Are state government policies influenced by factors that characterize each state? If so, how do these factors influence state government policies? Political scientists attempt to answer these questions by analyzing aggregate data across all 50 states using correlation and regression methods. A state government's policy can be illustrated by per capita and per capita government spending. State ideology can be a factor that can influence state government policy. Ideology can be explained as the position or attitude towards the government based on the notion of liberty versus equality by which in this case the state can be considered liberal or conservative depending on its position. Liberals tend to support more government spending on social welfare, while conservatives tend to support less spending. It can be hypothesized that a state that tends to be liberal will have higher state per capita and local welfare spending than states that tend to be less liberal. Additionally, in order to properly analyze the hypothesis, possible confounding variables must be tested to see if they affect the association between spending and the tendency of states to be liberal. In this case, the recipients of public assistance in each state constitute a possible confounding variable. The hypothesis can be defined conceptually as the level of expenditure of each state on social protection and the level of ideology, in particular the degree of liberality of the state. The operational definition of the hypothesis can be illustrated by measuring the two variables. The amount spent by each state on public welfare can be measured by assessing each state's expenditure and mathematically formulating the per capita amount...... middle of paper ...... e in others terms, the ideology of the state is the amount per capita. public expenditure per capita and local expenditure on social protection. It was hypothesized that liberal states were more likely to have higher per capita welfare spending than states that tend to be less liberal. A control variable was added to test for a possible confounding variable; in this case, the variable was the percentage of the population receiving public assistance. Research shows that there is a positive correlation between spending and the degree of liberality of each state, even with a control variable. It can be concluded that as the level of liberality of a state increases, social protection expenditure per capita also increases. Furthermore, this can be explained by the tendency of liberals to favor more spending on social protection, compared to conservatives who favor less spending on social protection..