Section 13.3 Analyzing Third-Party Voting
Finally, let’s look at a regression with vote_3 as the dependent variable:
. reg vote_3 race_2 race_3 race_4 race_5 race_6
Source | SS df MS Number of obs = 3,036
-------------+---------------------------------- F(5, 3030) = 2.23
Model | .20833556 5 .041667112 Prob > F = 0.0490
Residual | 56.6836275 3,030 .018707468 R-squared = 0.0037
-------------+---------------------------------- Adj R-squared = 0.0020
Total | 56.8919631 3,035 .018745293 Root MSE = .13678
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
vote_3 | Coef. Std. Err. t P>|t| [95% Conf. Interval]
-------------+----------------------------------------------------------------
race_2 | -.0142558 .0082213 -1.73 0.083 -.0303757 .0018642
race_3 | -.007618 .0158479 -0.48 0.631 -.0386917 .0234557
race_4 | -.020605 .0395873 -0.52 0.603 -.0982258 .0570158
race_5 | -.0120213 .009407 -1.28 0.201 -.030466 .0064234
race_6 | .0302425 .0129128 2.34 0.019 .0049238 .0555611
_cons | .020605 .0028638 7.19 0.000 .0149898 .0262202
This regression provides some insights into who supported third-party candidates in the 2012 election. First, our constant indicates that a non-Hispanic White voter has a 2% chance of voting third-party. (Non-Hispanic) Black voters are one percentage point less likely to vote third-party than White voters, although this difference is only significant at the .10 level. The only other significant slope coefficient is for race_6, where we see that people who identify as multiracial or other race are estimated to be three percentage points more likely to vote third-party than (non-Hispanic) White respondents.
