Public Opinion and Policymaking in the States: The Case of Post-Roe Abortion Policy

Whether public opinion should be expected to play a role in the shaping of abortion legislation in the states is a debatable question. Representation is a difficult task, especially if legislators receive mixed cues from the public, activists, and the political parties. In this study, we find that grass-roots activism and public opinion tend to match, and both are reflected in state abortion policy. In addition, more Pro-Life policies are found in states with a tradition of conservative policies in other areas, Republican majorities in the state legislature, more Catholic residents, and fewer women legislators. These patterns hold true for a composite index of abortion policies and for the specific policy area of government funding of abortions. Slightly different patterns occur for parental consent laws, though these statutes also tend to reflect general preferences on abortion and interest group activity in a state.     

Healthcare not airfare! Art,abortion and political agency in Ireland

Ireland’s near-total abortion ban was, in effect, a policy of offshoring abortions. Before the May 2018 vote to repeal it, the 8th Amendment allowed for conservative and nationalist groups to celebrate the idea of Ireland as an ‘abortion-free’ territory, while forcing women to travel to England for abortion or self-manage abortions with illegal pills at home. Artists in the Irish pro-choice movement have contested the public silence around abortion and abortion-travel; in doing so they have disrupted the political narrative of ‘abortion-free Ireland’ by symbolically re-placing Irish abortion seekers in public spaces. These place-based artistic interventions have larger significance for the changing relationship between women, reproduction, and the state. Drawing on ongoing debates in critical and feminist geopolitics, this article addresses the relationship between geopolitics, art, and political agency to theorize the role of pro-choice Irish artworks in challenging the enforced silence that surrounded abortion travel. It builds on geographical engagement with Jacques Rancière to address the feminist geopolitics critique of geopolitical scales and sites of ‘serious’ geopolitics. The article examines three artworks that depict Irish women’s experiences of abortion-related travel to England as part of the larger political campaign for liberalization of Ireland’s abortion laws.     

Abortion and eugenics

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a revolution within foetal diagnostics. In roughly the same period, legal measures in many countries permitted the termination of pregnancies in cases of suspected foetal abnormalities. Critics have claimed that the resulting abortion policies resemble the old, state‐imposed eugenics of the early 20th century. This article presents some evidence to the contrary. In Norway, which is the article's main topic of concern, so‐called eugenic clauses in the abortion legislation were passed well before the revolution in foetal diagnostics. More importantly, other motives were historically more significant than eugenics for the development of modern Norwegian abortion policies. Consequently, any eugenic effect of these policies should be considered a result of coincidence rather than design – or so the article argues. Brief comparisons with the other Nordic countries are included.     

Managing National Diversity through Political Structures and Ideologies: The Soviet Experience in Comparative Perspective

Abstract. The nationalisms faced by Gorbachev after 1985 were an outcome of Soviet policies, and most of them were not secessionist. Why, then, couldn't the Soviet state accommodate them? This article puts Soviet attempts to manage ethnic diversity into a comparative perspective, and looks at some of the ways in which the ideology and political structures of the USSR contributed to its failure to overcome its ethnic problems. Like other authoritarian states, the Soviet state was not based on consensus, and some of its policies exacerbated rather than diminished differences between ethnic groups. Moreover, the absence of intellectual and political pluralism, and the inflexibility of Soviet political structures made it difficult for the Soviet leadership to reconcile differences between the centre and the union republics and between ethnic groups, and this rigidity contributed to the disintegration of the USSR.     

‘The first duties of persons living in a civilized community’: the Maya, the Church, and the colonial state in southern Belize

In recent years, historical geography has been at the forefront of new scholarship on the spatiality of colonial power and its complex relations with indigenous communities. This literature shows that imperial policies – emerging through state and scientific institutions, cultural practices, and capitalist ventures – required particular ways of conceptualizing, mapping, and organizing spaces and territories which transformed the geographies of indigenous communities, livelihoods, and identities. Through a close reading of archival texts from the late 19th and early 20th century, this paper examines the spatial and political relations between three groups: the Catholic Church, the British colonial state, and the Maya communities of southern British Honduras. Differences between the Catholic Church and the British colonial state – in their aims and approach to winning hegemony over the Q'eqchi' and Mopan Maya – were accommodated and assuaged by a tacit agreement: that the Maya must be settled in permanent communities. Colonial power, in both its spiritual and statist modalities, was imminently geographical, and this geography comprised the common ground between Church and state in their approach to the Maya.     

