AMERICAN POLITICS & PUBLIC POLICY WORKSHOP
Abstract: A tenet of representative democracy is the responsiveness of elected officials to the preferences of their constituents. Two and a half years after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, this study investigates whether state level abortion laws align with the will of the American people. To answer this question, I compile an original dataset of state level laws and state level public opinion (N = 30,240). I find a significant disconnect: abortion laws are often misaligned with public opinion. I offer two explanations for this disconnect: standard binary survey measures, which oversimplify the complexity of attitudes, and the outsized influence of elite opinion, which tends to be more extreme than mass level opinion. These findings challenge prior research suggesting that state-level lawmaking is generally responsive to public opinion and raise important questions about the functioning of democratic governance in the context of abortion policymaking.
Natalie Hernandez is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Yale University. Her research interests are in American politics, public opinion and survey methodology, with an emphasis on the politics of abortion. Natalie employs a mixed-methods approach, combining large-scale public opinion surveys, experiments, and qualitative interviews. Before Yale, Natalie worked at the Boston Consulting Group and earned her B.A. in Political Science and Spanish from the University of Pennsylvania.
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