ENVS 1001 Week 5 Recitation Your Name Your Recitation In this recitation exercise you ll use data from the League of Conservation Voters on pro environmental voting in the US House and Senate Each row combines the fraction of votes deemed pro environmental pro env vote share together with the share of votes that went to the relevant democratic candidate election dem vote share The data were compiled by Sung Eun Kim and Johannes Urpelainen for their paper The Polarization of American Environmental Policy A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Senate and House Votes 1971 2013 We ve summarized the data so you can use Excel to analyze it the full dataset has vote level information for over 300 000 votes Download the polarization data xlsx file on Canvas then complete the following questions and upload your resulting file You may work together but you must turn in your own answers 1 Use the sort tool in Excel to sort the data by the chamber column so that all rows for the House of Representatives are together and all rows for the Senate are together How many records do you have from each chamber House 181 Senate 131 2 For each chamber separately make a scatterplot with election dem vote share on the x axis and pro env vote share on the y axis Give each plot a sensible title and change the titles on both the x axis and y axis to be informative Include a screenshot of both of your plots below 3 Visually inspecting the plots you provided in 2 does it look like there is a jump in the pro environmental vote share at the 50 point on the x axis Answer separately for the House and Senate House Yes there is definitely a jump at around the 50 mark Senate Yes but it is not nearly as strong as a jump but there still seems to be a jump at 50 4 Formalize the observations you made in part 3 by doing calculations To help with your efforts sort your data by the chamber with a secondary sort onelection dem vote share Now separately for each chamber use Excel to calculate three quantities for each chamber you should report two numbers for each part a pro environmental vote shares for all observations with election dem vote share between 40 and 50 House 0 24310102 Senate 0 22771122 between 50 and 60 House 0 68554425 Senate 0 762366 House 0 44244323 Senate 0 47852538 b pro environmental vote shares all observations with election dem vote share c The difference between your answers for a and b specifically b a This is one approximation of the jump in pro environmental voting when the election democratic vote share crosses the 50 mark 5 Based on your answers to 4 5 is there support for the Median Voter Theorem discussed at the start of recitation the Median Voter Theorem suggests that politicians will take centrist positions to attract support from largest number of voters Or are elected officials catering to someone other than the median voter Based on my answers there is support for the Median Voyer Theoem The data shows a jump in pronvironmental voting with election democratic vote shares over the 50 mark 6 The authors of the study above go on to claim the patterns you ve observe reflect politicians catering to political elites rather than the general public and they provide additional evidence to that effect What evidence would you need to see to convince you of their claim I would need to see the data describing the percent of political elites that are pro environmental voting including the general public Grading Rubric 8 points total 1 point each for complete correct answers to 1 2 1 point for complete answer to 3 3 points for 4 1 point for complete correct answer to each part 1 point each for complete coherent answers to 5 6