Nationalism,religion, and abortion policy in four Catholic societies

Over the last decade, a growing number of scholars have tackled the changing relationship between national identity and social policy. In this article, we explore the relationship between abortion policy and the historical and political construction of national identity as it relates to religious norms and symbols. Focusing on two main cases, Ireland and Poland, Catholic societies in which abortion rights are severely restricted, we argue that, in political discourse and institutions, a strong relationship between the Catholic Church and national identity helps opponents of abortion enact and maintain such restrictions in the name of religious norms embedded in strong claims about national identity. After exploring these two main cases, we briefly turn to Spain and Québec, Catholic societies that, in recent decades, have witnessed a secularisation of their national identity correlated to a liberalisation of abortion rights. This suggests that, at least in Catholic societies, the decline of a religious national identity is likely to favour a liberalisation of abortion rights.     

State restructuring,urban competitiveness policies and technopole building in Finland: a critical view on the glocal state thesis

This article examines processes of state restructuring and technopole formation in Finland and in the Helsinki region and takes a critical stand towards the glocal state thesis. The relationship between the nation state and the capital region cities is analysed by focusing on the implications of recent national technology, regional and economic policy measures on the Helsinki region cities and on their responses to national policies. The characteristics of new urban competitiveness policies of the Helsinki region cities are scrutinized with particular attention to the efforts of constructing technopoles as new technology-based agglomerations of research and business activities. The article concludes that the glocal state thesis is inaccurate to describe the Finnish situation as it provides a picture of the nation state that is monolithic and too rigid. In some respects, the developments in Finland have moved in an almost opposite direction.     

Authoritarian power in space,time and exile

Autocrats have been shown to exert influence over their populations and dissidents abroad through strategies such as ‘transnational repression’ or ‘diaspora engagement’ policies, demonstrating that authoritarian power carries across borders. But existing work on extra-territorial authoritarian power has tended to view state power as a stand-alone variable that endows regimes with a relatively free hand to make their own diaspora policies. This is despite that studies of authoritarianism inside states, including those observing the ‘dynamics of contention,’ have consistently highlighted the relational and contingent nature of authoritarian power. This paper asks whether the iterative dynamics of contention that describe regime-opposition relations within state boundaries endure between authoritarian regimes and their exiles? It brings together the literatures on extra-territorial authoritarian power and the topology of power with that on contentious politics in authoritarian regimes to undertake a case study on the relationship between the Syrian government and the exiled Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. It finds that extra-territorial authoritarian is relational and contingent on the political context and its recipients, and shares many of the characteristics of authoritarian power inside state boundaries.     

INCOME INEQUALITY,ECONOMIC GROWTH,AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF INCOME GAINS: EVIDENCE FROM THE U.S. STATES*

ABSTRACT This paper first investigates a relationship between economic growth and income inequality using U.S. states data, a state cost‐of‐living deflator, and nonlinearity. It then explores the distribution of income gains among different income groups. We find that the impact of inequality on growth is nonlinear. Lowering inequality or increasing it substantially reduces growth; thus stable inequality may be good for growth. Economic growth affects incomes of the poor, the middle‐income group, and the rich similarly with the elasticity of one. Education and labor market policies become important in promoting growth and improving income gains of the poor.     

Everyday Mediation: The Politics of Public Service Delivery in Gujarat,India

This article follows a municipal councillor in Ahmedabad (Gujarat, India) on his daily routine in order to explore the various ways in which politicians in India operate as mediators between state institutions and citizens. Political mediation is deeply entrenched in the procedures, policies and habits that guide the daily functioning of Gujarat's state institutions. This article argues that this institutionalization of political mediation is the outcome of a dialectic between the limited capacity of the state to provide public services and the strategies that local politicians employ to win elections.     

