Political Behavior of the American Electorate (9781483323428) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781483323428
Publisher: LightningSource
Published: 2015-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

Social Issues

One of the more emotional aspects of the polarization of the two political parties over the past two decades has been conflict over so-called traditional values. Issues such as abortion; gay rights, including gay marriage; pornography; and sex education and prayer in the public schools have risen in prominence in recent years. Common wisdom positions Democrats on the liberal side and Republicans on the conservative side of these “culture wars,” as they are often called, but significant numbers of leaders and followers in both parties are not so easily placed. Like the process of sorting that occurred over racial issues in the 1960s and 1970s, a similar sorting over traditional values has been occurring more recently. The Republican Party, especially, has had a difficult time portraying itself as a “big tent” that welcomes a wide range of people with varying beliefs, but people who are pro-life or opposed to gay marriage have also come to feel uncomfortable in the Democratic Party.

Certainly, one of the most potent of these social issues is abortion. The 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade immediately generated a polarized response, turning election races in some areas into one-issue campaigns. Forty years later, intact dilation and extraction, far more commonly known as “partial birth” abortion, is a hot-button issue, and both sides in the abortion debate gird for battle over any anticipated retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court.

One of the difficulties in examining public opinion on abortion lies in the responses that different question wording elicits. Although responses to the same question are similar over time, different phrasing of questions produces differing proportions of “pro-choice” or “pro-life” answers. In the following analysis, we use data from the ANES, which has used the same question in each survey since 1980.

The public’s views on abortion are associated with several personal characteristics, most notably age, education, and religion. No matter what combination of characteristics is examined in the general public, invariably more than half of the people in the ANES surveys support the right to abortion under at least some circumstances. The two response choices at the pro-life end of the continuum are that abortion should never be permitted and that abortion should be permitted only in cases of rape or incest or to save the life of the mother. The first is a more extreme position than many pro-life advocates would take; the second includes circumstances that have been explicitly rejected by pro-life advocates in and out of Congress. The most extreme pro-choice alternative offered is that by law a woman should always be able to obtain an abortion as a matter of personal choice. We have used the most extreme category at either end of the continuum to indicate pro-life and pro-choice positions.

In simple terms, older people are generally more likely to be pro-life than younger people, and the less educated are less supportive of legal abortion than are the better educated. Given the frequent labeling of abortion as a “women’s” issue, it is worth

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