I just realized that Obama’s chances of being re-elected might be seriously compromised. Not because of any of the policies he did (or did not) implement, but because of polarization of America Public opinion. The New Yorker has a piece of his re-election, describing all (recent) presidents that were re-elected for a second term.

Since 1916, seven presidents were re-elected for a second term. Since Nixon, however, the margin of victory over his opponent steadily declined:

In 1952 Nixon won another term by popular vote margin of 23 points. In 1984, Reagan won his reëlection by 18 points. In 1992, Clinton won his by nine points. In 2004, Bush beat John Kerry by just 2 1/2 points; the smallest margin of victory for the reelection of a President since the nineteenth century.

This declining margins of victory may very well be an indication of increased bipartisan polarization of the US. This does not stand on its own. The United States are often described as being involved in a Culture War on ideological views.

I blogged about this culture war couple of years ago, for instance on: “Dispatches from the culture war”, the abortion debate in scientific literature, and the often visited “Paradoxical negative spill over of the catholics attitudes on induced abortion”. Although most of these pieces about the culture wars referred to the abortion debate, much of the current issues (e.g. gay marriage) play a similar dividing role in this same culture war.

Carmines and Woods studied the political polarization related to public opinion, and indeed show that the Democratic and Republican parties take increasingly diverging positions on moral positions.

(See an earlier post about this paper here.) Following the elites and party activists of these parties, they conclude, the mass public now is more diverged as well.

In their words:

[…] since 1984 there has been a growing differentiation in the abortion positions of both groups of party activists. Now Democratic activists are consistently pro-choice while Republican activists are equally pro- life. This evidence indicates that the differentiation on the abortion issue that has only recently emerged among partisans in the mass public was predated by an earlier and much more dramatic polarization that had already developed among party activists and elites […]

So, the increasingly polarized positions of the Democrats and Republicans on moral issues may have divided the electorate in such a way, that it is increasingly difficult for presidential candidates to ‘swing’ voters over to their sides. As a result, the presidential bonus in elections has diminished, making it increasingly difficult for presidents to get re-elected.

Carmines, & Woods (2002). The role of party activists in the evolution of the abortion issue Political Behavior, 24 (4), 361-377

The Dutch Paradox of abortion entails the observation that in the Netherlands induced abortion is legal, safe, available, and free, but also extremely rare compared to other countries. A new publication in the European Sociological Review, authored by Mark Levels (corresponding author), Ariana Need, Rense Nieuwenhuis (that’s me), Roderick Sluiter, and Wout Ultee, examines the effect of both individual and societal effects on women’s decision process leading to an abortion. The article is available as advance access (limited to institutional access). Findings suggest, as quoted from the summary: “that the legalization, availability, and insurance of contraceptive pills helped to prevent abortions, because these measures effectively reduced the demand for abortion“.

A key innovation in this article, I think, is the theoretical and methodological focus on individual women, allowing to model the subsequent decisions that lead to an abortion. The life-courses of 3,793 Dutch women were analyzed, in which factors leading to an unintended pregnancy, and factors leading to a woman having an unintended pregnancy terminated are analyzed sequentially. This approach proved very elucidative. For instance, it has previously been observed that higher educated women are less likely to have an abortion. Our study shows the process leading to this observation: higher educated women are less likely to experience an unintended pregnancy, but when they do higher educated women do not differ from lower educated women in their likelihood of having an abortion.

This study tentatively concludes that the Dutch Paradox cannot be explained by the demographic composition of the Netherlands. For instance, while findings indicate that single women are more likely to have an abortion, Dutch women are more likely to be single than women in countries with higher abortion ratios. Similarly, still being in school increases the likelihood of a woman having an abortion, but Dutch women are in school (compulsory) longer than women in other countries.

In addition, women’s decisions regarding abortion were found to be influenced by societal characteristics. Liberal abortion laws and high availability of clinics increase women’s likelihood to terminate an unintended abortion. However, this cannot explain why Dutch abortion rates are so low. Legal sale of contraceptives, availability of the contraceptive pill and health care insurance of the pill increased women’s control over their fertility, all leading to a lower likelihood of a woman experiencing a pregnancy. Key understanding of low abortion rates, however, most likely resides in legality of contraceptives: when contraceptive sales were legal, women were less likely to experience a pregnancy, and less likely to experience their pregnancy as unintended.

