Abstract
Scholars of “morality policies” have often assumed a signature characteristic of such policies is that advocates will frame them as clashes between fundamental moral and religious principles. Recent studies of issues typically considered under the “morality policy” rubric have found that advocates often frame these issues along multiple dimensions and that they do not necessarily favor frames that emphasize moral principles over other considerations. This paper examines this issue for abortion policy. We analyze verbatim records of debates over 26 recent proposals to restrict abortion rights in the 16 states for which data are available. We found that both sides in debates over abortion restrictions framed the issue along several dimensions with no single frame dominating most of the debates. While there is some empirical support for the morality policy perspective, the frequency that advocates employed morality frames was less than we expected given the disproportionately high levels of evangelical Protestant membership in the states we examined. Rather than simply casting the debate as one over irreconcilable moral principles, the two sides’ strategies often converged by framing the issue in terms of various consequences of abortion and abortion restrictions for women. Advocates propensity to frame the issue in terms of “right to life” versus “woman’s choice” principles rose when one side or the other escalated rhetoric about “life” or “choice” principles (inducing the other to respond in kind). Our data thus conform to the logic of a game of tit-for-tat in which individuals follow a strategy of “retaliation” if their opponents frame issues in highly moralized, judgmental terms, or they “cooperate” by emphasizing how their preferred policy will promote some widely shared value (like women’s welfare or the authoritativeness of medical research). “Morality talk” was also more prevalent when the debates were about bans on abortion rather than other types of restrictions. The broad implication of our findings is that the propensity of advocates to frame issues in terms of fundamental moral principles has less to do with the general subject matter or issue area (e.g., abortion) and more to do with the context of debate and strategic considerations.
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Notes
Two other large literatures examine whether citizens are susceptible to “framing effects” (see Druckman 2001; Schuldt et al. 2011; Nelson et al. 1997; Chong and Druckman 2007) and how social movements frame issues in order to recruit and mobilize participants (Gamson 1992; Snow and Benford 1988, 1992; Benford and Snow 2000; Jasper and Poulson 1995).
In our study, we do not examine what Mooney and Schuldt (2008, 4) call the “secondary features” of morality policy, such as “lack of compromise, technical simplicity, and widespread citizen participation.”
The bans on abortion at 20 weeks will not affect the vast majority of abortions, which take place within the first trimester of pregnancy. The burdens imposed by the TRAP laws fall disproportionately upon poor women living in rural areas.
The majority opinion in Roe v. Wade framed abortion as a medical-humanitarian and women’s rights issue, two frames that appeared in earlier legislative efforts to reform abortion laws and the women’s movement (Burns 2005, 223). Similarly, the Court’s majority opinion in Gonzalez v. Carhart, which upheld a federal ban on “partial birth” abortion, borrowed from arguments that state legislatures made earlier about alleged harm to women from abortions (Rose 2011, 1, 2).
Jerit (2008) and Karch and Rosenthal (2017) contrast “engagement” with “framing.” Our study focuses exclusively on framing strategies. Frame convergence is necessary for engagement, but not sufficient. Engagement requires dialogue. If one side in the abortion debate talks about the consequences for women of abortion and the other of abortion restrictions, we consider that to be convergence because both sides are framing the issue in terms of consequences for women. But they are not engaged in a dialogue since one side is making an empirical claim about the consequences related to abortion and the other about restrictions on abortion. Engagement requires both sides to speak to the same claim.
The social movement literature’s emphasis on cultural resonance is directed at explaining how movements recruit and mobilize members rather than the framing of issues.
Since fetal heartbeat can be detected significantly earlier than 20 weeks, it is a more stringent restriction than the 20-week ban. We combined the data for the 20-week ban with the data for the fetal heartbeat ban because both constitute a single type of restrictions (bans) and because very few speeches (only 3% of the total) deal with fetal heart beat bans.
Archived video or audio recordings were readily accessible in most cases online from state legislative websites or a local public television station. Virginia and the North Carolina Senate sent us their debates on compact disks. The other states that enacted restrictions either did not record their floor debates (IN, KS, MT), or did not archive debates from earlier sessions (ND), or the records were no longer available when we sought to retrieve them (VA Senate for 2011 debate sought in 2014). Other legislatures made records available for one chamber, but not for the other (AR), or debate occurred only on the floor of one chamber (OH).
The alternative would have been to specify frames at the outset and use machine coding. We decided that manual coding allowed us to develop an exhaustive list of frame categories, uncover the myriad ways in which speakers express frames, and categorize them properly. Also, machine coding would have required costly and time-consuming transcription of the debates.
Extremely Hostile: LA, OH, UT; Hostile: GA, MI, OK, TX, FL, VA, AR; Not Hostile: NH, MN, NC, TN, AZ, WI.
Overall, restriction supporters depended more heavily on the “right to life” frame than the opponents relied on the “woman’s choice” frame (38–28%, respectively; the difference is significant with p <=.01) (Table 1). However, the differences diminish if we aggregate the data from the level of speeches to the level of debates. Looking only at the debates in which opponents or supporters gave 10 or more speeches, one-third of the debates for each side included the “life” or “choice” frames. But for the remainder of those debates, restriction supporters placed more emphasis on “life” than opponents did on “choice.”
For restriction opponents, the specific “consequences for women” included “women’s health and safety,” “burdens on women” (emotional, financial and practical, “makes abortion more difficult to access,” “abortion is safe at 20 weeks,” and “legislation will fail to inform women of all their options.” For supporters, the frames were “restrictions protect women’s health and safety,” “restrictions provide women with informed consent,” “abortion unsafe,” and ‘abortion is unsafe/harms women.”
Restriction opponents used “medical/scientific” frames that included “interferes with the doctor-patient relationship and usurping the role of physicians,” “restrictions not necessary/appropriate,” “fetal abnormalities difficult to detect,” “damages doctors and creates a shortage of ob-gyns,” for “ignores medical experts opposed to the restrictions,” “singles out abortion doctors for regulation,” and “research/experts for supporters are faulty/biased.” Restriction supporters argued that “doctors and scientific experts support proposal” and “opponents’ data flawed or studies biased.”
While the data in Tables 1 and 2 suggest a significant level of frame convergence at the speech level, the pattern at the level of debates is more complicated. We looked at head-to-head comparisons of the top frames for each side in the 19 separate chamber debates that featured at least 5 speeches on each side. When we compare the leading frame used by each side, both sides converged (on the “consequences for women” frame) twice as often as they diverged (on the “life versus choice” frames) by 6 to 3. And the debates with the largest number of speeches tended to fit the convergence pattern. The largest number of debates (10) were ones that fit neither the convergence or divergence patterns, but featured one side stressing “consequences for women” and the other either “life” or “choice.”
We separately tested the model, substituting the Lax and Phillips liberalism score with the Erikson et al. (1993, 67) measure of states’ public opinion as liberal/conservative. In that model, the main findings on the effects of the type of bill and the share of previous speakers using morality framing hold, while the EWM conservatism score is negative and statistically significant, suggesting “life/choice” framing was more likely in states with more liberal public opinion. We include the Lax and Phillips (2012) measure in our model as it is a more recent estimate and the methodology used by the authors (multilevel regression and post-stratification) has been shown to produce reliable estimates (Lax and Phillips 2009).
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Mucciaroni, G., Ferraiolo, K. & Rubado, M.E. Framing morality policy issues: state legislative debates on abortion restrictions. Policy Sci 52, 171–189 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-018-9336-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-018-9336-2