The news that abortion has increasingly become a decisive policy issue that helps determine presidential elections in the US is now backed up by research.
’The electoral consequences of abortion politicization in the US’, published in the European Journal of Politics and Gender, is based on data from the American National Election Studies (ANES), and sheds light on how the politicisation of the abortion issue affected US presidential elections between 1980 and 2020. And yes, the empirical verdict is that attitudes toward abortion have increasingly become a central factor in voters’ choice between Democrats and Republicans.
Previous research showed that abortion was a less significant issue in the presidential elections of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1980, around 36 per cent of Americans unconditionally supported free abortion. This number rose to about 46 per cent in the early 1990s, dropped to 37 per cent in the 2000s, and rose again to 48 per cent in 2020. Thus, nearly half of Americans in 2020 unconditionally supported free abortion, which is historically high for the period in which abortion opinions have been measured. Support for free abortion has therefore been increasing in the US in recent decades.
But what does this mean for voting behaviour in presidential elections? One of my key findings is that there is a negative correlation between pro-abortion views and the likelihood of voting for a Republican presidential candidate. Conversely, voters with pro-abortion views are positively correlated with voting Democrat.
In 1980, pro-abortion views were weakly negatively correlated with voting Republican. By 2020, that correlation had become nearly four times stronger. However, the development has not been linear. Empirically, one can see that the significance of the abortion issue comes in jumps, coinciding with Supreme Court rulings and changes in the composition of the Supreme Court.
There was a significant jump in the importance of the abortion issue for voter behaviour between the 1980s and 1990s. One of the most notable shifts came in 1992, after the Supreme Court ruling in the case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which made the abortion issue much more politicised.
Another striking jump came between the 2016 and 2020 elections after Donald Trump appointed several conservative judges to the Supreme Court. These appointments solidified a conservative majority, which has since put free abortion under pressure.
The keen reader will immediately ask whether conditional attitudes toward abortion also matter. And they do, at least to some extent. Empirically, I find that voters with moderate views on abortion, such as those who only support abortion in certain cases, have a higher predicted likelihood of switching their support from Republicans to Democrats. But the probabilities are not large. This group of voters constitutes an important voter base, and the increased politicisation of the abortion issue could potentially give Democrats an advantage, especially if they manage to appeal to these more moderate voters.
We should emphasise that all these findings are correlations and not causal effects. At the same time, it should also be stressed that I do not show whether changes in abortion laws and Supreme Court judges actually matter. It is merely an assumption based on notable coincidences. But to the extent that it is the case, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization from 2022 will only further cement the significance of the abortion issue in American politics.
The abortion issue is no longer a peripheral topic but a central part of American voters’ considerations when choosing a president. This is especially relevant in connection with the upcoming 2024 presidential election, where the issue of abortion rights could be decisive for the election’s outcome. How important it will be, we will only know after 5 November.
Søren Frank Etzerodt is a PhD student at the Technical University of Munich. He has published work on the political economy of welfare states and on voting.
The electoral consequences of abortion politicization in the US by Søren Frank Etzerodt is available to read in the European Journal of Politics and Gender on Bristol University Press Digital here.
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