Pro-Life Policymaking: Contingent Framing of Interest Group Lobbying on Abortion

• In Event: How Framing Shapes Abortion, COVID-19, and Medicaid Politics

Abstract

‘Pro-life’ politics have stirred up contentious debates in various health policy arenas: from abortion, to contraception, to even physician-assisted suicide. A broad swatch of literature categorizes these as “morality” policies. Morality policies have certain quintessential characteristics vis-à-vis public opinion and the relationship between public preferences and policy itself. More recently, scholars have begun to question the degree to which debates about issues like abortion are really moralized. For instance, Mucciaroni (2011) showed that despite being considered a quintessential morality policy, floor speeches about gay rights had little “morality talk” and more rational instrumentalist arguments (see also Mucciaroni, Ferraiolo and Rubado (2018)).

Interest groups have a vast number of strategies at their disposal to gain influence in the policymaking process. We theorize that interest groups strategically shift their rhetoric based on if the intended audience is lawmakers or the public. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that “morality talk” is more prevalent in interest group written public-facing documents about strategy and less prevalent in interest group written model legislation on abortion.* Using an original dataset of annual Americans United for Life publications from 2008-2020 (which includes both articles about strategy and politics, as well as model legislation), we use structural topic models to show how the rhetoric and substance of the debate over abortion shifts over time and context, even within a single interest group. This research contributes to the literatures on the “moralization” of abortion policy, framing, and interest group influence.

* We have these documents for several dozen abortion-related policies, as well as policies relating to assisted suicide, fetal rights, and contraception policy. Depending on time, our analysis may expand to include these topics as well.

Authors

• Rebecca J. Kreitzer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Kellen A. Kane, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• John Cluverius, University of Massachusetts Lowell