The growing number of newcomers from other countries threaten traditional American customs and values.The government needs to do more to make health care affordable and accessible.Business corporations make too much profit.Poor people have become too dependent on government assistance programs.Government regulation of business usually does more harm than good.Labor unions are necessary to protect the working person.The government should help more needy people even if it means going deeper in debt.There needs to be stricter laws and regulations to protect the environment.The economic scale questions collectively carry about twice as much weight in the overall scale as the social scale questions, consistent with previous findings about the strength of the relationship between party affiliation and economic and social values. If the ideological direction of your social and economic scores are different, your overall score will reflect this (e.g., if you have more liberal social views and more conservative economic views, or vice-versa, your overall score may place you closer to the mid-point of the scale.). This same technique is applied for the overall, economic, and social scales. This compression makes it easier to see the differences between groups in the graphs.
Because the theoretical range of the scale is much wider than the actual distribution of most of the public, the tails of the scale (scores beyond the value of the mean score of the “most ideological” group identified in the survey, at both ends of the scale) are compressed using a logarithmic function. To determine where you fit on the Political Party scale, your responses to the 12 political values questions are scored and weighted in the same way as the survey data. Each scale is centered on the score of the average registered voter, which is the mean score for all voters. To determine the placement of individual groups along the scale, the mean of the scores for all members of each group was calculated. The scale is a weighted sum of answers to each question, with individual questions weighted by the strength of their correlation with party identification among voters in the spring 2012 political values survey. The Political Party scale was determined by selecting a set of questions from the Pew Research Center’s 2012 American political values survey representing a range of political values that are each consistently associated with party identification.