Introduction
For this project, I want to focus on something I have background knowledge of so I have a general idea of what to look for once I start analyzing and visualizing the data. I majored in Politics in undergrad so I know how political trends work, as well as how many people my own age think (I’m 24). My research question is: Does an individuals age and/or education have an impact on individuals political views. In order to conduct my analysis I used the ‘poliscidata’ package in base R and filtered it down to 3 specific variables: ‘educ’ (education level), ‘age.f’ (age), and ‘polviews’ (political views).
General social consensus (or at least, the accepted line of thought regarding this) is that the older you are, the more conservative your political views are. Obviously, this is not always the case as there are plenty of young conservatives and older liberals. So I wanted to see what the data has to say myself. With all of this in mind, my hypothesis is as follows: education level will have a wide range in all categories (elementary education all the way up to graduate education), but I think there will be a higher concentration of those with the highest levels of education on the more extreme ends of the political spectrum.
In addition to ‘poliscidata’, I also consulted Pew Research Center and The Journal of Politics to verify and/or contradict my hypothesis and findings.
Before I present all of my data, I want to put forth a brief summary, just to show the general facts and figures of the survey participants.
educ age.f polviews
12th grade:540 30 : 47 Moderate :713
4 years :307 32 : 47 Conserv :292
2 years :261 55 : 47 SlghtCons:268
1 yr coll :163 42 : 43 Liberal :244
11th grade:101 49 : 43 SlghtLib :208
(Other) :600 (Other):1742 (Other) :149
NA's : 2 NA's : 5 NA's :100 Presentation of Data
ggplot(gss_refined2) + geom_jitter(aes(x=polviews, y=age.f,color=educ),size=1.5)+geom_hline(yintercept=45,lineType="solid",color="red") +labs(x="Political Views",y="Respondent Age",color="Highest Year of School") + facet_grid()
The above visualization shows, in dot plot form, the respondents who identify as each of the 8 ‘polviews’ categories. In order to make my research a bit less broad, I have decided to focus on Millenials (ages 26-45) and Gen Z (ages 18-26 in this case) - hence the horizontal red line at 45 on the y-axis. Coincidentally most of the responses are below that line, but I just didn’t want to make Boomer politics into a major point of my project. I’ll mention it while analyzing my data in comparison with outside resources, but I’m not going to go in-depth with it.
Looking at the graph, it’s clear that the majority of respondents in both age groups identify as ‘Moderate’. Upon further inspection, the most prevalent colors (representing education level) are those between 11th grade and 2 years of college. And contrary to my hypothesis - “education level will have a wide range in all categories (elementary education all the way up to graduate education), but I think there will be a higher concentration of those with the highest levels of education on the more extreme ends of the political spectrum” - a higher number of highly educated individuals (6-8 years post-high school) is concentrated on moreso on the liberal side of the spectrum rather than both. That is not to say, though, that there aren’t highly educated people on the conservative side. But by appearance alone it looks as though the right side of the graph is made up of a large number of individuals who have =<6 years of education post-high school.
The least populated categories are ‘ExtrmLib’ (Extreme Liberal), ‘ExtrmCons’ (Extreme Conservative), and ‘N/A’ (people who didn’t identify as any of the included categories).
While the above graph is more than adequate in helping me with this project, I’m going to include one more. This one is more precise as it’s actually filtered by age (18-45).
gss_refined.age <-gss_refined2%>%
filter(age.f==c(18:45))
ggplot(gss_refined.age)+geom_jitter(aes(x=educ,y=polviews,color=age.f))+labs(x="Highest Year of School",y="Political Views",color="Age")
The dot plot and the summary beneath it both show, specifically, the stats related to individuals ages 18-45. The majority of respondents under 25 are pretty concentrated around ‘Moderate’, leaning slightly toward ‘SlghtCons’. There are 6 respondents who are 42, and 3 each for ages 33, 31, 30, 25, and 24 respectively. However, I’m not sure why there are so few points here when the vast majority of respondents are in the age group I specified.
Analysis and Conclusion
Before I compare my data/results to those of Pew Research Center, I’m going to briefly summarize my findings.
|1. The majority of people between 18 and 45 years of age identify as 'Moderate' politically.
|2. Most individuals within that age group have had =<6 years of post-high school education and they are present in the following categories outside of 'Moderate': 'SlghtLib', 'Liberal', 'SlghtCons', and 'Conserv'.
|3. The least populated category, 'ExtrmCons', is largely made up of people who have at least a 12th grade education. According to Pew Research Center in 2014, about 29% of individuals aged 18-29 and about 32% of those aged 30-40 align themselves with various forms of political conservatism. To contrast, 45% of young people surveyed (18-29y/o) and 42% of people between the ages of 30 and 49 identify with the political ‘left’. (Desilver,2014). This report is relatively outdated,however, given that it’s from before the 2016 election. In July 2021, Pew Research Center conducted a political typology survey which had 10,221 participants. The focus of this survey was if people believe that the United States is superior to all other countries, the United States is one of the greatest countries, or that other countries are superior to the US. In this report, 42% of people ages 18-29 stated they felt that other countries were better than the US,48% believe the US is one of the greatest countries, and only 10% believed that the US is superior to all other countries. According to Pew Research Center, “55% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents under age 30 say there are other countries better than the US, as do 38% of those 30 to 49” (Hartig, 2021). Furthermore, in a November 2021 survey with 11,692 participants, the Research Center’s findings only supported the aforementioned report. The demographic of ‘left-leaning’ individuals in this survey were as follows:
| 6 in 10 are women
| 55% are ages 50 and older
| 27% of those are 65 and older
| 45% are 50 and under
Additionally, the specs for the November 2021 survey are as follows:
| Total unweighted sample size: 10,221
| ‘Faith & Flag’ Conservatives: 1,325
| Committed Conservatives: 865
| Populist Right: 1,108
| Ambivalent Right and ‘Stressed Sideliners’: 2,351
| Outsider Left: 837
| Democratic Mainstays and ‘Establishment’ Liberals: 3,034
| Progressive Left: 701
Compared to the data I presented, I would say the data from Pew Research Center is almost in agreement with mine. My data presents a clear majority for ‘Moderate’ political views, while the November 2021 report shows otherwise - however, if certain ambiguous categories were combined to make a pseudo-moderate category, this would change. If ‘Ambivalent Right’, ‘Stressed Sideliners’and ’Outsider Left’ were combined into one ‘Moderate’ category, there would be a significant portion of respondents in this category but not enough to match the majority in the first graph I presented (a moderate category would include at most 3,200 individuals out of 10,221).
Bibliography
Desilver, Drew. ’The Politics of American Generations: How Age Affects Attitudes and Voting Behavior.” 9 July 2014. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/09/the-politics-of-american-generations-how-age-affects-attitudes-and-voting-behavior/
Hartig, Hailey. ‘Younger Americans still more likely than Older Adults to Say there are other Countries Better than the U.S.’ 16 December 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/12/16/younger-americans-still-more-likely-than-older-adults-to-say-there-are-other-countries-better-than-the-u-s/
Pew Research Center. ‘Appendix A: Survey Methodology: The American Trends Panel Survey Methodology.’ Part of ‘Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology.’ 9 November 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/political-typology-appendix-a/
‘poliscidata’ package base R
