Project Title: Finding the Correlational Coefficient Between Support for Political Violence and Disbelief in the Electoral Process
BASIS Advisor: Mr. Hirsch
This project will look for the correlation in support for political violence and disbelief in elections in Columbia and Georgetown students. Students are the subjects because they are the future. These are going to be future voters and leaders and political activists so by looking at them now will provide a rough estimate of what later general population studies will see can be determined. By using two schools, one in Washington D.C. and one in New York City the effects on witnessing political violence, the Capital Riot, on the student’s opinions can also be determined. When it comes to both support for political violence and belief in voter fraud, most of the current academic research is rooted in partisanship.
My Posts
Week 11: The Presentation
Hi everyone. In my initial AP presentation I had 15 minutes to convey the whole idea of what I was researching. This week, I am going to be talking a little about my design choices and why I chose to emphasize certain ideas. The most important and drastic difference between my paper and presentation was […]
Week 10: Future Research
Hi everyone. This is last conclusion I reached in my research. Over the next few weeks I will instead talk about the presentation I did as well as reflect on this project as a whole. That being said all of that can begin by looking at what’s next. By doing the same experiment after a […]
Week 9: Limitations
No study is perfect. Some of the unique design choices may have benefitted my study in some ways but harmed it in others. The winner effect playing such a large role in the results may be a downside. The 2020 election may have made conservatives more accepting towards violence and liberals less accepting. In the […]
Week 8: Implications
The numbers and correlation I found shows a lot about the political future of this country. The results of this study don’t bode well for a future free of political violence, though better than the initial hypothesis. The positives shown by the results were that there was a lack of correlation for liberals in all […]
Week 7: My Results
I got more data back than I expected from a more diverse group than I expected. In total, 87 data points were gathered, from a good mix of demographics. There were 49 NYU students and 38 Georgetown students from a mix of political parties, including 11 third party voters and 22 independents. In addition, a […]
Week 6: Methodology
I am using a survey to answer my research question. The two relevant strengths of an online questionnaire to gather data are large distribution and honesty. Honesty in particular is a benefit for me as people often want to give a socially acceptable answer, which would massively skew my data. By providing them anonymity through […]
Week 5: Increasing Support for Political Violence
This week I will be talking about political violence. As partisanship increases, so does support for political violence. Partisanship and issue alignment, which in the US is almost perfectly aligned, were correlated with political hostility. This is backed up by research that found that stronger partisan identities drive stronger intentions to engage in political violence, […]
Week 4: A Declining Faith in Elections
Conspiracy theories are becoming ever more prominent in American politics. A study that appeared in Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind poll, a think tank member of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) Transparency Initiative, found that a majority of voters believed in at least one election conspiracy, often including one side or the other […]
AP Research Week 3: Partisanship
America is becoming more partisan than ever. According to the American National Election Studies (ANES), an academically-run government funded national surveys of voters in the United States, conducted before and after every presidential election, the amount of people who strongly identify as partisan is higher than ever before. Even those who claim independence from partisan […]
AP Research Week 2: The Gap in the Research
Last week I spoke about why I generally chose this area, but I really narrowed it down by looking at what gaps were left by other researchers. This study fills these gaps in three ways. First, pre-existing research fails to link political violence and faith in elections. Sometimes political violence will be linked to partisanship […]
AP Research Week 1: The Capitol Riot
Hi, it’s me again. My whole project started after the 2021 Capitol Riot, where it was made clear how people’s lack of faith in the democratic institution could lead them to extreme measures. The correlation between this violence and a lack of faith in our election is shown by its motto, “stop the steal.” In […]
AP Research Week 0: Introduction
Hi everyone. I’m Hudson, an AP Research student studying the relationship between how college students feel about elections and how that correlates to how supportive they are of political violence. I am specifically looking at NYU and Georgetown University. This is the area I chose to research because I love politics and the way it […]