Understanding the Gender and Partisan Dynamics of Abortion Voting in Congress

• In Event: Gender and Legislative Politics

Abstract

Abortion is the most heavily debated women’s rights issue in Congress. With feminist groups a key component of the Democratic coalition and social conservatives a major force in the Republican Party, the issue is continuously debated in Congress. Since Republicans took over Congress in the Republican Revolution of 1994, whenever Republicans hold the majority, they put a host of abortion related bills and amendments on the floor. Using the vote scores of the National Right to Life Committee from the 103rd-114th Congress, in this paper we take a closer look at the evolution of the types of policies that Republicans have offered and examine how voting on these issues has changed over time. From the 1990s to the early 2000s, it was common to find a significant contingent of Republicans voting pro-choice and Democrats taking a pro-life position. Today the abortion voting of members of Congress is almost perfectly aligned with their partisanship. We examine how much of the shift in abortion voting is due to existing members changing their position to come into compliance with important party constituencies and how much of the polarization in voting is due to member replacement. Since many of the issues recur annually, we analyze which proposals create the most conflict within parties and which members are most likely to be cross-pressured voting for example, in favor of amendments that take differing positions on the same issue such as an amendment that restricts international family planning money and one that provides more exemptions to allow for more opportunities to fund the program. We are particularly interested in tracing the behavior of Republican women to examine the extent to which Republican women lag Republican men in moving to a uniformly pro-life voting record. We also examine the conditions under which Republican women are most likely to exercise leadership by sponsoring pro-life or pro-choice policies on specific issues.

Authors

• Michele L. Swers, Georgetown University

• Kelly Rolfes-Haase, Georgetown University