GVU's Seventh WWW User Survey Politics Graphs

Opinions On Government Involvement

Notes:

These questions were revised for this survey so the results are not directly comparable to the results from the sixth survey. For this question, respondents were asked to state whether they agreed with, disagreed with or weren't sure for 10 statements. Five of them dealt with personal issues and five with economic issues. Each answer was given a certain number of points. Each respondent was then given a score for personal and economic issues and plotted on the two-dimensional graph below. What is different in this survey is that half of the questions were rephrased in the opposite sense.For example, when the statement last time was "I like blue", this time it was "I don't like blue". In the last survey, agreeing with the phrase always put you toward the liberal end of the scale, while disagreement meant you were conservative. We felt that revising the questions in this way would result in a more balanced survey since now agreement sometimes puts you toward the liberal end and sometimes toward the conservative end. The sizes of the dots in the graph indicate how many respondents fell into that category.

Rather than defining these terms which label the different areas of the graph, we provide the list of questions that were asked. For questions which are italic, respondents were given 20 points for agreeing, 10 points for "maybe", and 0 points for disagreeing. For non-italic questions, they were given 20 points for disagreeing, 10 for "maybe", and 0 for agreeing. In general, higher scores mean that the person does not favor government involment in those sorts of issues (i.e. personal or economic).

Military service should be voluntary. (There should be no draft.)
Government should have some control over radio, TV, the press and/or the Internet.
Government has the right to regulate sex between consenting adults.
Laws against drugs do more harm than good.
Let peaceful people cross borders freely.
Businesses and farms should be given government subsidies when needed.
People are better off with free trade than with tariffs.
Minimum wage laws cause unemployment.
Taxes are needed to fund public services. User fees won't work.
Both government and private funding should be used for foreign aid.

The original questions are Copyright 1995-6 by Advocates for Self-Government who are otherwise unaffiliated with this survey. They have been modified and used with permission.

The largest group of web users again fell in the the Centrist category (46.11%) followed by Left-liberal (27.68%) and Libertarian (17.04%). Even though the sense of half of the questions were reversed from last time, the percentange of people in each category is not substantially different. This suggests that the phrasing of the questions is not significantly skewing the results.

Table of Data for All Categories

Opinions on Government Involvement	All
Left Liberal	3473 27.68%
Libertarian	2138 17.04%
Right Conservative	437 3.48%
Authoritarian	712 5.67%
Centrist	5786 46.11%

For more information or to submit comments:
send e-mail to www-survey@cc.gatech.ed u.
GVU's WWW Surveyin g Team
Graphics, Visualization, & Usability Cen ter
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332-0280