Are state government policies influenced by factors that characterize each state? If so, how do these factors influence state government policies? Political scientists try to answer these questions by analyzing aggregate data across the 50 states using correlation and regression methods. A state government policy can be illustrated by state and local per capita spending on public welfare. One factor that can influence state government policy may be the ideology of the state. Ideology can be explained as the position or attitude towards the government based on the notion of freedom versus equality whereby, in this case, the state can be considered liberal or conservative based on one's position. Liberals tend to support more government spending on public welfare compared to conservatives who tend to support less spending. It can be hypothesized that a state with a generally liberal tendency will have a higher per capita state and local expenditure on public welfare than states with a less liberal tendency. Furthermore, in an attempt to adequately analyze the hypothesis, it is necessary to test for any confounding variables to see if it affects the association between spending and the tendency of states to be liberal. In this case, government aid recipients in each state are the possible confounding variable. The hypothesis can be conceptually defined as each state's level of spending on public welfare and the level of ideology, specifically the level of how liberal the state is. The operational definition of the hypothesis can be illustrated by measuring both variables. How much each state spends on public welfare can be measured by evaluating each state's expenditures and mathematically formulating the per capita... middle of the paper... and in other words the state ideology is the per capita state and local spending for public welfare. It was hypothesized that liberal states were more likely to have higher per capita spending on public welfare 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 aid. Research shows that there is a positive correlation between spending and the degree of generosity of each state even with a control variable. It can be concluded that as the degree of liberality of a State increases, per capita spending on public welfare also increases. Furthermore, this can be explained by the tendency of liberals to favor more public welfare spending compared to conservatives who favor less public welfare spending..