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.
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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.
