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

Also, I will present a working paper on polarization of attitudes on abortion in North America. It’s called Explaining Polarization of North Americans’ Abortion Attitudes, 1977-2006 and it authored by myself, Ariana Need, and Manfred te Grotenhuis. The abstract of the paper:

This study finds that North Americans’ attitudes towards induced abortion have become increasingly polarized between 1977 and 2006. This is in line with previous studies that treat polarization as a distributional characteristic. We improve upon existing studies by formulating an explanatory model for attitude polarization that distinguishes between macro-level and micro-level polarization.

A partial explanation for macro-level polarization of North Americans’ abortion was found in declining rates of church attendance. On the micro-level, we find that frequent church attendees are relatively restrictive towards abortion compared to people hardly ever attending church, and that this difference is more polarized in states with Medicaid provision of abortion, parental involvement legislation, high levels of apostasy, and high abortion ratios. Finally, in these same contexts, frequent church attendees were found more polarized amongst themselves as well.

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.