Steiner 1

Zion Steiner

Merrill

POLS 1100

2/27/2017

Project One

Overview

Politics is a naturally occurring brand of conflict, present in every institution

comprised of imperfect individuals. Upbringing, experience, education, culture, etc. all influence

opinion, and thus values. Political debate incorporates the clash of these unique and opposing

values, giving it a way to work itself out. In our political philosophy, we attempt to participate in

this debate fairly and peacefully. This idea is what makes our way of government (constitutional

democracy) popular.

Politics in America is dominated by two parties: the Democrats and the Republicans.

Citizens commonly align themselves with the party that shares their values when participating in

voting and other political socialization. Those in the Democratic party tend to hold liberal social

values and advocate for economic equality, while Republicans are more likely to be socially

conservative and enjoy more economic freedom. Note that these are extremely simplified

descriptions of the two and that in reality they are much more complex.

Analyzing how personal traits and statistics relate to political views is an interesting

study. A goal for this type of study may be to better predict the voting behavior of certain

demographics. This study intends to learn whether or not household income is a good indicator

of political values. Before any data is analyzed, a hypothesis can be developed based on the

following chain of logic.

 Last Name 2

The Republican party is known for their interest in less government interference in the

economy and promoting increased economic freedom. These factors promote the free market and

are capitalistic in nature. The unregulated status of the free market is important for business in

order to optimize competition and trade. Many business owners and employees are interested in

this idea because their livelihoods are tied to that of their business. This group of people also

tend to have higher than average incomes. So, it may be a good idea for someone with a higher

income to hold more conservative values.

Hypothesis: The higher a persons household income, the more conservative values they will

hold.

If any evidence of this positive correlation is found, it indicates that income may possibly

be used for prediction of political values among a population. Knowing which people are more

likely to identify with- and possibly even vote for- certain parties can be beneficial for predicting

the outcomes of future elections.

It is also important to mention that while a positive correlation between income and

conservative values may exist in nationally aggregated data, this may not be the case for single

geographic areas. For instance, if data from a very Democratic county were to be taken and

tested for this correlation, there may be trouble finding any evidence to support it.

Methodology

In order to gather data to test our hypothesis, several questions were designed to

be asked as part of a survey. The survey consisted of thirteen questions, ten of which were meant

to gauge where participant values fell along a linear political spectrum. We wanted these

questions to be basic indicators of liberal or conservative values, and as such, only yes or no

answer choices were offered. Questions were chosen from issues we believed were
 Last Name 3

representative of falling on either side of this spectrum. Almost everyone has an opinion about

these topics as they are timely, and are matter of constant debate. If a survey participant were to

answer yes to a certain question, it would be marked as a point for conservative/liberal values,

depending on the question. The points for either side a subject scored would be tallied up

individually after the completion of the survey. The ten value questions and the key to their

answers are as follows:

1. Do you believe in universal healthcare? Yes= liberal No=conservative

2. What is your stance on abortion? Prochoice= liberal Prolife= conservative

3. Are you for the death penalty? Yes= conservativeNo= liberal

4. Should the government prioritize environmental regulation? Yes= liberal No=

conservative

5. Should the national minimum wage be raised? Yes= liberal No= conservative

6. Do you think cuts in public spending are necessary to reduce the national debt?
Yes= conservative No= liberal

7. Do you think NAFTA has been beneficial for the US?

8. Should there be more restrictions on the current process of purchasing a firearm?

Yes= liberal No= conservative

9. Should it be illegal to burn the American flag? Yes= conservative No= liberal

10. Should the nation accept more refugees? Yes= liberal No= conservative

Although a matter of current debate, question 7 was scrapped as answers are not always

indicative of the nature of their values. Democrats and Republicans may both agree or

disagree with NAFTA for a variety of reasons. This leaves the survey with nine points

divided between what we deemed to be conservative or liberal values.

 Last Name 4

Eight income brackets for net annual household income were included in the survey as well.

The brackets are as follows:

$0-$20,000
$20,001-$40,000
$40,001-$60,000
$80,001-$100,000
$100,000-$150,000
$150,000-$200,000
$200,000+

These incomes were bracketed with the thought it would make it easier to handle the data

after collection. If each survey participant were given the chance to enter their own income, it

would severely increase the difficulty of sorting.

The twelfth question was How many people are in your household? (People that share

household income). This question was also scrapped. Its initial purpose was find out how many

people survived on the stated household income. A household of ten sharing an annual household

income of $150,000 is stretched much more thin than a family of four with the same income. It

was decided that this question did not match our purposes and would only serve to complicate

things.

We were also interested in seeing how often (if at all) the survey participants selected

values conflicting with their answer in question 13, which asked subjects whether they

considered themselves conservative or liberal. This was not directly related to our hypothesis, but

was an interesting question that was easily incorporated into our existing survey nonetheless.

