Influences on 21st Century Federal Elections

Expansive research exists on the topic of American citizens’ participation and behavior related to voting in federal elections. It is clear that multiple variables influence a citizen’s choice to vote and the political direction of that vote. However, there remains room for analyzing American electoral participation since politics and presidential decisions are increasingly shaping daily life activities. In this paper, I critically analyze the dependent variables of whether or not American respondents voted in the 2012 federal election, and if so how they voted for the presidential candidate. Additionally, I utilize logistic regression to examine whether there is a significant relationship between voting behavior and six independent variables that generally measure governmental confidence, personal work-related confidence and respondents’ assessment of democracy in America. The data utilized in this statistical study comes from responses on the 2014 General Social Survey. Essentially, the goal of this paper is to employ statistical tests in an effort to analyze potential relationships between previously unexamined variables to gain a clearer understanding of the factors that impact American voting behavior