Politics and Morality in State Abortion Policy

Abstract

The number and variety of state policies regulating abortion each year is increasing. Opponents of abortion adopted a strategy of "legal but inaccessible" that has resulted in the passage of more than 700 state laws since the early 1990s. Despite being a very active area of policy making, we lack a coherent explanation for the proliferation of abortion policy. Scholars studying different policies at discrete moments in time have come to conflicting conclusions about how well theories of morality policy and representation explain abortion policy. Using an original dataset comprised of a nearuniverse of pro-and anti-abortion rights policy from 1973 to 2013, I establish the ways in which partisan control of the government and the moral preferences of constituents shape state policy. I find that anti-abortion rights policies are well explained by both theories but that pro-abortion rights policies are not well explained as a morality policy or with descriptive representation. In addition, I show the heterogeneous effect of representation across anti-abortion rights policies; Democratic women and governors decrease the probability of only certain anti-abortion rights policies.

The Spreading of Innovation: State Adoptions of Energy and Climate Change Policy

“…The authors are able to examine the universe of interstate compacts, which allows them to incorporate policies that have widely diffused and those that are limited to a few states. Kreitzer () also utilizes a pooled event history analysis in her examination of state abortion policies. The use of this method moves the literature forward by considering a wider variety of policies (both popular and rare), though there are no studies using this method on energy and climate change policies.…”

SPID: A New Database for Inferring Public Policy Innovativeness and Diffusion Networks

“…In introducing our data and methods, we propose a major change in the trajectory of this work: from empirical analyses limited to single policies or small samples and implied diffusion relationships to the analysis of comprehensive populations of policies and rigorously inferred diffusion networks. Research in the past decade has started to evaluate larger samples of policies to make more generalizable claims about diffusion trends (Boushey, ; Caughey & Warshaw, ; Kreitzer, ), the largest of which include over one hundred policies (Boehmke & Skinner, ). This project continues this trend of increasingly large sample analyses, by a factor of four.…”

The macro polity and public opinion in religious context

“…witnessed a shift toward explicit religious messaging in campaigns and the election of America's first evangelical Protestant president, George W. Bush, increasing polarization between the political parties and propelling the culture wars. Bush's 2004 re-election campaign cleverly activated issue voters through priming via statewide ballot initiatives in favor of same-sex marriage (Donovan, Tolbert and Smith 2008;Campbell and Monson 2008) and abortion restrictions (Kreitzer 2015). Today domestic and foreign policy is tied to religious messaging by ambitious politicians and pundits seeking to curry favor with certain religious groups.…”

“…Policy studies of morality policy issues are thus naturally included in this category of religious context studies. Studies linking religious context and state and global abortion policy are included (Norrander and Wilcox 1999;Minkenberg 2002;Kreitzer 2015;Budde and Heichel 2016). These types of studies stress the importance of religion in place and space as influential in a variety of political outcomes.…”

“…There already exists some evidence of the power of religious context in explaining political phenomena at the state level. State religious context helps explain vote choice(Campbell 2006), policy outcomes and diffusion(Camobreco and Barnello 2008;Kreitzer 2015;Kreitzer and Boehmke 2016), and is routinely used as a proxy 7 For an introduction to each research area, see: federalism(Weissert and Scheller 2008;Schneider, Jacoby, and Lewis 2011;Kelly and Witko 2012); public opinion and voter turnout…”