Levels, M., Need, A., Nieuwenhuis, R., Sluiter, R., & Ultee, W. (2010). Unintended Pregnancy and Induced Abortion in the Netherlands 1954-2002 European Sociological Review DOI: 10.1093/esr/jcq065

Regarding my Master’s thesis, it studies polarization in North American’s abortion attitudes. I was able to locate a very nice lacuna in the literature, and built upon existing literature to solve this lacuna. But, without further ado, I will let the preface speak for itself:

Attitudes on the permissibility of induced abortion vary widely in the United States of America. How people think about abortion has often been the topic of scholarly studies, which highlighted aspects ranging from the level of the streets with protests either ‘pro-life’ or ‘pro-choice’, to the level of legislation and Supreme Court rulings, to the public opinion on abortion. The question whether public opinion on abortion has become more polarized received substantial attention of social scientists, as well. This study adds to this body of literature on polarization in the North Americans’ public opinion on induced abortion. It contributes a new explanatory framework on polarization of public opinion which allows much of the existing literature to be brought together, a suggestion for a statistical approach for analyzing hypotheses derived from this model, and new hypotheses derived from this model.

Chapter 1 describes a background on the abortion issue in the United States, and three generations in the development of research on abortion attitudes are identified. To contribute to the third generation, three research questions are formulated that share the goal of developing and testing an explanatory model for attitude polarization. In chapter 2, it is explored how a theory of polarization should be formulated. A theoretical framework for such explanations is developed, based on the identification of three mechanisms constituting polarization. In chapter 3, the theoretical model is substantiated with theories on attitudes on abortion, and hypotheses on the polarization of North Americans’ attitudes towards abortion are derived. Chapter 4 contains a detailed description of the data that are used to test these hypotheses. Also, a procedure is suggested to analyze polarization. This procedure is used throughout chapter 5, in which the hypotheses formulated in the third chapter are tested. The concluding chapter 6 then relates the outcomes of these analyses back to the three research questions from the first chapter. Also, limitations of the used approach, directions for future research, and the implications of the findings for the used theories are discussed.

Several people and organizations have contributed to this project, with financial or other means. The National Opinion Research Center (NORC), the organization responsible for collecting the data of the General Social Survey used in this study, made sensitive data available for use in this study. This made it possible to take into account the state in which people live. The funds required for obtaining these additional data were made available by Ariana Need, and are part of her NWO VIDI subsidy.1 Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute sent a very detailed, historic overview on state-level legislation on abortion in the United States.

I conclude this preface by expressing my sincere and kind gratitude towards my supervisors Ariana Need and Manfred te Grotenhuis. They contributed profoundly to this project by providing ideas, advice, and methodological guidance. To me, however, of much greater importance was how they have helped me to strike a fair balance between ambition and personal life events.

What struck me in the interview, is the enormous amount of difficulties Rebecca Gomperts and Women on Waves have been confronted with. Whereas she had high hopes, ten years ago, for a whole fleet of ‘women on waves’ providing information and aid to women who required it, she recently has had to cancel some of their activities. This is the direct result of changes in Dutch abortion policy.

Partly, she is confronted with unjust allegations. For instance, she discusses the common misrepresentation of Women on Waves, especially reagrding what happens on their boat. The only types of abortion (if it can even be called that way) that are carried out there, are performed using abortion pills, and only in the first 16 days after a woman was expected to start menstruating. Moreover, their emphasis seems to be on providing information, rather than the actual abortion practice.

According to Gompert, the Dutch climate towards induced abortion is changing. Besides recent changes in the Dutch abortion policy, she also discusses how organisations against abortion receive more government funding than organisations in favour of the possibility for abortion. She concludes with being concerned that this financial inequality between organisations may topple public opinion against women’s opportunity to choose.

The first is a slight change in policy regarding the use of the ‘abortion pill’ in very early pregnancies (before 16 days after a women was expected to start menstruating). The government decided that regulation regarding this procedure now is part of the abortion legislation (which is wasn’t). Although the government states that this does not change much for abortion practice, opponents argue that this results in a more restrictive abortion legislation.

