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Home and Away: Explaining the Paradoxical Political Attitudes of Indian Americans - Political Behavior
Do individuals hold fixed political attitudes that persist across different contexts, or do their views shift depending on their group’s relative status within each setting? We argue that political preferences are shaped in part by whether one’s group is positioned as a majority or a minority in a given context. Groups that consistently occupy minority positions tend to hold stable, liberal attitudes driven by support for minority rights. In contrast, groups that are majorities in one context but minorities in another are more likely to adopt context-specific views, endorsing liberal positions where they are disadvantaged and more conservative stances where they are dominant. We test this argument using an original, nationally representative survey of Indian Americans, a diaspora population for whom both U.S. and Indian politics are politically salient. We delineate two main findings. First, Indian Americans concurrently support more liberal policies when thinking about the United States and more conservative policies when considering the Indian context. Second, these differences are largely driven by religion: while Muslim Indian Americans – minorities in both contexts – maintain consistently liberal attitudes, Hindu Indian Americans express liberal views in the United States but more conservative stances in India, where Hindu majoritarianism has become entrenched. These findings have important implications for understanding political behavior in the United States, as well as the role of group status and perceptions of majoritarianism in shaping attitudes.
