My research argues that gender and political ideology have a relationship because of gender ideology, specifically ideas of gender roles. These findings are important because they will show why women are more likely to be moderate in their views and why men are more likely to be extreme. This is important because it can display why there is such a gender divide in politics today.
My first figure is a graph showing the change in the republican vote share over time by gender between the years 1950 and 2016. The purple line represents the proportion of males that voted republican, and the green line represents the proportion of females that voted republican.
My next figure is a density plot of the female population that identifies as either an extreme liberal, a liberal, a weak liberal, moderate, a weak conservative, a conservative, or an extreme conservative. The graph on the left shows the year 1980, and the graph on the right shows the year 2016.
My research examined the relationship between religion, church attendance, and political ideology. This research adds to our understanding about politics because, currently, it is common to believe that churchgoers are conservative (which is often true), but my research discovered that as one attends church more often, they are actually more likely to be liberal. This is important because it challenges the current belief that devout Christians HAVE to be conservative. I was motivated to ask this question because I grew up in the church, and the majority of my, white especially, friends were conservative, but I am very liberal.
My first figure is a coefficient plot showing the results of a logit regression estimating the relationship between certain groups and being conservative. This shows that the three major religious groups present in the model are each less likely to be conservative as they attend church more often. Also displayed in this regression table is the likelihood of being conservative based on education, gender, age, race, income, and year. My next figure is a graph that shows a link between attending church and civic participation. Active churchgoers (blue) were found to vote at a higher rate than those who do not attend church regularly (gray).
I ask how one’s geographical area shapes their political beliefs. If there are geographic differences in political beliefs and engagement, this supports Bishop’s argument about the effects of geographic clustering on politics. This is interesting because it causes a continuous divide within the country with what states are considered “red” versus “blue”. Shadowing Washington University’s Webster and Stanford’s Gregory Martin’s ideas of residential sorting and geographical polarization (2020), I argue that the psychology involved in homogeneous political communities is strongly correlated to the political stances that are taken. I also use data from the American National Election Studies to present analyses that support my hypothesis.
My first figure presents the results of a logit regression on the likelihood of identifying as Republican. I find that men that live in rural areas are more likely to identify as Republican.
My next figure presents the results of a linear regression on one’s level of political engagement.