(Right click on “View image” to see the whole thing.)
Among whites, vouchers appear to be more popular with the upper middle class and rich (with predictable religious variation: the strongest support is among Catholics, then born-again Protestants, then others).
Among blacks and hispanics, though, vouchers are more popular among the poor.
We’ll have to check this on some other data.
Some details:
We estimated this using the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey (sample size 50,000) using multilevel regression and poststratifying on the voter population from 2008. These are income categories from 2008 as well.
The survey question was: Federal government should give school vouchers give tax credits or vouchers to help parents send their children to private schools – should the federal government do this or not?
So if I understand these maps, aside from the odd support by minority groups in CA and NY the bulk of the support for vouchers comes from people who want the government to pitch in for their kids to go to religious schools.
It also doesn't look like there's overall support for vouchers – most of the maps seem to be either mostly opposed or at best 50/50.
Was the actual survey question really a run-on sentence?
Can you recheck the wording on that survey question? It doesn't seem parseable as a real sentence the way you've written it. Perhaps some cut and paste problems?
I think that this data might be too old to be useful for this issue.
There was been TREMENDOUS expansion of charter schools in this decade. mean, ENORMOUS.
This has changed the educational landscape, giving those who want an alternative to traditional public schools highly visible alternative to private schools — and therefore quite possibly a significant reduction in the demand for publicly funded scholarships for private schools.
So, even if your methodology is good, and the data was accurate, I think that useful lessons would be awfully hard to mine from it.
I had to read the caption to understand the color coding. To me, the purple looks more like the red than does the pink.
yes, colorbrewer would help
Boy is that color coding aweful!
Interesting data; seems the more a group feels at a distance from the commonwealth the greater their enthusiasm for a scheme that enables them to opt further out. Plus a modicum of in group opinion norms. That california hispanic one is striking.
I think I would try to avoid the white, because it looks like "white" should represent a number between light pink and light blue. Maybe crosshatch the states where group percentages were low?