Exercise 4. Attitude on Abortion and the Presidential Vote

1. Another issue that might have influenced how people voted in the 2016 presidential election is the issue of abortion. To examine whether attitudes on this issue affected voting, we can look at a table that relates attitudes toward abortion to the presidential vote. Respondents in the 2016 ANES were asked about the conditions under which abortion should be legal. We would hypothesize that being more willing to allow abortions would make one more likely to vote for Clinton. To examine that possibility, we can look at a table that relates attitude toward abortion (K01) to the presidential vote. For the reasons suggested in exercise 1, you should use the recoded version of A02 that you created for that exercise, so that you examine only the major-party vote (i.e., only the Clinton and Trump voters).

   • Create Table 4A
   • Interpreting Table 4A

2. After examining Table 4A, you should conclude that those who were more pro-abortion had a much greater propensity to vote for Clinton than those who were more anti-abortion. However, as we learned from Exercise 3, this does not necessarily mean that attitudes on this issue really had a significant effect on the vote, meaning that people truly voted on the basis of this issue. The relationship in Table 4A could be the result of the actions of an confounding variable.

3. As in Exercise 3, party identification is a possible confounding variable, which should be examined to better understand why our independent and dependent variables are related. To do so, you need to construct a three-variable table that shows the relationship between attitude toward abortion, presidential vote, and party identification. To ensure that you have a sufficient N for each column, you should recode K01 so that it has just two categories (favor and oppose) and use the recoded version of party identification that you created for exercise one (Democrats, independents, and Republicans).

   • How to create three-variable tables using SDA
   • Create Table 4B
   • Interpreting Table 4B

4. In this example, the relationship between attitude toward abortion and the presidential vote persists even after we control for party identification. This indicates that attitudes on this issue did influence how people voted. The association between the independent and dependent variables is not as strong in Table 4B as it was in Table 4A, so we would conclude that party identification did inflate the bivariate association between the two variables, but the important point is the fact that the two variables still are clearly and substantially associated even when party identification is controlled for. Among Democrats and Republicans, there is about a 10 point difference in the presidential vote between those who basically favor and those who basically oppose legalizing abortion; among independents, the difference is almost 20 points. These are meaningful differences.