Secondly, health inspection ordered the prosecution of Women on Waves, a Dutch organisation that uses boats to provide abortions and information to women in countries where abortion is prohibited. By sailing to international waters, their actions are regulated by Dutch legislation, providing a legal basis. Apparently, they violated the law by using the wrong type of boat.

Interestingly, a major Dutch newspaper featured an interview with Rebecca Gomperts, founder of Women on Waves, just this weekend. I’ve already rounded up some thoughts on this interview with the founder of Women on Waves, Rebecca Gomperts, which I will publish tomorrow. So, if you’re interested in this subject, do come back then!

One of the elegances of sociology is found in the unintended consequences of our actions. In my studies of attitudes towards abortion, I found a nice example of such unintended consequences regarding the Catholic church. But, I doubt that the findings are warranted by the analyses.

The theoretical background of the article by Cook, Jelen, and Wilcox (1993) is rather straightforward. It is well known that the Catholic church opposes against the practice of induced abortion. Therefor, it is expected that individual members of the Catholic church will be influenced by this doctrine, and will object against induced abortion more often than, for instance, non church members. On the other hand, people not objecting against abortion, or even having an explicit pro-choice stance on the issue, might feel threatened by the presence of a strong Catholic church in their presence, and express their pro-choice attitudes more strongly. From this the expectation is derived that in regions with high proportions of Catholic church members the non-Catholics will be more permissive towards abortion than in regions with low proportions of Catholics.

The authors test these two assertions using data from an exit-poll, collected in 42 American States. Using regression analyses, they find that indeed individual Catholics have a stronger pro-life stance than non-Catholics. On the contextual level they find the expected opposite result: when controlled for individual Catholicism, people living in a state with a high proportion of Catholics tend to be more permissive towards towards abortion. Apparently, according to the authors, the Catholic church is very well capable of instilling their pro-life stance on abortion in its members. And, again according to the authors, the presence of a strong Catholic church in a state mobilizes the non-members to express an strengthen their pro-choice stance.

However interesting the expectation and supposed finding about the unintended consequences of the presence of strong Catholic church might be, I doubt these findings are warranted by the analyses. Allow me to be a little bit technical. The analyses basically consist of two parameters (plus several controls): individual and contextual level Catholicism. Both variables are added to a multiplicative regression model simultaneously, which has led to the findings as described above. However, the authors seem to interpret the model as if a cross-level interaction effect between individual and contextual catholicism had been estimated as well, which was not the case. Their interpretation of the findings that the effect of contextual Catholicism only instills pro-choice attitudes amongst the non-members would only be warranted by such an interaction term.

Instead, I would think that a proper interpretation of their findings would be that, when controlling for individual Catholicism, the presence of a high proportion of Catholics leads to stronger pro-choice attitudes for everyone. Even, on average, for the Catholics themselves. Of course this is not explicitly tested, requiring an interaction term added to the model as argued above, but it could be interpreted as that people tend to fight for what they think is important when their opinion is contested by the presence of others with a different opinion, and what in a different context would remain salient.

How’s that for an unintended consequence of membership of the Catholic church?

Cook, Elizabeth Adell, Jelen, Ted G., Wilcox, Clyde (1993). Catholicism and Abortion Attitudes in the American States: A Contextual Analysis Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 32 (3), 223-230

Can bad science lead us to draw wrong conclusions about the world we live in? “Of course it can“, we are inclined to think. And if so, can this have real-life consequences? Investigating these meta-questions is not as easy as it might seem, for it would require an exact manner to distinguish the good from the bad science, and it would require a subject that has been thoroughly investigated in both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ ways to compare the outcomes.

One such subject would be the vast amount of research done on the psychological consequences of undergoing an induced abortion. This heavily researched (and heavily debated!) subject focusses primarily on the questions whether or not a women has a higher chance of suffering from anxiety, feeling of guilt, depression, or (other) mental disorders caused by undergoing an induced abortion. The conclusions drawn in the vast literature on this basic question vary form an abortion having no consequences, to an abortion having a negative impact on the psychological well-being of a woman.

Charles, Polis, Sridhara and Blum (2008) did a systematic review of this literature. Interestingly, they did not only classify the findings, but also derived a set of guidelines by which to evaluate the methodological quality of each research paper.

