Class Year

2025

Document Type

Student Research Paper

Date of Creation

Fall 2022

Department 1

Political Science

Abstract

This paper looked into the relationship between political trust, demographics (race and gender), and presidential election votes for 2012 and 2016. The purpose of this research was to see the baseline feelings of political trust in different demographics, as well as how those feelings of political trust changed depending on if they voted for in the winning candidate in the presidential election. Preliminary research has already been conducted on both of these topics; however, in this paper I sought to examine if an individual's race or gender affected the extent of a person's loss or gain in political trust when voting for the winning candidate in a presidential election. Using the NES dataset, political trust by gender, race, and 2012 and 2016 presidential votes were compiled. Then model estimations were put together using control variables for common confounding variable, such as age, religious attendance, and education. Overall, the findings showed a strong correlation between race and political trust. However, the paper failed to reject the null hypothesis in regards to whether or not race and gender affect the amount of political trust lost or gained when voting for the winning candidate in a presidential election. Meaning that race and gender have no statistically significant effect on political trust when voting for the winning candidate in a presidential election. This may have been due, in part, because of the small number of presidential election years used and more research should be conducted into this research topic.

Comments

Written for POL 215: Methods of Political Science.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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