Search

What explains the general absence of disdain against the Chinese Filipino community in the Philippines? One common answer focuses on the high rates of intermarriage—a legacy of Spanish colonialism. Yet, this explanation ignores how the Chinese were explicitly targeted—culturally during the American occupation and economically in the aftermath of independence. Moreover, it runs against theoretical expectations that when there are national security threats, there is a domestic backlash in the threatened state against the diaspora from the aggressor state. Simply put, we should observe rising discrimination against the Chinese-Filipinos given escalating maritime disputes between Manila and Beijing in the West Philippine Sea. Yet we do not. In this paper, we argue current patterns of minimal discrimination is the product of government–tempered nationalism. Despite the territorial conflicts, the Duterte administration has gone to great lengths to highlight the positive economic aspects between the two countries. To test this argument, we employ an original survey data, scrape speeches by government officials, and conduct interviews with local officials and business leaders.

When an institution is not easily accessible—for example, it is geographically far—it can be hard for institutional trust to develop. The institution is not only unavailable, but it can also be seen as inappropriate, non-affordable, unapproachable, and unacceptable. In this paper, we examine whether reducing distance to medical facilities and professionals can improve trust in the maternal healthcare system. We do so by focusing on developments in Georgia. Since 2013, the government has aggressively closed the distance to service access not by building more facilities or hiring more staff per se, but by upgrading and funding existing facilities and professionals in a national network to better coordinate service provisions at the local levels. Employing an original survey, we match GPS coordinates to measure distance and use regression analysis to demonstrate how ensuring every woman has access to maternal healthcare at the right place at the right time has improved institutional trust in the system. The implications highlight results that are generalizable beyond both the country and maternal healthcare.

The passage of (and debate over) immigration laws in Arizona highlights the increasing linguistic diversity of the US. To date, 31 states have passed an English-official bill. In this paper, we test several hypotheses concerning the adoption of such legislation across the states. Using data spanning the past three decades, we present event history models on the timing of adoption since the start of the modern movement in 1980. Like previous works, we find that the timing of adoption in states is structured by immigrant population and the initiative process. However, we find a conditional story that has been overlooked to date: the effects of immigrant threat only increase the likelihood of English-official legislation adoption when the issue of immigration is nationally salient.