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.
My Posts
How I Made the Issue Platforms
Apr 29, 2019
Overall issues Trump Immigration Healthcare Environment Taxes Brett Kavanaugh Wild Card https://www.washingtonpost.com/election-results/california/?noredirect=on district 10 district 25 district 39 district 45 district 48 district 49 prev R, now dem, but unmarked as key district 21 district 50 (not a flip, but key) conservative districts district 1 district 4 district 8 district 22 district 23 district 42 […]
Fully rewritten final paper
Apr 29, 2019
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SJ013MM8aiIYkusduQxDNhD4aPqRhwE-oAeZMkKgc4I/edit?usp=sharing
Methodology Pt. 3 (Voting Simulation)
Apr 22, 2019
After the ideology test, I ran a voting simulation. In order to do this, first I would select a real race that happened in the California midterms, indicate their party affiliation, and then I would create an issue platform for the two candidates. I chose to run real races as opposed to cherry-picking candidates and […]
Methodology Pt 2. (second and third section of ideology test)
Apr 15, 2019
The second section of my ideology test was aimed at gauging the levels of civic engagement of each participant. According to the Pew Research center, higher political engagement is correlated with higher political partisanship, which makes this a relevant factor to evaluate in my research. Because of this, I hypothesized that civic engagement is the […]
Methodology Pt. 1 (Brief intro and section 1 of ideology test)
Apr 08, 2019
Participants’ first took an ideology test which I designed. I chose to design my own ideology test because there is currently no agreed upon ideology test in academia that is considered generalizable. Furthermore, the ideology tests I found were far too broad for my purposes, so it was more efficient to create an ideology test […]
Revised Lit Review/Research Question
Apr 01, 2019
The 2018 midterm elections have been viewed both in America and the international community as a referendum on Donald Trump’s presidency (Remnick et al, BBC). This is evident in a number of factors. The most important factor is the voter turnout, which was at a record-setting 50.3%, compared to 36.7% in the 2014 midterms (United […]
Slides
Mar 25, 2019
http://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FNRZ7wjDTVuQuHkazyPKj76djDvrvPxrVkSoDQiaX20/edit?usp=sharing
Background Research
Mar 18, 2019
In a study conducted by Yale University on the impact of political parties on individuals, it was found that “group influence can bias responses to persuasion” (Cohen). Cohen states that, as a result, individuals have very strong, emotional connections to political parties. In his own research, Cohen tested the favorability of welfare bills sponsored by […]
Introduction
Mar 14, 2019
The 2018 midterm elections has been viewed both in America and the international community as a referendum on Donald Trump’s presidency (Remnick et al, BBC). This is evident in a number of factors. The most important factor is the voter turn-out, which was at a record-setting 50.3%, compared to 36.7% in the 2014 midterms (United […]