The Political Economy of Vermont’s Abortion Bill

Shishir Shakya, Elham Erfanian () and Alexandre Scarcioffolo ()
Additional contact information
Elham Erfanian: Department of Agricultural Economics, University of Kentucky
Alexandre Scarcioffolo: Department of Economics and Finance, Georgia College & State University

Working Papers from Regional Research Institute, West Virginia University

Abstract: Public choice literature divides the rationality of voting between instrumental and expressive. In this paper, we take the Vermont legislature in passing the H. 57 bill as a case to explain some of the determinants of expressive voting empirically. The H.57 bill declares that no government entity can interfere with, or restrict, a consenting individual’s right to abortion care across the entire gestation period. However, the bill has not changed the previously states quo of the state towards abortion rights. Thus, it creates a situation in which we can analyze the legislator’s voting behavior through the lens of expressive voting framework. We utilize a high dimensional dataset and post-double-selection LASSO method to explain the channels that influence the expressive voting on the H. 57 bill. We web scrape the lower and upper chamber voting data on H.57 bill and use the 2017 American Community Survey 5-year estimates to retrieve 89 different socioeconomic, housing, and demographic characteristics of State Legislative Districts. Our results suggest channels of poverty, gender, and population diversity are some crucial mechanisms.

Keywords: Expressive voting; LASSO; Abortion; Vermont (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 7 pages
Date: 2020-10-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/rri_pubs/216/ (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The political economy of Vermont’s abortion bill (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:rri:wpaper:2020wp04

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