A popular saying in American politics is, "Politics stops at the water's
edge," which means that there's no place for partisanship in foreign
policy. The sidebar on page 678 asks whether this is indeed true for
public opinion. Does party preference matter concerning people's attitudes
on America's role in the world? You can check this out using the VOTERS
dataset on the 1996 presidential election. Go to Houghton Mifflin's
CROSSTABS online page
to run the program. (Ask your instructor for the appropriate Username
and Password to enter.)
Our dataset contains voters' responses to three questions in 1996 that
dealt with foreign policy. Look under the "Views on Clinton" menu for
respondents' approval or disapproval of his handling of foreign affairs.
Under the "Views on Spending" menu, look for spending for defense and
spending for foreign aid.
In this analysis, you will be trying to explain opinions on
foreign policy (your dependent variables) by party identification (your
independent variable or "cause").
The convention for constructing analytical tables in social research
is to place dependent variables along the rows of a table, independent
variables along the columns, and then compute percentages according
to the column totals so that the total percentages in each column sum
to 100%.
According to this convention, you should place the opinions
on foreign policy in the rows of your crosstab table, and party identification
in the columns, and choose "% by Cols" in the "Display" menu.