This comes from the file content/big_picture.Rmd.
Are your opinions and views really yours or just a result of the rise of authoritarianism? A group has no name takes on ANES (American National Election Studies) survey data from 2000 to 2020 to analyze different variables of authoritarianism over the years and its connection to political parties.
The overall goal of this project/analysis is to demonstrate whether or not there actually has been a rise in authoritarian politics in the United States, and from there if it is in one particular political party, or a certain region.
The gif below shows the change of Americans overall authoritarianism views from 2000 to 2020. Those states that often lean ‘red’ or Republican are likely to have a higher overall authoritarianism views compared to ‘blue’ or Democratic states. Through our data analysis we were able to confirm Republicans are more drawn towards authoritarian politics compared to Democrats. The grey areas just indicate where there is a lack of data to account for.
As one can see, in states that were traditionally won by Republicans (think Missouri, Kansas, or Nebraska), these states got notably more authoritarian over the years. Traditional “blue states” such as New York get notably less authoritarian over the years, indicating a divide on political views between these two partisan groups.
Interactive
Our Shiny interactive available here shows a high-level idea of state level authoritarianism based on a users inputs. The user can select their desired state, year, and isolate a given authoritarian variable. There are five authoritarian scores the user can choose from including, child authoritarianism score, women authoritarianism score, rural authoritarianism score, foreign authoritarianism score, and an overall score composed from the four. The interactive also displays how many surveys for a given users imputed year were collected. This is because some years lack a sufficient number of surveys to be concretely conclusive.
Since the scope of our project explores elections spanning from 2000 to 2020, users can select an election from 2000 on. As ANES survey questions have changed throughout the years there are some years that lack appropriate data. In such cases a message will prompt the user to input a different combination of variables.
As users explore authoritarianism on a state level with our interactive they may see a common theme of higher authoritarianism scores within the Republican party and a rise of authoritarianism throughout the years.
Video Recording
A link to our video recording, done by the lovely Jonathan Rushbrook, is in the README.md file of our Github repository.
Rest of the Site
Finally, here are important things to keep in mind for the rest of the site.
The main title of your page is informative. Each post has an author/description/informative title. All lab required posts are present. Each page (including the home page) has a nice featured image associated with it. Your about page is up to date and clean. You have removed the generic posts from the initial site template.