Analytical studies were rated on a scale from Excellent to Very Poor using five major criteria: (1) use of an appropriate comparison group; (2) use of valid mental health measures; (3) control for preexisting mental health status; (4) control for confounders; and
(5) whether there was comprehensive exploration of the research question. (p. 437)

Trained researchers would find it difficult to disagree with these ‘five guidelines for quality research’. However, hardly any of the studies they evaluated did comply with all of them. Try to imagine what the consequences of failing to comply with any of these guidelines might be. For instance, it is known that mental health status relates to the chance of becoming pregnant unintendedly, and subsequently it relates to the decision whether or not to keep the baby. Not taking that into account would attribute the difference in mental health between women who have had an abortion, and women who did not, to the abortion, whereas these differences in fact were already present before the abortion. A similar argument goes for taking into account differences regarding age, educational level, and religious conviction: these characteristics all relate to both mental health and the odds of having an unintended pregnancy and / or an abortion. As a last example, the groups of women that are compared should be as equivalent as possible, except for having had an abortion. However, studies compared women having had an abortion with, for example, the general population, or just with women having carried out their pregnancy. This practice does not allow for causal inference, for it cannot exclude the effects of pregnancy intentions.

In total, Charles et al. evaluated 21 studies, the methodological quality of which varied widely, as did their conclusions on the consequences of an abortion. Their most fascinating finding was that a relation exists between the methodological quality of a study and the conclusions drawn in it: the better studies hardly found any consequences from undergoing an abortion, whereas the poorer quality studies did find negative consequences of an abortion. In other words: bad science tends to overestimate the consequences of an induced abortion.
Generally, these differences are due to the fact that the studies with poor methodology did not take into account differences between women prior to the abortion, thereby attributing differences between women in mental health to having had an abortion, whereas in fact these differences were pre-existing.

There we have it: bad science distinguished from good science, and different outcomes. So, yes, bad science indeed leads to wrong outcomes and in real life, this can have consequences. In the policy-discussions on induced abortion, the possibility of negative consequences of an abortion plays an important role. It would depend on which research papers the policy makers turn to, what their stand on the issue would be.

The question that remains is now: can we trust policy makers to distinguish the good from the bad (science)?

V CHARLES, C POLIS, S SRIDHARA, R BLUM (2008). Abortion and long-term mental health outcomes: a systematic review of the evidence Contraception, 78 (6), 436-450 DOI: 10.1016/j.contraception.2008.07.005

Now that we all know who the new President of the United States will be, people are preparing for a new type of government, with a new and markedly different agenda than the previous one. Most people are very contend with this new agenda, but some will be disappointed. How does this influence the people’s opinion, one might ask? Will conflict be the result, or can one expect that in general the new agenda will be accepted and that those who voted McCain will change their opinions to generally accept the new policy?

In their classic article, Franklin and Kosaki studied something similar, although they focused on the impact of a Supreme Court ruling regarding induced abortion. Remember though, how Obama and MaCain differed on this issue, with Obama stating to protect the Roe v. Wade Court Ruling, and McCain trying to overthrow it. It is exactly the effect on public opinion of this Roe v. Wade Court Ruling that Franklin and Kosaki studied.

According to the authors, it has for long been held accepted that public opinion tends to converge with present legislation. So, in the case of abortion, the effect of Roe v. Wade (which, in a practical sense, legalized induced abortion in 1973) would be that public opinion on induced abortion would become more permissive. They refer to this as the positive response hypothesis. They contrast this hypothesis with a much more interesting one though, which they call the structural response hypothesis. This hypothesis states that it is possible that average levels of public opinion remain stable, but that different groups diverge. In other words: polarization does not necessarily mean a change in average levels of permissiveness towards induced abortion. According to the authors, prior studies failed to take that into account.

Using survey data from the General Social Survey (GSS) the authors found that the Court’s decision did indeed influence the public opinion, but not in the way the positive response hypothesis would expect. Roe v. Wade did raise approval of health-related induced abortions, but not for discretionary abortions. Regarding the latter, it was found that the average level of support remained the same, but that attitudes indeed became more polarized, as proposed by the structural response hypotheses. This can be understood based on a model of interpersonal communication: when new legislation is pressed, people talk to their peers about it and thereby form their own opinion. From this, it results that opinions become more homogeneous within groups, and that the relative differences between groups become larger. Moreover, it was found that this increased divergence between groups was stronger for groups that were diverged to a large extent intitially (religious v. non-religious), compared with groups that were not so much diverged (lower and higher educated) on the issue of discretionary abortions.