Speaking of silence,speaking of art,abortion and Ireland

Sounding the Depths a collaborative installation by Pauline Cummins and Louise Walsh, 1992 reclaimed the female body appropriated by the Eight Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland and symbolically opened it up to speak and even laugh in defiance of patriarchal and heteronormative definitions of “woman”. First exhibited in 1992, the artwork was addressed to the silencing of women about abortion and other denigrated bodily experiences in a deeply repressive social and political climate. More recent artworks which challenge how women’s reproductive bodies are controlled by the state evidence the continued relevance of these themes as related to the Irish contexts, North and South. This essay considers how art and contemporary pro-choice arts activism explores ways of “saying the unsayable” when abortion is criminalised, stigmatised and largely experienced secretly and silently, to transform its symbols and discourse.     

The Preemptive Power of State Supreme Courts: Adoption of Abortion and Death Penalty Legislation

We offer a theory about public policy adoption that depicts a game between state supreme courts and state policymakers. We hypothesize that court ideological hostility or friendliness operates to discourage or encourage policy enactment, with the likelihood of subsequent court intervention magnifying the relationship. To test the argument we examine the influence of court ideology on the enactment of state abortion and death penalty laws since the 1970s. Empirical analyses provide strong support for our theory, indicating that court ideological hostility or friendliness significantly influenced state abortion and death penalty policy enactments. In addition, the likelihood of court intervention conditioned this relationship, with the most pronounced effect occurring where subsequent court review was mandatory. The findings reveal courts exert important preemptive influence on law without hearing a case. This facet of judicial influence expands the traditional view of actors involved in the policymaking process.     

Invisible radiation reveals who we are as people: environmental complexity,gendered risk,and biopolitics after the Fukushima nuclear disaster

The March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, and the subsequent tsunami and release of nuclear contamination from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, is clearly one of the largest disasters of the past century and it has devastated large portions of eastern Japan. In this paper we explore the coping mechanisms of people navigating these landscapes of contamination, as well as examine state policies developed to deal with the disaster. We argue that there has been a significant discrepancy between state policies and the needs of people directly affected by the catastrophe. To more fully examine why this discrepancy exists – and how it is produced – we investigate the complex geographies of contamination and risk near the damaged Fukushima power plant through the conceptual lens of ‘wet ontologies’ coupled with an analysis of state strategies for the governance of the affected populations. In our research we found that Foucauldian theorizations on biopower, neoliberalism and environmental governance can help explain how nuclear power as a social institution can require states to sacrifice the well-being of hundreds of thousands of their citizens in ways that affect people in gendered and age-specific ways.     

Nationalism,Ethnicity and Religion: Fundamental Conflicts and the Politics of Identity in Tanzania

Abstract. This article explores the competing relations between ethnic, religious and racial identities in contemporary Tanzania at a time of rapid socioeconomic change and in the face of the declining authority and legitimacy of the state. During nearly four decades of one-party rule the state has pursued policies - educational, linguistic, developmental, etc. - aimed at constructing a secular national identity capable of uniting diverse social groups under the banner of African socialism. However, economic retrenchment in the 1980s and political liberalisation in the 1990s has contributed directly to a series of upheavals leading many Tanzanians to redefine the structures of common difference and to a fracturing of national identity. This article seeks to understand the reasons for the upsurge of conflict and cultural fragmentation in the 1990s.     

