Curving Normality

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.

I have been writing about abortion a lot, recently, so I decided to provide some more context regarding this important subject, by making some graphics. The first graph I created is on trends in American public opinion regarding induced abortion.

Building upon the paper written by Jelen et al. (1993) that I wrote about a few days ago, I’d like to bring to your attention a more recent paper by Dutch researchers. It also addresses attitudes toward abortion in Western Europe, but does so in a rather more advanced manner.

As might be expected from an article written 15 years later, much developments have been made in the research on public opinion regarding induced abortion, both on a theoretical level, as well as on a methodological level. Let’s take a look at the outcomes of those improvements.