The Sound of Politics
An Examination of Political Orientations and Musical Preferences Among College Aged Adults
An undergraduate honors thesis conducted at the University of Central Florida.
As the primary researcher on this project, I conducted the literature review, developed the questionnaire, conducted the survey, analyzed the results, and authored the resulting paper.
The main analysis found there is a relationship between liberal voting habits and alternative music listening as well as a relationship between conservative voting habits and religious music listening.
Research Goal
Dr. Brian Whitman, of MIT, conducted an informal data analysis with his company, The Echo Nest, using data collected from several Internet radio services and found a correlation between what artists Republicans and Democrats (self-reported by listeners) listen to. An interesting conclusion from the data analysis found that on average, Democrats listened to a more diverse set of genres (Whitman, 2012). With that information, some streaming services took to advertising certain political campaigns in 2012 with targeted ads based on their predicted voting preference.
This informal study prompted me to further question this relationship and what contexts (if any) this also applied to.
The goals of this study were to examine the relationship between political preferences and music listening habits, and hypothesized that there will be a significant correlation between political orientations and involvement in music and political orientations with music genre preferences. It was additionally hypothesized that there will be a relationship between socioeconomic status and music preferences. Furthermore, it was expected that participants will report a high level of music involvement, considering how accessible music is to many students.
Experimental Design
The questionnaire was administered via an online survey using the university hosted survey system. Following IRB review and approval, the study consisted of 500 undergraduate students at the University of Central Florida. However, due to inadequate or incomplete responses, 52 participant’s results were removed.
Following the suggestion of Dixon (1980) and Kohn (1980), a self-report measure was used to assess music listening preferences and habits.
A twenty-six question political orientation questionnaire created by Kerlinger (1984) was used to determine where participants fall on the liberal-conservative scale.
Participants answered eight questions related to their age, race & ethnicity, gender, and year in college.
Social class was assessed using measures of parental education, income, and occupation as well as measures of self-identified social class identity initially developed by Rubin, 2012.
The analyses for this study included a Pearson correlation coefficient and linear regression to not only determine relationships but their relative strength.
Results
Results indicated that political orientation significantly correlated with alternative music and religious music. The analysis also indicated that there was a significant relationship between political orientation and presidential preference showing stability in political beliefs.
Descriptives:
44% of participants indicated they would vote for Bernie Sanders (n = 196)
21% of participants indicated they would vote for Donald Trump (n = 95)
19% of participants indicated they would vote for Hillary Clinton (n = 87).
Average respondent in the survey scored liberal on the Kerlinger scale (M = -8.6, SD = 14.4) and 75% of the sample was registered to vote (n = 337)
68% of participants was an MP3 player (n = 253), and 57% of participants (n = 305) use a combination of music streaming platforms (from the choices of Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, Amazon Prime Music, or Google Play Music).
Genres: Rap/hip-hop (n = 127), pop (n = 88), alternative (n = 46), rock (n = 44), and religious music (n = 37)
86% of participants indicated they enjoyed music “a lot” (n = 387) 93% of participants said they listened to music “daily” (n = 417)
Voters for Hillary Clinton correlated negatively with rock music and positively with rap/hip-hop
Voters for Donald Trump correlated positively with rock music.
Voters for Bernie Sanders correlated negatively with religious music.
Applying Findings
A specific instance of where this research is applicable is in regards to creating targeted experiences for users of popular music streaming apps (Pandora, Spotify, etc.). By having a basis for the foundations of associations created by specific genres, products can market to advertisers that they can increase revenues by providing a targeted audience who would be more receptive (i.e. a progressive candidate placing advertisements on contemporary alternative music playlists) that would be more beneficial for the advertiser, and user who may be more accepting of an advertisement promoting a service or view they already agree with.
Furthermore, these relationships between products and consumers contribute to the understanding that a better user experience can increase revenues for the business.
For example, further asking users questions regarding their choice for a streaming music platform can reflect design choices and preferences in user interfaces or algorithms that are specific to each application.
Personally, this experience was pivotal in my decision to pursue research and gave me the satisfying experience of carrying out research from the initial observation to data collection and disseminating the results.