Social Constructions,Anticipatory Feedback Strategies,and Deceptive Public Policy

Elected leaders adopt “anticipatory feedback strategies” in designing public policies that generate support and forestall opposition. This contention is at the core of a social construction theory of feedback. Officials anticipate approval when policies allocate benefits to powerful groups socially constructed as deserving and allocate costs or punishment to groups viewed as undeserving, particularly if these groups lack political power. Designs for powerful groups that are widely viewed as unworthy provide mainly benefits in ways that are hidden from the general public who would not approve. For politically weak groups regarded as deserving, legislators generally design policies that provide promises, but not much in terms of material benefits. Often, deception will be used to protect or enhance this particular allocation pattern, including the reinforcement, perpetuation, or change in the social constructions along with the stereotypes, labels, stigma, and accompanying narratives. Using data from legislation introduced by the 2016 Arizona Legislature, we find that most policy is directed toward providing benefits to positively viewed target populations, as expected by the theory, and legislators employ deceptive feedback strategies that protect themselves. Feedback from the general public, which otherwise might be expected, may be precluded by the deceptive strategies being used.     

PRESSURE POLITICS REVISITED: THE ANTI-ABORTION CAMPAIGN*

This article focuses on the anti-abortion campaign as an extreme example of pressure group operations. After a review of the history of the abortion controversy, the recent activities of anti-abortion groups are assessed in the state of Pennsylvania. A comparison to the Anti-Saloon League is examined, and the article concludes with speculations about the probable consequences and future of such closely defined single interest groups.     

Compared to What? Changes in Interest Group Resources and the Proposal and Adoption of State Teacher Policy

What is the relationship between changes in interest group resources and the proposal and adoption of state policy? Using a dataset of proposed and enacted teacher policies across five legislative cycles in all 50 states and measures of interest group relative and absolute resource strength, I estimate a series of within-state fixed effects models that gain identification from changes in interest group resources and teacher policy over time. I find that legislatures propose more unfavorable and fewer favorable policies toward teachers' unions in states where teachers' union opposition interest groups are expending more election (but not lobbying) resources over time. Further, I find that more unfavorable and fewer favorable policies are adopted in states where teachers' union opposition groups are growing in election resource strength. Expanding on prior empirical work, this study suggests that interest group resources matter for policy change and highlights the importance of capturing interest group resource dynamics over time.     

Dreams of the old country: A room of one's own

This article reports the findings of a study concerning the politicization of abortion in Finland in the first half of the 20th century. The focus is on discussions and debates in the legal and medical professions, 1900?1950, showing the historical transformation of abortion from a criminal act to a medical issue, legalized by the 1950 abortion law. The argument throughout is that the strongest motivation for legalization of abortion in Finland was the perceived negative effect of criminal abortions on the population growth. The article also shows that the abortion debate was linked to the formation of a maternity care system and the development of the medical promotion of birth control. Thus the context for the line of argumentation is the formation of the Finnish welfare state and the medicalization of maternity.     

Creating Choice: A Community Responds to the Need for Abortion and Birth Control, 1961-1973

Creating Choice is an important collection of edited interviewswith individuals involved in the movement to secure women'saccess to birth control and abortion in western Massachusettsin the decades surrounding the Supreme Court's pivotal rulings,Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 decision that legalized contraceptiveuse by married couples, and Roe v. Wade, the 1973 abortion rightscase. The collection broadens the historical treatment of thismovement, introducing activists from grassroots women's organizationsand accentuating the contributions of professionals—clergy,medical practitioners, and health educators—who establishednetworks and services that made free choice possible for somewomen even before state law extended     

From expectations to aspirations: State modernisation,urban policy,and the existential politics of welfare in the UK

The form and character of the British welfare state is undergoing another round of reform. Welfare modernisation now focuses on the creation of ‘aspirational citizens’ in deprived areas or communities, individuals, and groups who will ‘better’ themselves and become more like an imagined social ‘mainstream’. Old-fashioned policies that promoted expectations of improvement have been replaced by this focus on encouraging new forms of self-reliant, aspirational citizenship. This paper interrogates the nature of this discursive shift. It argues that an existential politics, built around notions of aspiration, is being rolled-out across the British welfare state and that this has significant material and political implications. It begins by critically assessing the terms aspiration and expectation. It then draws on recent urban and spatial policy agendas to empirically explore the nature of this shift and its wider effects on urban societies, economies, and environments before concluding with a discussion of possible future research directions and agendas.