Since the founding of the United States of America as a republic in 1776, the country has constantly taken steps to further civil liberties, and exemplify not only a military and political hegemon, but also a moral one. From abolishing slavery to eradicating the Jim Crow laws to the Civil rights Movement, the country has lived up to its Constitution and founding values such liberty and the pursuit of happiness. However, movements such as Black Lives Matter demonstrate how the Black population are still oppressed, namely because of their race, many argue.
Theodore J. Davis Jr. of the Department of Political Science and International Relations from the University of Delaware wished to seek an answer for whether the political opinions …show more content…
Additionally, due to huge loss of cases from including certain variables, I have had to make the difficult decision of excluding many variables and only include spending on crime, spending on race, death penalty for murder, gun permit laws, allowing racists, communists, homosexuals, militarists, and/or atheists to speak. The only independent variable is race, which has been recoded (White=1, Black=0) to exclude other races and just concentrate on Blacks and Whites. I have recoded them as scrime, srace, dpenalty, glaw, freeracist, freecom, freehomo, freemil, and freeath respectively. All of these dependent variables have been recoded to reflect conservative to liberal opinions, whereas 1.0 is the most liberal answer and 0.0 is the most conservative. Table 1. shows the variables as they were presented by the General Social Survey (GSS) and Table 2. demonstrates the recoding methods. There were a total of 787 respondents included in this study, 582 of whom were white and 146 of whom …show more content…
While some variables were not available through 2014, others had very few cases and therefore had to be dropped. Arguably, the assumingly most essential variables such as spending on welfare, the most telling variable since 1970s, as indicated in Davis’ study, had to be excluded from the study. Another limitation is lack of controlling for income. As Davis mentions, the Blacks who have achieved more economic and social success are more likely to mirror the values of the dominant racial