Abortion Attitudes and Polarization in the American Electorate

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About two-thirds of Americans support legal abortion in many or all circumstances, and this group finds itself a frustrated majority following the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization which overturned the legal precedent set in Roe v. Wade. Previous scholarship argues intense minorities can secure favorable policy outcomes when facing off against a more diffuse and less motivated majority, creating incongruence between public opinion and policy. Int his Element, we focus on the ways that preference intensity and partisan polarization have contributed to the current policy landscape surrounding abortion rights. Using survey data from the American National Election Studies, we identify Americans with intense preferences about abortion and investigate the role they play in electoral politics. We observe a shift in the relationship between partisanship and preference intensity coinciding with Dobbs and speculate about what this means for elections and policy congruence in the future.

Abortion Attitudes, written with Heather Ondercin and Jordan Randall, is forthcoming at Cambridge University Press, Elements in Gender and Politics Series.

Erin Cassese, Phil Jones, Joanne Miller, Kassra Oskooii, and Dannagal Young. 2024. “Motivated Misperceptions and Public Opinion about Abortion.” Paper presented at the 2024 American Political Science Association Meeting. [Access the current draft here]

Research on the political implications of misinformation and disinformation has tended to overlook its role in the abortion debate. Abortion attitudes have taken on new electoral significance following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization which eliminated a constitutional standard for abortion rights. As issue salience has increased, so too has the complexity of the information environment surrounding abortion rights. Not only has the policy space become more complex and variable as policy making authority was reverted to the states, but misinformation about abortion seems to be increasingly prevalent in political discourse. In this paper, we use data from the 2023 Congressional Election Study (CES) to establish a baseline for belief in misinformation related to abortion. We also evaluate the correlation between these beliefs and abortion attitudes, testing the expectation that misinformation is linked to more polarized views on abortion policy. Understanding the prevalence of abortion misperceptions and their link to abortion attitudes will help us to better account for the role this crucial issue might play in the continued polarization of the American electorate.

Cassese, Erin, Meredith Conroy, Dhrumil Mehta, and Franchesca Nestor. 2022. “Media Coverage of Female Candidates’ Traits in the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary.” Journal of Women, Politics & Policy - Special Issue: Intersectional Analysis of Women of Color Political Elites in the U.S. 43(1): 42-63. [FirstView]

The 2020 Democratic presidential primary featured more female candidates than any prior race of its kind, presenting a unique opportunity to analyze media coverage of women running for this distinctively masculine office. In this article, we explore themes in trait coverage for female candidates in 2020. Using a natural language processing (NLP) approach, we analyze a sample of print and online media coverage of the Democratic primary field just prior to the Iowa Caucus. We find that trait coverage largely emphasized warmth and competence, with a tendency to criticize female candidates for displaying insufficient warmth. Comparing white women to women of color, we find coverage of Harris, but not Gabbard, emphasizes racial and gender identifiers. The themes emerging from our trait analysis suggest women candidates continue to face obstacles in the form of gendered and sometimes racialized media coverage on their paths to the presidency.

Kevin, Banda, and Erin Cassese. 2022. “Hostile Sexism, Racial Resentment, and Political Mobilization.” Political Behavior 44(1): 1317-1335. [FirstView]

We argue that hostile sexism and racial resentment play an important and somewhat underappreciated role in American elections through their influence on voter turnout and engagement with political campaigns. The effects of these attitudes are not straightforward but depend on partisanship. We evaluate whether high levels of racial resentment and hostile sexism cross-pressure Democratic partisans, resulting in lower levels of political participation. We further consider whether high levels of racial resentment and hostile sexism bolster participation among Republicans. We find evidence of these divergent effects on the political mobilization of white voters using the 2016 American National Election Study. The results support our expectations and suggest that cuing resentment-based attitudes was an important strategy for engaging voters in the 2016 presidential campaign and will likely play an important role in future campaigns as well.

Cassese, Erin C. 2020. “Partisan Dehumanization in American Politics.” Political Behavior. [FirstView].

Despite evidence that dehumanizing language and metaphors are found in political discourse, extant research has largely overlooked whether voters dehumanize their political opponents. Research on dehumanization has tended to focus on racial and ethnic divisions in societies, rather than political divisions. Understanding dehumanization in political contexts is important because the social psychology literature links dehumanization to a variety of negative outcomes, including moral disengagement, aggression, and even violence. In this manuscript, I discuss evidence of partisan dehumanization during the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign and demonstrate how a focus on dehumanization can expose new relationships between moral psychology and partisan identity. Using data from two surveys conducted in October of 2016, I show that partisans dehumanize their political opponents in both subtle and blatant ways. When I investigate the correlates of dehumanization, I find that partisans who blatantly dehumanize members of the opposing party prefer greater social distance from their political opponents, which is indicative of reduced interpersonal tolerance. I also find that blatant dehumanization is associated with perceptions of greater moral distance between the parties, which is indicative of moral disengagement. These results suggest that dehumanization can improve our understanding of negative partisanship and political polarization.