How Xenophobia Shapes Political Party Support: Evidence from COVID-19 in Canada

Racialized or ethnically marginalized groups typically have strong loyalties to particular political parties, but can these group loyalties be undermined? In this paper, I investigate whether racist but group-specific political discourse can alter these loyalties by activating a sense of linked fate among those who share a panethnic identity (e.g., as Asian). Using Canadian Election Study data in a quasi-experimental research design, I explore the impact of the highly visible, anti-Asian racism during the COVID-19 pandemic and whether this led to changes in political party support among different Asian ethnic groups, relative to the control, in Canada. I find that Conservative Party support declined more steeply for Chinese respondents than for any other Asian communities after the pandemic, despite Chinese being most likely to vote Conservative pre-pandemic. Therefore, I argue that periods of widespread discrimination can lead people to reject parties that are exclusionary against their group. However, despite their shared vulnerability to discrimination, this rejection of the Conservative party did not occur among all those who are racialized within Asian panethnic identity. Hence, racially hostile but group-specific language can potentially undermine a sense of linked fate and collective political action as a result.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12552-025-09480-y.