Sam Yoon, the first Asian-American to run for Boston City Council, can tick off Asian-Americans who have ventured onto the political stage in Massachusetts on just one hand: a Newton alderman, a Lowell city councilor, a Randolph selectman, a couple of others who took a stab at office and didn't succeed.

Though Asian-American communities across the state are growing, they are not making themselves heard in the political arena. Voter registration levels among Asian-Americans lag, and relatively few Asian-Americans run for office, which further depresses political participation, Yoon and others said.

"There's a kind of chicken-vs.-egg problem," said Yoon, director of housing at the Asian Community Development Corporation, in Boston's Chinatown. "A lot of Asians don't participate in politics because they don't see themselves reflected in political or governmental institutions."

A report released this week suggests the extent of the problem. In the 11 largest Massachusetts cities and towns with sizable Asian populations, only 25.5 percent of Asian-Americans are registered to vote, compared with 62 percent of the total adult populations in those communities.

That is in part because so few Asian-Americans in those cities and towns are citizens, said Paul Watanabe, director of the Institute for Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and one of the authors of the study. Fully 71.8 of the Asian-Americans in the communities studied were born outside the United States, the highest rate of any immigrant group in the state.

"A major explanation for the lower registration rates is that a significant number of [Asian-Americans in Massachusetts] are foreign born, and thus a significant proportion have to go through the naturalization hurdle," he said.

But even among Asian-Americans who are citizens, "there remains a considerable disparity between their registration rates and those of the general population," the report read. Eligible Asian-Americans are registered to vote at a rate of 51 percent, Watanabe said, compared to 74 percent of the eligible population as a whole.

The rate of registration is not consistent among the cities and towns, however. In Lowell, which has a large and well-established Cambodian population and a popular Asian-American city councilor in Rithy Uong, better than three out of four Asian-American citizens are registered, a rate that is slightly higher than the eligible population as a whole. In Quincy, home to Chinese and Vietnamese communities, 45 percent of eligible Asian-Americans are registered to vote, compared to 76 percent of the eligible population as a whole.

Although the study did not compare Asian-Americans' participation to that of other immigrant communities, Watanabe said their voter participation runs at about the same rate as that of Latino immigrants in Massachusetts.

According to the report, Asian-Americans comprise about 10 percent of the overall population of the 11 cities and towns surveyed: Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, Lowell, Lynn, Malden, Newton, Quincy, Somerville, Waltham, and Worcester. In cities with large Asian-American populations -- Quincy, with 18.4 percent, Malden, with 18 percent -- the gap between presence and political participation is particularly wide.

"I know a number of [Asian-American] people who would like to be active and who are not eligible for citizenship," said Amy Mah Sangiolo, who has been an alderman in Newton for eight years. "It's not a matter of Asian-Americans not wanting to become citizens. Citizenship is so hard to get these days, given 9/11 and the state of our country."

One of Sangiolo's fellow aldermen has sponsored an initiative to give noncitizens the right to vote in local elections. In some other major cities, including Chicago and New York, immigrants are allowed to vote in school board contests.

"It's a great way to get people involved in politics," she said. "You don't have to be a citizen for the government to take your taxes, and our country was founded on [the principle of] no taxation without representation."

Politically active Asian-Americans say there may be more that is keeping Asian-American residents from political participation than the onerous burdens of naturalization.

"Asians don't go into politics as much as others do, maybe because politics is not embedded in their culture," said Yoon, whose parents were born in Korea.

On the West Coast, Yoon and Sangiolo said, there are larger Asian-American communities of longer standing in the United States than in the Northeast. Third and fourth generations there have embraced politics, just as, they say, future generations will eventually embrace politics in greater numbers here.

Others may feel bound by their backgrounds, Yoon said.

"A lot of Asian countries have been autocratic societies, and there could be, for the first generation of Asians, a feeling that authority is something to be feared more than respected," he said. "Asian culture is more centered around community, and the stereotype of politicians [in America] is one that is egocentric and self-promotional, and maybe that runs across the grain."

But both Yoon and Sangiolo are optimistic about the future.

"It's a matter of time for some folks like myself to jump out of that cycle, to do something for which there is no precedent or expectation from the community," Yoon said.