The Abortion Attitudes Paradox: Model Specification and Gender Differences

Abstract

Rather unexpectedly, prior work has failed to find consistent gender differences in public support for legal abortion. Given that gender differences in public opinion emerge for a wide range of other issue areas, it seems paradoxical that there is no consistent gender difference on the issue of abortion. I propose that this failure to find a consistent gender difference is due to how abortion attitudes are modeled. Controlling for religiosity, which research has shown women to score higher on, results in a small and consistent gender gap in support for legal abortion with women more likely than men to support.It is rather surprising that prior research does not find a consistent or sizeable gender gap on abortion attitudes. This article explores gender differences in support for abortion legality, showing that although some prior work fails to document a gender gap on the issue, important and politically meaningful differences exist between men and women's views of abortion. Even rather small gender differences of only two to three percentage points in public opinion are important and have the potential to be politically consequential. This is because women make up half of the population and recently have been more likely to vote than men (Center for American Women and Politics 2009).This article seeks to distinguish why inconsistencies in the literature for gender differences in abortion attitudes emerge. Differences in model specification often produce such discrepancies. These inconsistencies should be investigated so that as political scientists and public opinion researchers, we can better understand how different model specifications, or in other

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Gender and the Politics of Marijuana

“…Thus, even though women tend to be more liberal and Democratic overall, their greater religious commitment relative to men pushes them toward more conservative positions on issues with a moral dimension, such as access to pornography, allowing prayer in school, and divorce (Eagly et al., ; Seltzer, Newman, and Leighton, ). Along similar lines, Lizotte () shows that even though men and women have roughly similar attitudes on abortion in the aggregate, that once women's greater religiosity is controlled for, there is in fact a gender gap on the issue of abortion with women more likely than men to support pro‐choice positions. It is plausible that some Americans also see marijuana policy as a morality issue.…”

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