One methodological nag

I think, overall, that this is a very interesting article, the findings of which should necessarily be taken into account in other studies on public opinion as well, especially when studying polarisation. Sure, they only take into account one indicator of polarisation (diverging group-means). Since the authors only invesitage the direct response to the Roe v. Wade ruling, they neither investigated the emergence of the pro-choice and pro-life movement in the wake of the decision. Nevertheless, with this single measure of polarisation, they are able to convincingly show the empirical support for their structural response hypothesis, in addition to showing the shortcomings of the positive response hypothesis.

Nevertheless, I cannot resist to point out one methodological shortcoming, which may of may not have influenced the findings of this study. Using survey data from the General Social Survey (GSS), the authors create two scales by counting the number of conditions under which respondents would allow a women to have an abortion. In general, this is a doubtful strategy. Since the authors do not test for the feasibility of a so-called Mokken-scale, the ordinal-level scale ((according to the authors)) that they created assumes that acceptance of each condition is independent of the acceptance of other conditions, and that each condition is equally ‘difficult’ to accept. Despite the disntiction between so-called ‘health’ related conditions (abortion to save mothers’ health, after a rape, or in case of a birth defect), and ‘discretionary’ conditions (mother too poor, unwed mother, parents do not want anymore children), which helps to make this assumption less strong, I doubt that these two scales are good representations of respondents’ acceptance of or objections against induced abortion.

Theory of the minor Differences

Now for a completely different story, but also based on what has become a classic paper amongst scholars from a different background than Franklin and Kosaki. Put shortly, the theory of the `Narcissism of the minor differences’ has been described by Anton Blok (1998) as `the idea that identity lies in differences, and difference is asserted, reinforced, and defended against what is closest and represents the greatest threat’ (p. 39). Based on this general statement, it is expected that when differences are small, or are decreasing, people will accentuate these differences, enlarge emphasize them in order to protect their identity. According to the theory, this allows people to distinguish their own identity in a situation in which the similarities are actually much more evident than the differences.

From the perspective of the theory of the Narcissism of the minor differences we cannot decide which differences are large or small. This would require an a-priori judgement on, for instance, whether church members and non-members are much different from each other. The theory does not provide guidelines for this decision. However, it is possible to state expectations on relative differences.

In that case, from the theory of the Narcissism of the minor differences the hypothesis can be derived that polarisation takes place to a larger extent between groups that are relatively close to each other. When legislation comes into effect, which results in a clear, homogeneous, and identical situation for members of all groups, according to the theory people will need to emphasise their own position in the debate more strongly in order to defend their own identity. In other words, diverging attitudes towards abortion after the Roe v. Wade ruling would be expected, especially between groups that were relatively close initially.

However, as it was argued and empirically shown by Franklin and Kosaki: the opposite is true. In the case of the coming to effect of `Roe vs. Wade’ Franklin and Kosaki showed that it are the groups that initially are more different from each other that took increasingly divergent positions in the abortion debate after the legislation came into effect, whereas members of rather similar groups converged. So, in other words, conflict increased between already different groups, in clear contrast with the expectation based on the theory of the Narcissism of the minor differences.

References

Charles H. Franklin, Liance C. Kosaki (1989). Republican Schoolmaster: The U.S. Supreme Court, Public Opinion, and Abortion The American Political Science Review, 83 (3), 751-771

Anton Blok (1998). The Narcissism of Minor Differences European Journal of Social Theory, 1 (1), 33-56

(click on the graph for a larger image)

To give an impression of how abortion attitudes have developed in the United States, I created a graph which is shown in figure 1. Using survey data from the General Social Survey (GSS), a nationally representative survey program in the United States, I was able to visualise the policy preferences regarding induced abortion for Americans living in nine different regions ((More detailed state-level aggregation is possible in principle, but the data required to do so are not publicly available)). The available data cover the period from the legalisation of induced abortion in the United States, to 2005. Respondents were asked under which conditions they think it should be possible for a pregnant women to have an abortion. The subsequent conditions were:

• The woman’s health is seriously endangered by the pregnancy
• The woman’s pregnancy is a result of rape
• There is a strong chance of serious defect in the baby
• Family has a very low income and cannot afford any more children
• The woman is not married and does not want to marry the man
• The woman is married and does not want any more children
• The woman want an abortion for any reason

The graph in figure 1 represents for each of these conditions the proportion of respondents (both men and women) that agreed with each condition. Since the same conditions were asked to respondents every wave of the survey, it is possible to visualise trends over a long period of time.

