Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

If You Can't Join 'Em, Don't : Untangling Attitudes On Social, Economic And Foreign Issues By Graphing Them, David Claborn, Lindsey Tobias

Faculty Scholarship – Political Science

“Are you politically left or right?” Students of politics cringe at how reductionist a simple political spectrum is. This is why early on in politics classes students learn how to expand the one dimension to two. Attitudes on social and economic regulation can show students the inconsistencies of Republicans and Democrats, and introduce Libertarians and Communitarians as consistent counterparts. What comes about when we add a foreign affairs axis to the social and economic regulation axes? This project adds that foreign affairs axis to our conventional 2-D graph, thus making a 3-D cube of political attitudes. We then find that …