Peer-Reviewed Papers
Chen, Chuang. "How Immigrants and Racial Segregation Affect Immigration Attitudes and Voting for Trump." Political Behavior (Accepted).
​
Chavarría-Mora, Elías, Chuang Chen, Valentina González-Rostani and Scott Morgenstern. 2024. “How Germane Are Moral and Economic Policies to Ideology? Evidence From Latin American Legislators.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 00(0): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12476.​
Conference Presentations
APSA 2024; MPSA 2023, 2024; the 26th Annual Latin American Social and Public Policy Conference (2024); SEMINARIO PELA-USAL 2023; 1st Beijing Foreign Studies University & Sichuan University American Studies Graduate Forum 2018.
Dissertation Project: Populism With(out) Immigrants
My dissertation analyzes the relationship between immigration and populism in the U.S., Latin America, and Western Europe.
(Please do not cite or circulate)
Chapter 1:
Do immigrant presence and racial segregation affect different individuals' attitudes toward immigration? There is a controversy in previous literature about whether more immigrants lead to more or less anti-immigration attitudes. I argue that the disagreement is because they ignore the degree to which the immigrants (and other minorities) are segregated. In the U.S. context, I hypothesize that for conservatives, higher immigrant/racial segregation is related to more pro-immigration attitudes because a lack of intergroup communication functions as a "shield" against more salient group membership and substantial prejudice against the outgroups. With data covering five presidential elections in 2008-2024 from the U.S. Census, American Community Survey, and Cooperative Election Study, I use Bayesian multilevel linear regressions with immigration attitudes as DV. Most results support the hypothesis. This paper contributes to immigration politics by comparing the different effects of immigrant presence and racial segregation interacting with ideology and providing a modified version of the threat theory in explaining the divergent effects of racial segregation on liberals' and conservatives' immigration attitudes.
Chapter 2:
The second chapter focuses on the populist right surge in Chile where immigration is a new issue. I propose a theory of "immigrationalized" partisanship and hypothesize that (1) higher immigrant presence is related to a higher (lower) probability of leftist (rightist) voters identifying with a political party and that (2) higher immigrant presence is related to a lower probability of apartisans (partisans) voters voting for the left (populist right). With data from the 2017 Chile Census, temporary residence applications from Servicio Nacional de Migraciones, and the Chilean Longitudinal Social Survey (2022), I first run logistic regressions on party identification and then multinomial logistic regressions on voting choices. Most results support my hypotheses. This study contributes to the study on immigration politics by providing evidence about how immigrant presence affects voters' movement into and out of partisanship and how this relationship affects their voting decisions in Chile.
Chapter 3:
The third chapter shifts attention to Western Europe and focuses on France (in process). I hypothesize that it is how voters perceive the level of immigrant presence rather than the presence in reality that affects the decision of voting for National Rally, the populist-right party.
Methodologies:
My dissertation adopts various advanced statistical methods. After matching fine-grained census data at the county level (or even lower) with individual-level surveys, I use Bayesian multilevel linear regressions and binomial/multinomial logistic regressions to analyze the data, combined with techniques of geospatial analysis. The local demographic data provides information about immigrants that has been overwhelmingly ignored by previous scholars (such as segregation), and the rigorous methods help isolate effects of strong confounders. I also use Python to scrape electoral results of France and Chile online for macro-level analysis.