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ENVS 1001Week 5 RecitationYour Name:Your Recitation:In this recitation exercise, you’ll use data from the League of Conservation Voters onpro-environmental voting in the US House and Senate. Each row combines the fraction of votesdeemed “pro-environmental” (pro_env_vote_share) together with the share of votes that wentto the relevant democratic candidate (election_dem_vote_share). The data were compiled bySung Eun Kim and Johannes Urpelainen for their paper: The Polarization of AmericanEnvironmental 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 hasvote-level information for over 300,000 votes).Download the polarization_data.xlsx file on Canvas, then complete the following questions, andupload 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 theHouse of Representatives are together and all rows for the Senate are together. How manyrecords do you have from each chamber?House- 181Senate- 1312. For each chamber separately, make a scatterplot with election_dem_vote_share on thex-axis and pro_env_vote_share on the y axis. Give each plot a sensible title, and change thetitles on both the x-axis and y-axis to be informative. Include a screenshot of both of yourplots below.3. Visually inspecting the plots you provided in #2, does it look like there is a jump in thepro-environmental vote share at the 50% point on the x-axis? Answer separately for theHouse 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 at50%.4. Formalize the observations you made in part 3 by doing calculations. To help with yourefforts, 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_sharebetween 40 and 50.House-0.24310102Senate- 0.22771122b. pro-environmental vote shares all observations with election_dem_vote_sharebetween 50 and 60.House- 0.68554425Senate- 0.762366c. The difference between your answers for a and b (specifically, b-a). This is oneapproximation of the jump in pro-environmental voting when the electiondemocratic vote share crosses the 50% mark.House0.44244323Senate0.478525385. Based on your answers to 4-5, is there support for the Median Voter Theorem discussed atthe start of recitation (the Median Voter Theorem suggests that politicians will take centristpositions to attract support from largest number of voters). Or are elected officials cateringto someone other than the median voter?Based on my answers there is support for the Median Voyer Theoem. The datashows a jump in pronvironmental voting with election democratic vote shares overthe 50% mark.6. The authors of the study above go on to claim the patterns you’ve observe reflect politicianscatering to political elites rather than the general public, and they provide additionalevidence to that effect. What evidence would you need to see to convince you of theirclaim?I would need to see the data describing the percent of political elites that arepro-environmental voting, including the general public.Grading Rubric: 8 points total1 point each for complete, correct answers to #1, #21 point for complete answer to #33 points for #4: 1 point for complete, correct answer to each part.1 point each for complete, coherent answers to


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CU-Boulder ENVS 1000 - Week 5 Recitation

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