This report describes the preliminary findings from the World Values Survey conducted in Vietnam in 2001 within a comparative perspective of the 2000-01 World Values Survey (WVS). The WVS is a worldwide investigation of sociocultural and political change that has carried out representative national public opinion surveys in more than 65 societies on all six inhabited continents, containing almost 80% of the world's population. For the first time, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam joined the World Values Survey network. The Institute for Human Studies in Hanoi conducted the Vietnamese survey, under the direction of Prof. Pham Minh Hac. The Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California in Irvine provided support for this study.

Protest, now ubiquitous in advanced industrialized societies, has become a useful window for examining all sorts of broader political phenomena. Using event data from newspaper reports, we trace protest by Vietnamese Americans over the past 26 years as a means to assess political incorporation. By looking at the issues, tactics, and development of protest within the Vietnamese American community, we get a sense of the development and incorporation of that community. We find that protest, particularly in the form of demonstrations, is a common form of making claims among Vietnamese-Americans, and that the issues expressed are primarily about foreign policy, directed toward the old homeland, rather than domestic political concerns. It is not clear whether mobilization on homeland issues provides a foundation for subsequent political mobilization on domestic issues, or whether it serves as a distraction from it.