The graph learns us several things about abortion attitudes in the United States. To start, it is shown that, apart from fluctuations, the overall level of acceptance of induced abortion remained relatively stable in each of these nine regions. Interestingly, much of these fluctuations seem to have occurred during the early 90’s.

Furthermore, it is very clear that two ‘groups’ of responses occur. `Health’ related abortions (woman’s health in danger, pregnancy as a result of rape, defect in baby) have much higher levels of acceptance than ‘discretionary’ abortions (low income, unmarried, no more children, any reason). This is true for each of the nine regions shown. Not all is the same in these regions, however, for large differences between the regions in average levels of accepting abortions are clear, especially with respect to the discretionary abortions. In the Pacific region, approximately 60% of the respondents think that a woman should be able to have an abortion for discretionary reasons, whereas in the E.S. Central region acceptance has been as low as 20% in 2002.

Finally, closer examination shows that that amongst the discretionary conditions, the variation between the different conditions has decreased. For instance, in the Mountain region, we see differences in levels acceptance of almost 20 percentage points amongst the discretionary items (with approximately 40% of the respondents accepting an abortion for any reason, and approximately 60% when the family cannot afford any more children). These differences, however, waned over the years and in 1995 all the four discretionary conditions have very similar levels of acceptance. To a lesser extent, the opposite might have happened regarding the health-related conditions. Whereas the level of acceptance for having an abortion when the mother’s health is in serious danger remained relatively stable in the nine regions, acceptance for having an abortion when the pregnancy is the result of a rape and when there is a serious chance of a defect waned slightly.

Of course, this is only an overview graph, and an overview interpretation of that graph. Nevertheless, I think it provides some interesting insights in the development of the American public opinion on induced abortion.

A lot has been written about this, as well as on what exactly should be interpreted as polarisation. Methodologically inclined literature seems to be debating this to some extent, but at least agree that it has to do with an increasingly broad distribution of attitudes or opinions. In less technical terms, this means that the opinions of large number of people in society differ in increasing amounts. so, we’re talking about polarisation of the general public, instead of the polarised activities of either pro-life, or pro-choice organisations.

What, then, has this to do with Women on Waves in Valencia? Women of Waves is a “Dutch non-profit organisation concerned with women’s human rights. Its mission is to prevent unwanted pregnancy and unsafe abortions throughout the world.” (Quoted from their web-site.) The use boats to go to countries in which abortion is restricted of prohibited by law, allow women who want to have an abortion aboard, sail to international waters, let the women have an induced abortion, and then sail back to the national waters of the country they started. Since national legislature is not in effect in international waters, the national abortion bans are neither. What the Women on Waves do, it seems, is perfectly legal. But, it also raises controversy.

There is a lot to say about Women on Waves, both in favour in against, but I will remain neutral on this one. However, the news coverage on their recent arrival in Valencia, Spain, made clear to me another effect their actions has. As a sociologist, I’m interested in the unintended consequences of peoples’ actions, and I think that the presence of Women on Waves in a country or city might have a polarising consequence. Both pro-choice organisations (who invited Women on Waves), and pro-life organisations rallied in the Spanish harbour. They both use all the energy they have to bring their views to the attention of the larger public.

Sure, none of these organisations will have changed their positions. However, I think that the presence of both types of organisations, their rallying, and the coverage in the news of these events, might have forced people in Valencia, Spain, and perhaps even abroad, to form their opinions on induced abortion. This can either be in favour, or against, but the increased visibility of the abortion-debate must have decreased the number of people who aren’t really aware of the issue, or have never given much thought about it.

It is not the goal of Women on Waves to change peoples’ attitudes, but to allow women to have an abortion. Nevertheless, I think it might have had an unintented consequence of (slightly) polarising the abortion debate. Again, an interesting phenomenon for sociological study, and again it is just there to be found in the news. I love my job!