Poverty and Voting in America

Review of the Literature:

For my topic of research, the dynamics of poverty and voting in America, I used a vast number of

sources in an attempt to produce the most accurate and broad discussion possible.

The sources I believe to be the most reliable were: 1) the scholarly works (Friedman; Raskin),

which were purely scientific and did not include political biases, but rather examined the facts from as

neutral a point of view as possible; 2) the government reports (DeNavas-Walt; Dept. of Commerce;

Dept. of Labor, McNeil), which also appeared to be politically neutral and created in a scientific

fashion. These two types of sources mainly provided statistics on voting and poverty numbers through

charts and graphs.

The next set of sources came from less reliable media (“Election”; Loughlin; Wetherell), but still

were purely observational and not opinionated. They came from online news sites, so they cannot be

considered as academic as the first set, but the type of articles they are leaves little for the author’s own

opinion. They also weren’t intentionally targeting a specific political party or ideology.

The following set of sources hint of bias in the way they present their information, but the

information itself seems scientific (Cervantes; Drum; Piven). These sources integrate some liberal

opinions of the information into the material; however, they give seemingly accurate facts.

“America,” James, and Wicker make up the next group of sources, which aren’t necessarily biased,

but are more opinionated than factual. Facts are provided, but the authors’ ideas play a large part in

these works. They are fairly neutral politically, however, and look at government more as a whole;

both political parties are criticize...

... middle of paper ...

...rg. 2005. Center for Community Change. 1 March 2006

.

ProjectVote.org. 2004. Project Vote. 1 March 2006 .

Raskin, Jamin B. “Race, Poverty and the ‘Wealth Primary.’” Poverty & Race. 6.2 (1997): 1-5.

Shipler, David K. The Working Poor: Invisible in America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

Sood, Suemedha. “You don’t need a home to vote.” Alternet.com. 26 August 2004. Independent Media

Institute. 1 March 2006 .

Wetherell, Derrick. “The Bush 100: Center Releases Report on Bush’s Top Appointees.”

Publicintegrity.org. 14 January 2002. The Center for Public Integrity. 12 February 2006

.

Wicker, Tom. “Delivering the Vote.” New York Times. 15 August 1971, E15 (1 page).