PREDICTING STATE ABORTION LEGISLATION FROM U.S. SENATE VOTES: THE EFFECTS OF APPARENT IDEOLOGICAL SHIRKING |
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| Authors: | Stephan F. Gohmann Robert L. Ohsfeldt |
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| Affiliation: | Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Louisville. His past research primarily has focused on the effects of social security and private pension design on retirement decisions and other aspects of labor markets. Other current areas of interest include the effects of abortion and other inputs on infant health outcomes, the economics of AIDS-related legislation, and benefit-cost analysis of alterna- tive infertility treatments.;Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His past research has been published in theAmerican Economic Review, Review ofEconomics and Statistics, Journal of Human Resources, Public Choice, Medical Care, and a number of other journals. His current research interests include methods of financing long term care and their impact on demand, the effect of abortion availability on infant health, and the economics of state health insurance regulation. |
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| 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. |
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