Dissertation (Book Project)

Politics in Translation: Immigrants’ Dual and Dynamic Political Preferences

My book project asks how people navigate political preferences between two countries. Challenging existing narratives of preference formation and immigrant incorporation, I reframe immigrants who arrive in a new country as carriers of dual and dynamic political identities, rather than political blank slates. In doing so, I recast immigrant incorporation as a process of strategic political adjustment rather than one-way assimilation. The book shows this via three pathways: (1) the varying portability of political preferences across national contexts, (2) the persistence of pre-migration political socialization after migration, and (3) the pressures that geopolitical rivalry places on immigrants’ political alignments. Together, these findings reveal political behavior as not merely a domestic phenomenon, but a transnational process shaped by comparative institutions and geopolitics.

Chapters:

• Portable Politics? A Cross-National Model of Immigrants’ Dual Preferences
• Do Political Generations Travel? Birth Cohorts and Pre-migration Socialization
• The Cost of Taking Sides? US-China Rivalry and Immigrant Political Moderation

Publications

• “Pivotal power of small states to save the international liberal economic order: the case from East Asia” (w/ Trissia Wijaya, Jessica C. Liao, and Saori Katada, 2025), The Pacific Review, 38(2), 285–316.

Working Papers

• “Marry, Work, Migrate? A Wider View of the Implications of Shifting Gender Politics” (w/ Christian Dyogi Phillips and Jeonghyun Kim)
• “Conservative or Christian? North Korean Refugees’ Political Identification in South Korea”
• “Great Power Rivalry and Political Ideology: The Geopolitical Foundations of Domestic Left-Right Cleavages”
• “Wartime ‘Comfort Women’ and the Gendered Conditions of National Acceptance”