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Background Research

Before conducting our study, we did a quick Google search to turn up relevant information about GPA and political affiliation. We used the search terms “relationship between GPA and political affiliation,” “relationship between GPA and political party,” “correlation between GPA and political affiliation,” “correlation between GPA and political party,” and “study on GPA and political affiliation.” We also reattempted all the above searches using quotation marks around “political party” and “political affiliation,” but the results were equally disappointing: We failed to find any formal studies on the subject of our project.

Although it does not appear that any formal studies have been done on the subject, several informal studies have been done and it appears that other people have considered this question (or something similar to it). The first link in the Google search was a post by a member of a bodybuilding forum¹ who asked other members to post their college GPAs, majors, and political affiliations so that he could see if there was any correlation. This approach has several issues. First of all, it suffers from selection bias, since it is limited to bodybuilders. Second, many of the responses may have been sarcastic or insincere. Third, not enough responses were collected to form any sort of meaningful conclusion and the original poster never attempted any analysis anyways. However, it was interesting to see that other people were curious about the same subject of inquiry we were, albeit more focused on college than high school.

The second hit was from a statistics website, showing a student’s study² involving 153 of his fellow students. The boxplot seems to imply that the mean GPA of members of third parties and the Republican party are higher than the mean GPA of members of the Democratic party and people who do not care about political parties. Mean GPA across all the categories seem to be grouped around a 3.0 GPA. However, the significance of the difference in GPAs found by this student is questionable. Furthermore, the data seems to be skewed by the presence of some outliers (GPAs equal to or very close to 0). Like the previous website, this one is concerned with college, not high school GPAs. It is the most formal study we were able to find, but we do not believe that it provides adequate evidence of a connection between party affiliation and GPA.

Finally, a third link brought up a page from Yahoo! Answers³ that asked about research regarding political affiliation and GPA. The top response, though politically biased, brought up an interesting point: If party affiliation is correlated with income, and income is correlated with GPA, then a relationship between GPA and party affiliation could be plausible.

Intrigued, we decided to further investigate the connections between party affiliation and income, as well as income and high school GPA. As we had suspected, those with higher incomes tend to be Republicans⁴, and those with lower incomes tend to be Democrats. Furthermore, higher high school GPAs seem to be a significant predictor⁵ of higher incomes as well. Therefore, it may be reasonable to hypothesize that Republicans will have higher high school GPAs, though this is by no means certain.

One problem with this line of reasoning is that people may only become Republicans after attaining a high level of income; thus, GPA would be more likely to predict for future party affiliation than present party affiliation. This is, of course, still pure speculation. Moreover, the correlations between party affiliation, income, and high school GPA may simply not be strong enough for high school GPA to be a predictor of party affiliation, present or future.

In summary, although people have informally considered the question we are researching for our project (albeit focusing on college GPA instead of high school GPA), no formal studies have been done on the topic. The informal studies that have been done are either inconclusive or unreliable. In fact, our study may be the most advanced of its kind ever conducted.