Fellow for Excellence through Diversity at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2019-2020, I will be a Center for the Study of Democratic Politics Post-Doctoral Fellow at Princeton University.
My dissertation is a study of the effectiveness of pan-ethnic (e.g., Asian American; Latino/Hispanic) and national origin (e.g., Chinese American; Mexican American) identity appeals on voter turnout, candidate evaluation, and civic participation among Latinos and Asian Americans. I explore when and to what extent pan-ethnic identity appeals (e.g., Latino/Hispanic, Asian American) mobilize Latinos and Asian Americans for politics when a significant proportion of them prefer their national origin identities (e.g., Chinese American; Mexican American). In response to this phenomenon, I build a theoretical argument that connects these varying identity appeals to key markers of the immigrant socialization, including: nativity status, length of residence in the U.S., immigrant generational status, English proficiency, and experiences with discrimination. By leveraging a series of randomized survey experiments, I find mirroring and differential factors across Latinos and Asian Americans that speak to the unique paths to politicization of the two groups.
My dissertation committee is made up of Ted Brader (co-chair); Vincent Hutchings (co-chair); Matt Barreto (UCLA); Jane Junn (USC); Silvia Pedraza (Michigan – Sociology).
In other on-going work, I am invested in intra- and inter-group political behavior. To highlight a few, I have investigated the tenuous partisan attachments in the Asian American community. Specifically, my collaborator and I find evidence for the abandonment of the Republican partisanship among Vietnamese Americans in Orange County, California. In my other collaborative work, my co-authors and examine the racial disparities in mobilization by formal institutions like political parties and argue that contacts by community-based organizations might have important participatory outcomes for non-white voters. Using the 2008 Collaborative Multi-racial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) we find that while contact by political party or campaign has an overall positive effect on political participation for all voters, contact by community group is substantively more important for Latino and Asian American voter mobilization.
You can download a pdf version of my C.V. here
I can teach on American politics; political behavior; public opinion; politics of race, ethnicity, and immigration; identity politics; and research design.