What were the effects of conservatism and the religious right on politics and society?

The potential demise of the Religious Right’s influence comes may come from a younger

age group. As the American public becomes more and more accepting of the social issues once

considered uncivilized by the Religious Right, the GOP could be losing ground. Unless current

members of the Religious Right are able to rally enough support from millennials, all of the

support will come from older generations.

Methods and Analysis

Hypothesis

Among conservatives, younger age groups will be more liberal on social issues than older age

groups.

The following GSS2012 variables are used: “age” (independent), “polview” (used for

exclusion), “marhomo” (dependent), abany (dependent), gunlaw (dependent), divlaw

Rostad 11

(dependent), and grass (dependent). The dependent variables have been chosen because they are

five examples of social issues that have been relevant of the last 35 years.

To analyze the relationship between social conservatives and their concern of social

issues, I have conducted five cross tabulation tests. Each test will help me determine the feelings

conservatives have for social. The tests are between the independent variable “age” and a

dependent variable such as “divlaw”. The independent variable “age” has been recoded into two

groups: a younger group of conservative responders between the years of 18-49, and an older

group consisting of conservative responders of years 50 or more. The reason for using two age

groups is because when I attempted to split the age groups further, the cell sizes became too

small for meaningful analysis. However, since Falwell and his Moral Majority were around 35

years ago, maybe having the age groups set like this will work to my advantage.

All five tests are controlled by the variable of “age”. The conservative categories in the

“polview” variable have been renamed: slightly conservative is now “weak”, conservative is now

“moderate”, and extremely conservative is now “strong”. Conservatism was subcategorized to

show the differences between conservatives, some will be stronger than others. Renaming the

categories will help make reading the tables more clearly and provide a variety of responses

instead of one line of conservative data.

Rostad 12

Same-Sex Marriage

Chi-Square: 29.819 (Younger) 34.095 (Older) = 53.592 (Total)

Asymp. Sig.: .000 (Younger) .000 (Older)

Cramer’s V: .275 (Younger) .285 (Older) = .256 (Total)

Approx. Sig: .000 (Younger) .000 (Older)

Rostad 13

The first test is with dependent variable “marhomo” (Table 1). The question is asking the

conservative respondents whether they agree or disagree with same-sex marriage. In this test

there are a total of five response the respondents could choose from: strongly agree, agree,

undecided, disagree, or strongly disagree. The test results show the relationship between younger

conservatives and same-sex marriage is weak due to Cramer’s V being between 0-0.29, and the

same is true for older conservatives. Both groups in the independent variable share a similar

relationship with the dependent variable when looking at Cramer’s V. In the older age group,

84% of strong conservatives said same-sex marriage ought to be illegal vs 47.1% of the younger

strong conservative age group. This shows here that regarding same-sex marriage, younger

conservatives are more liberal than the older age group, thus supporting my hypothesis.

the answer would be logic.