What is the relationship between political party affiliation and wanting to raise taxes on the rich?

In order to answer this question I will be using a data set that comes from a poll done by Public Policy Polling which examines this question. Participants were asked what their political affiliation was (Democrat, Republican or Independent/Unaffiliated) and whether taxes should be raised on the rich or the poor.

This data set contains two columns, “Party” which has responses for political affiliation and “Taxes” which has responses for who to raise taxes on. These are the two variables that will be used to see if there is a relationship between party affiliation and wanting to raise taxes on the rich.

library(tidyverse)
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library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)

Taxpoll <- read.csv("US Poll on raising taxes.csv")

In this section I will check the number of observations, structure, NA’s and summary statistics of the data set. I also want to see how many respondents fall into each political party category to see if there is one that is favored over another. I will then make bar graphs showing the number of respondents who want to raise taxes on the rich and the number who want to raise taxes on the poor and count them by party.

str(Taxpoll)
## 'data.frame':    691 obs. of  2 variables:
##  $ party: chr  "Democrat" "Democrat" "Democrat" "Democrat" ...
##  $ taxes: chr  "Raise taxes on the rich" "Raise taxes on the rich" "Raise taxes on the rich" "Raise taxes on the rich" ...
summary(Taxpoll)
##     party              taxes          
##  Length:691         Length:691        
##  Class :character   Class :character  
##  Mode  :character   Mode  :character
colSums(is.na(Taxpoll)) #Dataset has no NA's or missing values.
## party taxes 
##     0     0
count(Taxpoll) #Dataset has 691 observations.
##     n
## 1 691
table(Taxpoll)
##                taxes
## party           Not sure Raise taxes on the poor Raise taxes on the rich
##   Democrat            14                      11                     251
##   Indep / Other       72                      20                      88
##   Republican         101                      24                     110
Taxpoll |>
  filter(party == "Democrat") |>
  count()
##     n
## 1 276
Taxpoll |>
  filter(party == "Republican") |>
  count()
##     n
## 1 235
Taxpoll |>
  filter(party == "Indep / Other") |>
  count()
##     n
## 1 180

Who is more likely to want to raise taxes on the rich?

Rich <- Taxpoll |>
  filter(taxes == "Raise taxes on the rich") |>
  count(party) 

Rich
##           party   n
## 1      Democrat 251
## 2 Indep / Other  88
## 3    Republican 110
barplot(Rich$n, names.arg = Rich$party, main = "Raise taxes on the rich", xlab = "Party Affiliation", col = "Dark Green")

Who is more likely to want to raise taxes on the poor?

Poor <- Taxpoll |>
  filter(taxes == "Raise taxes on the poor") |>
  count(party)

Poor
##           party  n
## 1      Democrat 11
## 2 Indep / Other 20
## 3    Republican 24
barplot(Poor$n, names.arg = Poor$party, main = "Raise taxes on the poor", xlab = "Party Affiliation", col = "Dark Red")

The data shows that people are overall more likely to want to raise taxes on the rich as opposed to the poor. However there is a big difference between the number of Democrats who want to do this and the number of Republicans or Independents. Democrats are far more likely than Republicans and Independents to want to raise taxes on the rich.

Republicans had an almost even split between those who wanted to raise taxes on the rich and those who did not know who they should raise taxes on, the same thing happened with Independents. This shows in my opinion a clear relationship between political affiliation and wanting to raise taxes on the rich, Democrats by a clear majority to want to raise taxes on the rich compared with the other two political affiliations.

Since this is the case further questions for research on this topic could include: -what income level are people talking about when they mean rich? -Why do they think raising taxes on the rich would be a good thing? -And whether there is a relationship between the respondents own socioeconomic status and their response to wanting to raise taxes on the rich.

These further questions would help give more insight into why people hold these opinions.

Data set: https://www.openintro.org/data/index.php?data=ppp_201503