• Project Title: Party and Policy of the Modern Voter

  • BASIS Advisor: Dr. Brown

  • Onsite Mentor: Drake Hougo

We are entering a new era of politics, shaped by fake news, cyberattacks, and scandal. Traditionally, party affiliation and political ideology have been very closely correlated. However, as our political landscape changes, party affiliation and political ideology have seemed to diverge further and further, as noted by the results of the 2018 midterms. In order to investigate this phenomenon, I will be collecting data on political behavior, as well as running a voting simulation. I will gather data on the participants’ political behavior by evaluating their levels of civic engagement and giving them an ideology test. In my voting simulation, I will select real races that happened in the California midterms, and I will create issue platforms for the candidates based off what voters deemed most important to them in the 2018 elections. These candidates will be anonymized. In certain races, I will be switching the party affiliations of the candidates, meaning that if a candidate is actually republican, I will change their party affiliation to democrat. I would be able to determine if participants’ party affiliation and political ideology differed if they voted for candidates whose “actual” party affiliation differed from the political ideology the participants’ indicated in the first phase of my methodology. I will be limiting my sample size to Californians.