Book Projects

Boundaries of Obligation

This book shows how ordinary Americans imagine their communities and the extent to which their communities' boundaries determine who they believe should benefit from the government's resources via redistributive policies. By contributing extensive empirical analyses to a largely theoretical discussion, it highlights the subjective nature of communities while confronting the elusive task of pinning down "pictures in people's heads." A deeper understanding of people's definitions of their communities and how they affect feelings of duties and obligations provides a new lens through which to look at diverse societies and the potential for both civic solidarity and humanitarian aid. This book analyzes three different types of communities and more than eight national surveys. Wong finds that the decision to help only those within certain borders and ignore the needs of those outside rests, to a certain extent, on whether and how people translate their sense of community into obligations.

Here is an overview of my recently-published book project Boundaries of Obligation.

Here is the web appendix to the book.

Maps in Their Heads

If ``All politics is local,'' as Tip O'Neill famously stated, then understanding politics requires understanding how people and place interact. This project deepens our knowledge about how ordinary people use information about their environments to make decisions about politics in the following ways: It (1) improves the measurement of personally relevant places by creating an innovative map-drawing computer interface to a large scale survey; (2) clarifies the mechanism behind contextual effects by directly asking people to describe their environments; and (3) enhances our understanding of the causal relationship between place and attitudes by adding contextual information to a longitudinal study of political attitudes and behaviors.

For place to matter to an individual, it should to be personal. A boundary drawn by the Census or a state political party may contain meaningful places for some people, but it is not designed with any given individual in mind. Relationships between the characteristics of such geographies and individual attitudes and behaviors may be hard to interpret because of the heterogeneity in the psychological relationships between people and place. This project enhances the measurement of individuals' perceptions of their local communities by allowing them to draw boundaries of these places on maps; a self-drawn map will at least show us what area is personally relevant; and an online survey of a sample chosen to maximize variation on the racial characteristics (and changes) of people's environments will ask about the personal maps as well as about places that group people by administrative fiat.

While mapping allows improves the measurement and meaningfulness of observed relationships between place and person, researchers have long faced the difficulty of disentangling the fact that people choose to live in places based on their beliefs, attitudes, and interests, as much as (or perhaps more than) places may change such aspects of people. In any given observational cross-section, it is hard to differentiate the effects of place from those of selection. This project provides a way to address this problem by adding contextual information to the Youth-Parent Socialization Panel Study. In this study, a random sample of roughly 900 members of the high school graduating class of 1965 were tracked over 33 years of their lives; in addition to information about how political attitudes and behavior have changed over time, the study contains a record of residential mobility. The project will geocode the respondents' residences reported over the 33 year period and add information about the political, economic and social characteristics of those places to the dataset. The longitudinal data on people connected to places will allow description of the selection effect in action. These data will allow analysts to disentangle the effects of moving to a new place from the effects of life-cycle (by comparing similar people of the same ages who have and who have not moved).

Published Papers

Journal Articles

Who Fights: Substitution, Commutation, and `Green Card Troops'. 2007. Du Bois Review 4: 1-22.

`Little' and `Big' Pictures in Our Heads: Race, Local Context and Innumeracy about Racial Groups in the U.S. 2007. Public Opinion Quarterly. 71: 392-412.

Racial Threat, Partisan Climate, and Direct Democracy: Contextual Effects in Three California Initiatives (with Andrea Campbell and Jack Citrin). 2006. Political Behavior 28: 129-150.

Two-Headed Coins or Kandinskys: White Racial Identification (with Grace E. Cho). 2005. Political Psychology. 26: 699-720.

"Multiculturalism in American Public Opinion" (with Jack Citrin, David Sears, and Christopher Muste). 2001. British Journal of Political Science 31: 247-275.

"Public Opinion Toward Immigration Reform" (with Jack Citrin, Donald P. Green, and Christopher Muste). 1997. The Journal of Politics 59: 858-881.

Book Chapters

Who Belongs? Assimilation, Integration and Multiculturalism in the United States. Forthcoming. In Gary Freeman, John Higley, James Jupp, eds. Nations of Immigrants, 2nd edition. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.

Jus Meritum: Citizenship for Service (with Grace Cho). 2006. In Taeku Lee, Karthick Ramakrishnan, and Ricardo Ramirez, eds. Transforming Politics, Transforming America: The Political and Civic Incorporation of Immigrants in the United States. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

The Meaning of American National Identity (with Jack Citrin and Brian Duff). 2001. In Richard D. Ashmore and Lee Jussim, eds. Social Identity, Intergroup Conflict, and Conflict Reduction. New York: Oxford University Press.

NES Reports

"Group Closeness" 1997 NES Pilot Study

Monographs

Ethnic Context, Race Relations, and California Politics (with Bruce Cain and Jack Citrin). 2000. San Francisco, CA: Public Policy Institute of California.

Current Projects and Working Papers

(all titles are preliminary. comments are welcome. please do not cite without permission of author.)

Racial Context

Racial Context is Factual, but is Racial Threat Partisan? (with David Hendry.) Paper presented at the 2009 APSA meeting.

Whose Side Are You On? Environmental Determinants of Inter-Group Conflict. (with Vincent Hutchings, James Jackson, Ronald Brown, and Katherine Drake). Paper presented at the 2007 MPSA meeting.

Objective vs. Subjective Context: Questions about the Mechanism Linking Racial Context to Political Attitudes. 2005.

Overlapping Communities: The Political Effects of Racial Context and Identity for Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians (with Katherine W. Drake). Paper presented at 2005 MPSA meeting.

Testing the Assumptions of Power Threat Theory (with Jake Bowers and Katherine W. Drake). Paper presented at the 2005 MPSA meeting.

Multiracial Identities in Multiracial Contexts: The Conditional Political Effects of Race, Identity, and Environment (with Katherine W. Drake). Examination of the effects of racial identity and context on voting for Proposition 209 by whites, blacks, Asians, and Latinos.

Questions of Citizenship

`You've Flown the Flag. Now What?': Patriotism, Civic Duty, and Perceptions of National Identity. (with Vincent Hutchings, James Jackson, Ronald Brown, and Katherine Drake). 2007.

Transnationalism and Immigrant Civic Engagement in London, Madrid, and Berlin. (with Laura Potter). Paper presented at the 2007 MPSA meeting.

Research project on Muslim immigrants in Europe (with Ken Kollman, Mark Tessler, and James Jackson).

Other Projects

National Politics Study (with James Jackson, Ronald Brown, and Vincent Hutchings). Funded by NSF and Carnegie.