About

Janelle Wong is a Professor in the Departments of American Studies and Government and Politics, and a core faculty member in the Asian American Studies Program. Her research focuses on race, ethnicity, and politics, utilizing mixed-methods approaches and specializing in multi-ethnic, multilingual surveys of Asian Americans and other groups. She has authored several books, including 'Immigrants, Evangelicals and Politics in an Era of Demographic Change' (2018) and 'Democracy’s Promise: Immigrants and American Civic Institutions' (2006), and co-authored works on Asian American political participation, notably based on the first national, multilingual, multiethnic survey of Asian Americans. Wong has been involved as a co-principal investigator on significant surveys such as the 2016 National Asian American Survey and the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-election Survey, funded by the National Science Foundation. Her advocacy work supports affirmative action and Asian American issues, and her opinion pieces have been featured in national and local media. She grew up in Yuba City, California, and earned her undergraduate degree from UCLA. Wong received her PhD from Yale University’s Department of Political Science and previously served at the University of Southern California in the Departments of Political Science and American Studies and Ethnicity.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Demography
• Economics
• Gender studies
• Criminology
• Development economics
• Demographic economics
• History
• Economic growth

Selected publications

• Introduction to the Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) Oversamples

  PS Political Science & Politics · 2025-02-25 · 3 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• 9 Sounding the Alarm and Reclaiming an Asian American Politics for Racial Equity

  New York University Press eBooks · 2025-12-11

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• An Incomplete Recognition: An Analysis of Political Science Department Statements after the Murder of George Floyd

  American Political Science Review · 2024-01-15 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  As a discipline centered on power, political science provides an important window into potential responses to episodes of heightened attention to long-standing racial violence and inequality in the United States. During the summer of 2020, political science departments, like many other entities, issued public statements in response to the brutal murder of George Floyd and the long and ongoing history of deadly violence against Black people at the hands of law enforcement. This paper examines these statements, providing a descriptive analysis of themes raised and types of commitments to action. Rhetorical responses to racism constitute important sites for understanding how discursive power is deployed. Ultimately, we observe that proposed solutions contained in statements are not commensurate with the structural understanding of racism encapsulated in statements. These statements suggest that the status quo prevails even among those who study power. We document limited commitments to addressing racism in political statements.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Affirmative action isn't hurting Asian Americans. Here's why that myth survives

  Asian Pacific American Law Journal · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action, focusing on whether Harvard’s consideration of race in admissions intentionally discriminates against Asian Americans, is expected this month. A big part of our research has been to identify anti-Asian discrimination, so we understand how charges that Asian Americans are held to a higher standard in college admissions might feel like another instance of anti-Asian bias. But we just don’t see an Asian American penalty in college admissions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Avoiding the Anti-Black Trap: Toward a Robust Interpretation of the Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans

  Polity · 2024-02-26 · 7 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Anti-Black Racism and Asian American Local Educational Activism: A Critical Race Discourse Analysis

  Educational Researcher · 2023-03-29 · 17 citations

  articleOpen access

  In this critical race discourse analysis of legal documents and correspondence, we discuss how a small number of highly organized and visible groups of Asian American parent activists oppose admissions policy reforms intended to diversify student enrollment to specialized high schools. We identify two narratives deployed by this vocal minority: anti-Asian discrimination and Asian American exceptionalism. These narratives prioritize the historical and interpersonal racialized experiences of Asian Americans over institutionalized racial inequality experienced by Black students, namely, residential housing and school segregation. By valorizing Asian American exceptionalism and meritocracy, these claims relegate racism as a historical problem, mirroring ideologies of white supremacy and anti-Blackness while reconstituting anti-racism.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Coding Scheme, other documentation for "An Incomplete Recognition: An Analysis of Political Science Department Statements after the Murder of George Floyd"

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-09-11

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Solicitation documentation Coding Scheme

  PublisherDOI

• Asian Americans and the Politics of the Twenty-First Century

  Annual Review of Political Science · 2023-04-11 · 29 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We begin our review with research related to the racial formation and racial position of Asian Americans. How we define this fast-growing group and how it is situated in the broader racial landscape are critical to understanding its politics. We then turn to research on the history of Asian American civic engagement. These two research areas provide important context for the rest of the review, which covers three additional themes: ( a) political participation; ( b) partisanship, vote choice, and issue orientations; and ( c) political representation. The last section returns to the theme of racial position, including its role in contemporary Asian American activism and its centrality to future research in the field.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Replication Data for: An Incomplete Recognition: An Analysis of Political Science Department Statements after the Murder of George Floyd

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-09-19 · 1 citations

  datasetOpen accessSenior author

  Excel sheet with coding of statements, Coding scheme and solicitation documents

  PublisherDOI

• The Role of Race in Political Attitudes Among the Religiously Unaffiliated

  Political Psychology · 2022-06-27 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  The growth of religiously unaffiliated voters has been noted for some time, but the political consequences of this trend are much less certain. Extant scholarship makes clear that in terms of vote choice, partisanship, and ideology, the group as a whole tends to diverge from those who affiliate with a religious tradition. This article examines whether the politics of the religiously unaffiliated differ across racial groups as it does among the religious. To investigate the role of race among the nonreligious, we analyze racial differences in vote choice and political attitudes among the nonreligious. Relying on the 2016 Collaborative Multiracial Post‐Election Survey, as well as other survey data, we demonstrate that there are important variations across race when it comes to the politics of the religiously unaffiliated. When it comes to vote choice, partisanship, and certain deeply racialized policy issues Whites who are religiously unaffiliated demonstrate more conservative positions. But, on other policy issues that are racialized, but less obviously so, Whites tend to be more progressive than their religiously unaffiliated non‐White counterparts. As such, we argue that one cannot understand the political impact of the growing religiously unaffiliated in the United States without attention to race.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• S. Karthick Ramakrishnan

  University of California, Riverside

  16 shared

• Taeku Lee

  Harvard University

  12 shared

• Pei‐te Lien

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  10 shared

• M. Margaret Conway

  8 shared

• Jane Junn

  8 shared

• Dara Z. Strolovitch

  Yale University

  5 shared

• Donald P. Green

  Columbia University

  5 shared

• Margaret Rosas

  Southern California University for Professional Studies

  4 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Political Science

  Yale University

• B.A.

  University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

Awards & honors

• 2016 National Asian American Survey (co-principal investigat…
• 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-election Survey (co-prin…