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.

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. ((Desclaration of interest: I personally know and work with most of the authors of this paper. Thereby, please don’t regard this blog as neutral, or possibly critical, review, but rather as a — hopefully — interesting perspective and notification of fascinating research.)) 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.

The authors state three main mechanisms on which the formation of attitudes toward induced abortion is based. At first, it is known that people adjust their opinion to ruling legislation in the country they live in. Secondly, based on the seminal work by Émile Durkheim, the authors state that in general people adjust their norms (and thereby attitudes) on topics to the norms prevalent in the (intermediary) groups they are a member of. Thirdly, previous research found that people tend to adjust their opinion to what is commonly thought to be good, or commonly done, in the ‘public domain’. They refer to this as the ‘marketplace of opinions and behaviour’.

Based on these three fundamental mechanisms, several interesting hypotheses are formulated, of which I will name only a few. Generally, it is expected that due to educational expansion people have become more liberal between 1981 and 2000. This is also, to some extend, expected due to a general trend toward more liberal legislation of induced abortion in Western Europe during the last few decades. Most churches object against (the possibility of) induced abortion, with the Catholic church expressing the most pronounced pro-life stance. It is thus hypothesised that members of more strict churches will object against induced abortion more strongly. Regarding the ‘marketplace of opinions and behaviour’, it is expected that people will express more favourable opinions toward the possibility of abortion when living in a country with high abortion ratio’s.

The authors tested these (and other) expectations on 14 European countries, with a time-span between 1981 and 2000. This was done by performing multilevel regression analyses on data from the European Value Survey. Some of the findings that I find especially interesting, is that when one lives in a country with many non-religious people, one tends to have fewer objections against induced abortion. Also, when more induced abortions are performed in a country (measured by abortion ratio’s), people tend to have more liberal attitudes on this subject. The authors accounted for some causality issues by taking the abortion ratio measured two years prior to the measurement of the attitude. Also, it was found that while members of a church and frequent church attendants have relatively negative attitudes towards induced abortion (compared with non-members and infrequent attendants), this impact waned over time. No differences between Protestants and non-members were found. Finally, by taking into account several demographic variables, educational level and religious denomination of respondents, and different levels of religiousness and abortion ratio’s of countries, the authors were able to explain much of the between-country differences in attitudes towards abortion.

Reference

Ariana Need, Wout Ultee, Mark Levels, Marike van Tienen (2008). Mening over abortus in West-Europa, 1981-2000 Mens en Maatschappij, 83 (1), 5-22