The survey was given through Google Forms to two main groups of people. The first

group consisted of people our team saw in real-life. This included classmates, teachers, and

family members. All of these people live in the Salt Lake Valley. The second group was a
 Last Name 5

/r/SampleSize, a sub-community within the website Reddit.com. The potential problems with

how the survey was administered will be outlined in the final section.

Results

Ninety-one surveys were collected in total from the two groups defined in the methods

section. The responses of each group are mixed together in the data, so there is no hope in

finding patterns specific to a single group. When collecting statistical data, it is necessary to take

random samples from the population to minimize the risk of bias. The population in mind when

designing the survey was all American adults, but we cannot extrapolate our findings to that

population because we did not conduct proper sampling. Instead, we can only make inferences

regarding a mixture of two groups, which is not at all helpful in itself because we dont know

which responses came from which group.

Figure 1 Survey Income Distribution

Several graphs and methods of analysis were used in an attempt to understand the

data we collected. Figure 1 shows the income distribution from the ninety-one survey

respondents. The sections of the pie graph are fairly similar in size, with three exceptions.

The largest section on the graph are those who claimed to make between $100,000 and
 Last Name 6

$150,000. The two smallest sections are those claiming to make $40,000-$60,000 and

$150,000-$200,000. Knowing how many people claim what income was important for

creating the graph below.

Figure 2 Conservative Point Proportion vs Income

Each person had a score out of nine for how many questions they answered

conservatively. The total conservative score for the respondents in each income bracket were

totaled. Next, they were divided by 9*(respondents in each bracket). The result is a proportion of

conservative points out of total points. For instance, the $0-$20,000 bracket had a proportion of

0.27. This means that this group had 27 conservative values per 100 value questions asked.

If there was a positive correlation between income and conservative point proportion it

would be evidence for our hypothesis. This doesnt appear to be the case with this graph. There

are noticeable increases in proportion for the $40,000-$60,000 and $200,000+ income brackets,

but it isnt apparent if they are significant or not.

To detect if the results we collected were significant in any way, a chi-square

independence test was conducted. This test was performed to find evidence that income and

conservative points were associated. Without going into further detail on how the test was done,

it did not provide evidence for any sort of income-point correlation. The tests p-value was
 Last Name 7

0.0138, which means that if income and conservative points are independent of one another,

there is a probability of 0.0138 that the data would take a form as or more extreme than it did. At

=0.05, this probability is not low enough to be considered significant.

From Figure 2 and the chi-square test, income does not seem to be related to more

conservative values.

Conclusion

There were a multitude of issues with this project. For one, our methods of data

collection were terrible. Reddit has a notoriously liberal user-base which likely clashed with

subjects from the more traditionally conservative Salt Lake county. I say traditionally because

since 2004 the county has alternated between voting for Republican and Democratic presidential

candidates. Any signs of positive correlation between income and conservative values may be

too small to notice because of the overwhelming number of liberal responses from Reddit.

Another fundamental problem was the nature of how we asked the value questions in the

survey. These issues are almost never yes or no questions, but we forced the participants into

treating them as such for the sake of simplicity. Many of the people surveyed in person displayed

their dismay at the yes or no questions and wanted more options to choose from, as they didnt

believe that the yes or no system gave them a chance to give their proper views. This was the

same for question 13 as many people do not identify as either conservative or liberal.

A third issue was the question matter. The reasoning behind the projects hypothesis was

explained by linking high income with conservative economic values. However, we asked many

social questions as well. The wording in the hypothesis does not mention exclusively economic

conservative values either. So, if someone with conservative economic values and liberal social
 Last Name 8

values were to take this survey, it would appear to us that they are economically and socially

liberal, which may not be the case at all.

We also did not specify what we meant by saying more conservative values in our

hypothesis. Does more in this situation mean a greater number of, or more extreme? For

clarification, more in this case means a greater number of.

All of these factors contributed to a low quality of data that made it impossible to draw

any substantial conclusions. We initially made our survey much more complicated than it needed

to be by adding a point system. Even if the point system was a good idea for what we were

doing, we didnt think of how we would organize the resulting data. I analyzed the data in the

best ways I could think of, but they still failed to yield any findings.

Similar studies to this have been conducted on a national scale. The Atlantic concluded

that during the 2012 presidential election that the majority of those who earn over $75,000 per

year voted for Republican candidate Mitt Romney. Data collected by NPR suggests that although

40% of high income earners affiliate themselves with the Republican party, that number may be

shrinking as Independent/other affiliates rises.

Overall, we did not find any evidence to suggest that income is positively correlated with

conservative values. If we are still assuming that the study population is all U.S. adults, we may

have actually found evidence against it. Using an extremely biased group in our survey probably

hurt any substance our data would have had otherwise.