This article argues that some leaders within the US antiabortion movement are pursuing a frame extension in order to attract new adherents to their cause. While the dominant rhetoric of the movement today focuses on the fetus and the immorality of abortion, pro-woman rhetoric has reemerged that leverages both the language of women's rights as well as science in order to propose that abortion is bad for women. The frame extension is evident outside even the social movement organizations, and if the pro-woman rhetoric resonates with traditional opponents of the antiabortion movement, it could allow the movement to construct a majority for further restrictions on abortion access and rights.
As female candidates may face greater challenges in establishing their “qualifications” for office, coverage of their personal traits may be pernicious, because it tends to de-emphasize substantive qualifications. This study focuses on relative amounts of trait and issue coverage of contests with and without women candidates. We find that races with female candidates yield more coverage of traits than male versus male contests and races with female candidates are less likely to generate issue coverage than trait coverage. Candidate gender and office interact; female gubernatorial candidates are most likely to garner trait coverage and least likely to engender issue coverage.
Divided government scholarship focuses either on evaluating divided government's correlation to legislative gridlock or on its tendency toward interparty squabbling. I argue that one overlooked aspect of divided government is its impact on intraparty dynamics: Divided government offers the controlling congressional party incentives to raise controversial issues to damage the coherence of the president's party. Revealing the tensions within the president's party serves to embarrass the president, increase the electoral chances of the majority party in Congress, and ultimately shift public policy. This phenomenon can be understood through Riker's theory of heresthetic. The contemporary debates between President Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress over abortion and gay rights provide ample evidence that this theory of divided government is compelling and warrants further consideration.The divided government literature has focused primarily on two hypotheses: that divided government changes the productivity of government and that it creates increased hostility between the parties. 1 Mayhew's work (1991), which compares the quantity of legislation produced during times of unified versus divided party control, is the cornerstone of the first approach. Although Mayhew found little basis for concern about divided party governance, other scholars, advocating alterations to Mayhew's methods, have at times come to contradictory conclusions (Kelley 1993;Edwards, Barrett, and Peake 1997;Thorson 1998;Binder 1999). This squabbling aside, one fact remains: one dominant method in divided government scholarship measures the quantity of legislation produced by alternative party arrangements. This emphasis on legislative productivity naturally leads scholars to quantitative tools in divided government studies, to the exclusion of more historical accounts.Recently, a few scholars have departed from the dominant quantitative methods in divided government studies by investigating the tenor, rather than the productivity, of dif-679 Presidential Studies Quarterly 31, no. 4 (December)
Political scientists have debated the causes of divided government since the Reagan administration. In addition, a handful of scholars have also pondered the possible consequences of divided party rule for politics and policy. Still, one serious oversight in the divided‘government literature is the potential consequences of divided party rule for the types of policy pursued during divided and unified party regimes. Divided government may create incentives for conflicting institutions to use social regulation debates, often considered the most divisive public policy debates, as “wedges” in order to damage the opposing party in future elections. Each party also has an incentive to embrace social regulation in order to reaffirm its allegiance to its core constituency. This article tests the hypothesis that divided government produces more important social regulation votes than unified government. I define the population of important votes as all Key Votes in the House of Representatives from 1953 to 1998. The data analysis reveals that important social regulation votes are in fact more prominent during eras of divided government than during unified party control. This finding has potential implications for the tenor of our national politics as well as the public trust.
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