Political Trends: Examining the Future of Politics

Overview

We investigated which issues and criteria cause Wisconsinites to vote the way they do in elections and then broke down the data based on variables, such as gender. The survey contained questions pertaining to the person’s age, gender, party affiliation, voter motivation, preferences regarding both general and specific issues, criteria regarding the candidate as an individual, and views concerning the dominant two-party system with the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. We conducted research using older journals and recent news articles in order to select criteria for the survey to establish the foundation and the future of politics in the scope of the questions. We then went to various public places within a 100-mile radius and asked people to take our survey in an attempt to achieve a random sample with more significant data. We went to rural, suburban, and urban areas in different parts of Wisconsin. With our data, we found parts of our hypothesis to be correct, while others were incorrect. We found statistically significant differences between the subgroups that we devised after separating the data based on the variables of age, gender, and party affiliation. For example, we found that Democrats cared more about social issues than Republicans when voting by establishing a difference using significance testing. Once we determined these differences, we made educated predictions about the future of American politics based on the voting trends we observed. We were not only able to investigate the significant differences in the voting population, but we were also able to demonstrate how pointed survey questions and paper surveys can eliminate polling issues such as nonresponse bias and errors like those seen in the past election respectively.

Competition history

• ISEF 2017 Behavioral and Social Sciences · Entry BEHA034T

Resources

• ISEF abstract page ↗

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