Reference no: EM132906181

Prunella Mindmunkle has compiled data on the sixteen presidential elections since 1960. (Many scholars of the American political process incorporate this timeframe for data analysis. This is because the Kennedy/Nixon presidential debates that year marked the first widespread use of television as a tool for political communication.) She looked on data on the unemployment rate that year, using this as a measure of overall economic conditions. The other variable she looked at was the percentage of overall two-party vote received by the incumbent party, as a measure of political satisfaction. She expected the correlation between these two variables to be negative - that is, the higher the unemployment rate, the lower the rate of satisfaction with the incumbent party.

Prunella computed a correlation between her two variables of -0.18.

Treat these sixteen elections as a random sample from a hypothetical population of all such elections. Perform all steps of an appropriate hypothesis test to investigate whether the economy (as measured by the unemployment rate) really is a significant influencer of voter preference.