Introduction: The Emerging Political Status of Asian-American Elected Officials

Research on Asian-American elected officials is scarce, but Asian-American officeholders are not. The National Asian Pacific American Political Almanac (Lai and Nakanishi 2001) lists hundreds of Asian Americans who hold elected offices in national, state, and local governments, in addition to a number of appointed officials and judges. Furthermore, increasing numbers of Asian-American, political candidates run for national and state-level offices (Cho 2000a; Lien forthcoming), and there have been periodic Asian-American political movements (Wei 1993). Nevertheless, Asian-America political leadership and Asian-Americans' roles in campaigns have often been overlooked in the discussion of minority politics, in part due to the community's relatively young and largely foreign-born population (Brackman and Erie 1995).