Paper
Buyuker, B.E., Hoffacker, C., Jozkowski, K.N., Crawford. B.L., Turner, R.C., & Lo, W. (2023, August 31-September 3). Attitudes About Government and Support for Legal Abortion in the U.S. American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Meeting, Los Angles, California.
Scholars have shown widespread mistrust of government among the American public
(e.g., Lerman, 2019). Moreover, the public’s view about government involvement often depends on specific policies (Pew Research Center 2020). For instance, issues such as terrorism and immigration often draw support for a large governmental role (Pew Research Center 2020), while a libertarian minority wants less government involvement regardless of the issue (Fleurbey, 2018). To date, this research does not extend its findings to study how people perceive the government’s role in abortion, even though the abortion debate attracts prime attention in US politics both at the federal and the states level.
A second line of research on abortion documents that individual-level characteristics such as education, religiosity, party identification, and political ideology are key predictors of public support for legal abortion (e.g., Lizotte, 2015; Smith, 2016; Jozkowski et al., 2018). However, this research does not directly investigate how individual attitudes toward federal and state government involvement influence support for abortion legality.
This project examines how public attitudes toward the role of federal and state governments are influenced by individual support for legal abortions in Texas and Mississippi. To answer this question, we used a mixed methods approach. First, we conducted a longitudinal study by using a nationally representative sample of English and Spanish-speaking U.S. adults via Ipsos’ Knowledge Panel. We fielded Wave 1 with 1,045 US adults in June 2022, right before the Dobbs decision, and wave 2 with the in October 2022. Then, we analyzed in-depth interviews to better understand how participants’ perceptions of federal and state government involvement are related to their attitudes toward abortion legality. Findings from this study may shed lights understanding of the public’s view on federal and state government’s role in regulating abortion in the context of increased legislative attempts at the state level to limit abortion access and the US Supreme Court’s decision on Dobbs v. Jackson.