I assume you know what an asterisk is. It’s the little star on the keyboard that has multiple functions. Its biggest function is to reference a footnote or annotation that is omitted or not included from the original text.
It has been noted as of lately that certain ethnic minorities are considered to be “the asterisk.” Asian American, Pacific Islander, Native American, and Spanish American are labeled as an asterisk. The “Asterisk” is basically ethnic minorities who don’t have significant enough percentage in the U.S. to be named on surveys, polls and questionnaires so there is a little asterisk at the bottom of the page coining them all together in the same group.
I start with this because the research I plan to tell you about, involves a community labeled as an “Asterisk.” Pacific Islanders have a small percentage of population in the United States, but it does not mean their demographics don’t matter. In this study, we look at Pacific Islanders and assess the influence of religious rhetoric used by politicians on their perceived favorability towards them. This research is significant to existing literature because first, there are not enough studies done on ethnicities labeled as the asterisk and second, there is hardly any existing literature on Pacific Islanders and politics. Generally, you try to choose a topic to research that hasn’t been researched a lot, but there usually is always existing literature on parts of your study. In this case, it really is true, there is not any existing literature on what we are trying to find. While working through our literature review, we had to figure out what was important to add just because there is so little on Pacific Islanders. We were able to look at other studies done about the effect of religious rhetoric used in politics in other ethnicities. This helps show the effect that religious rhetoric has on other ethnicities and that it would be significant to research it on Pacific Islanders.
The other important aspect of this study that we included in our literature review is religion and religious rhetoric. Religion is one of the most influential forces in our world’s history and its impact is undeniable. Religion can be a big influencer in all aspects of life, including politics. We felt this was an important variable because religion is especially influential amongst Pacific Islanders. They are heavily influenced by religion because of the origins of religion in the Pacific. Many islands in the pacific are dominantly religious. From our research of different religions within the South Pacific, we hypothesized that using religion in speeches could be statistically significant in relation of their favorability and support of those politicians who used it.
For this study, we used a survey and administered it through various social media outlets. We were able to receive a good sample size and got enough responses to analyze what we needed to. We asked questions regarding their specific ethnicity, their religion and religiosity and then their political preferences and parties. For the experimental part of the survey, we presented them with 2 different quotes. Before the quote was presented, we had a description that included one of our control groups. We had four groups: Religious and Republican, Non-religious and Republican, Religious and Democrat and Non-religious and Democrat.
Our independent variable was whether the quote was religious or not and what party it was and then the dependent variable was the response to the quotes. Based on review and research of existing literature we had three different hypotheses. The first was that Pacific Islanders would trend Republican. This was mostly because Polynesians were more likely to identify with Christian religions and those religions tend to identify as republicans. Our second hypothesis was that the response amongst pacific islanders would generally trend more favorable to the politician if the quote had religious rhetoric. Finally, to go along with the second hypothesis, we hypothesized that the positive response to religious rhetoric would be amplified if the politician was republican.
We were able to find support for our first hypothesis. 80% of respondents who were “Very religious” considered themselves to be Strong republican. The Moderate Republican respondents were at 89.5% for the “Very Religious” category. These results were what we were expecting. The more religious they were the more they trended to the end of the spectrum towards Republican.
We haven’t been able to look at analysis regarding the different blocks from our control groups that the respondents saw because of technical difficulties, but we have collected a lot of data from the different variables that were in the survey. Ultimately, we concluded that religion is a very important part of Pacific Islanders lives and those who were more religious trended more Republican.
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