In the spring of 2011, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives took high-profile votes that would have eliminated all funding for Planned Parenthood and made it far more difficult for American women to have abortions paid for through their private health insurance. These votes are inconsistent with accounts that Congress avoids highly contentious issues and that pro-life activists are ideological purists unwilling to compromise. In this book, Ainsworth and Hall explore the incremental politics of abortion in the U.S. House, focusing on the ways in which House members have balanced the passion of the issue with the procedural detail of congressional policymaking.
This is not a book centered in gender politics, but rather in the logic of institutions. The first half is focused on the strategic logic of incrementalism on an issue about which many legislators have ideal points far from the status quo. Chapter 2 begins with a thoughtful review of past scholarship on incremental policymaking, and then explores a variety of factors that can lead to incrementalism in policymaking, including incomplete information by legislators and the fear of sabotage and countermobilization.
In Chapter 3, Ainsworth and Hall explore the importance of the distribution of preferences in the House (measured by Nominate scores), and takes into account preferences of the median legislator as well as the supermajority legislator needed to pass constitutional amendments. This analysis shows that as the GOP ranks grew, it was easier to pass incremental abortion legislation but no easier to pass amendments because of the growing partisan division in policy preferences. The authors also map the ideological distances between the median floor vote and the median vote in key committees such as Judiciary and Armed Services. In the final section, they explore the public's ambivalence on abortion, which, they claim, allows legislators some wiggle room to address the abortion issue. Thus, legislators consider the balance of preferences in the chamber and in their districts in their policy proposals and votes.
In Chapter 4, the authors provide an interesting legislative history of the abortion issue. They note not only the evolving nature of abortion-related proposals but also the way that abortion has entered into broader debates over defense appropriations, United Nations and Washington, DC, appropriations, and other issues. They show that legislative sessions that include more abortion-related votes also accomplish less. Chapter 5 models the type of legislator who introduces incremental and nonincremental legislation. Most abortion-related legislation has been pro-life, in part because Roe set the status quo at a pro-choice position. The somewhat surprising result is, therefore, that a majority of bills introduced by almost every group in the House are pro-choice—and this is true among even those most liberal on Nominate scores. Catholics are the most likely to introduce nonincremental measures, such as constitutional amendments, but this has declined over time as it has become evident that such measures do not pass.
In Chapter 6, the authors explore the internal dynamics of House legislative action on abortion bills, especially committee referrals. Most abortion bills in the 1970s were referred to the Judiciary Committee, but in later congresses abortion began to permeate a range of other policy areas, and abortion-related bills were assigned to a range of other committees. Judiciary referrals are more common with Democratic control, and also in sessions where the median Democrat on the committee is more conservative; presumably in other sessions, legislators have a greater incentive to write bills in ways that lead to their referral to other more favorable committees.
There is much to like about this book. It takes seriously assumptions of rational choice theory, it takes the substance of the abortion issue seriously, and it takes politics seriously. It is not common to read a book that has, in the same chapter, one appendix that develops more fully a formal model and a second appendix that lists all of the members of Congress who have sponsored multiple abortion measures. The book lays out a compelling analysis of the constraints and wiggle room of individual legislators to try to influence abortion policy, without paying too high an electoral cost. The book assumes that legislators seek to maximize the votes on abortion measures, rather than proposing the most radical measure that can muster a majority, because it is easier to explain votes to constituents if many other members voted the same way. The preference for a measure that garners a large majority probably varies across members, but it is a reasonable assumption.
The empirical results are interesting, but because the real world limits our possible data, they are sometimes difficult to interpret. For example, on pages 173–74, the authors find that pro-life media attention affects the fate of measures referred to Judiciary but not to other committees, and that Republicans are far more successful than Democrats in the Appropriations Committee, where the sponsor's ideological extremism is positively associated with the success of his or her proposal. The authors provide all of the necessary caveats.
The book explores differing legislative behavior across religious groups but does not consider possible gender differences. This is surprising, since a number of studies have shown that women in the House vote differently on abortion bills than do men. For readers of this journal, the omission will certainly be disappointing.
Overall, however, Abortion Politics in Congress is an exemplar for work that seeks to explain the way that institutions, the distribution of opinion inside and outside of the chamber, and the substance of an issue interact to influence policy. The explosion of issues into which abortion has been insinuated is a logical response to political constraints and opportunities. The authors show that although abortion sparks extraordinary passion, it produces somewhat more ordinary political behavior in the House.
