PREDICTING STATE ABORTION LEGISLATION FROM U.S. SENATE VOTES: THE EFFECTS OF APPARENT IDEOLOGICAL SHIRKING

Stephan F. Gohmann and Robert L. Ohsfeldt

Review of Policy Research, 1990, vol. 9, issue 4, 749-762

Abstract: The recent Supreme Court decision in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services giving more discretion to states to regulate abortion has led to speculation concerning which states might move to limit abortions. Medoff (1989) attempts to predict how state legislatures might vote on state‐level abortion legislation by examining the 1983 Senate vote on the Hatch/Eagleton Amendment. We expand upon Medoff's analysis by incor‐ porating recent developments in agency theory as it applies to the political agents (i.e., Senators) in the empirical model. The results demonstrate that accounting for Senatorial “shirking” and state ideology substantially im‐ proves the predictive ability of the model for the Senate abortion vote. The predicted votes of the state's Senators, after eliminating the effects of apparent Senatorial shirking, are used to infer the likelihood of state‐level legislation substantially restricting abortion. We compare these results to a base model that ignores the issue of shirking and find increased predict‐ ability and several differing results.

Date: 1990
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