Week 9 - Second Stages

Hi everyone!

This week, my priority continues to be wrapping up my work with civics education requirements and on-campus polling. Results and progress on this front will come next week two, as I wrap up with analysis that keeps high-schoolers and non-voting methods of participation in mind.

Civics Education

To study civics education, I chose to see if there was a correlation between states’ requirements and their average voter turnout over the timeframe of 2014 to 2024. To do this, I first compiled the data from a study by Craiutu and Ngalande titled “State Civics Requirements In 2024.” This article detailed the states that participated in each combination of civics course and test (ex. no course and no test, no course and test not required to pass, etc.)

Then, I found the average voter turnout for each state and created a heatmap showing, as a scale which combinations corresponded to the least and highest voter turnout.

On-Campus Polling

The states selected for this study appeared neither in SDVR or AVR lists, to remove possibility of impact from these legislations. As manually entering the data proved to be the only option, I began for the first three states on the list. Using the College Scorecard dataset, which contains comprehensive details on each college in the U.S., I clustered similar colleges by factors like tuition, acceptance rate, and type (private, for-profit, non-profit, etc.).

From these clusters, I paired the most similar colleges within the state, where one college was a treatment university found in the list offering on-campus polling sites, and the other is a control. Finally, I affirmed each college’s validity to belong within their own clusters by calculating their silhouette score (colorcoded indicating green as very reliable, yellow as fairly reliable, and red is unreliable).

For the next week, I’ll be tackling the second step to this analysis: comparing the number of registered voters in each college in the pair. To do this, I’ll be accessing the college’s NSLVE reports. While some are easily found online, and colleges who participate are found on a website called All In Challenge, that website often allows colleges to hide their reports from public view. So, for those that I cannot find online, I’ll be reaching out to All In representatives for the reports, as suggested on the website.