Stasis and Sorting of Americans’ Abortion Opinions: Political Polarization Added to Religious and Other Differences

Hout, Michael, Stuart Perrett & Sarah K. Cowan

Published in Socius 8 (2022)

Americans disagree on legal abortion now about as much as they did in the 1970s, but their attitudes now sort much more according to political identity. Differences of opinion by religion, gender, race, and work that were key to understanding abortion attitudes in the 1970s persisted through 2021. The General Social Survey shows that first conservatives increased their opposition to legal abortion rights; their mean score dropped 1.1 points (on a 6-point scale) from 3.8 to 2.7 from 1974 to 2004. As conservatives’ opinions leveled off, liberals increased their support of abortion rights from 4.7 in 2004 to 5.3 or 5.4 in 2021 (because of Covid-19, survey mode changed, creating uncertainty about the sources of change). Women were significantly more divided by political ideology than men were throughout the time series, but gendered political differences did not displace or reduce religious, educational, racial, or work-life differences.

Category: Abortion, Public Opinion, Political Sociology

Discordant benevolence: How and why people help others in the face of conflicting values

Cowan, Sarah K. , Tricia C. Bruce, Brea L. Perry, Bridget Ritz*, Stuart Perrett* & Elizabeth M. Anderson*

Published in Science Advances 8 (7), 2022

What happens when a request for help from friends or family members invokes conflicting values? In answering this question, we integrate and extend two literatures: support provision within social networks and moral decision-making. We examine the willingness of Americans who deem abortion immoral to help a close friend or family member seeking one. Using data from the General Social Survey and 74 in-depth interviews from the National Abortion Attitudes Study, we find that a substantial minority of Americans morally opposed to abortion would enact what we call discordant benevolence: providing help when doing so conflicts with personal values. People negotiate discordant benevolence by discriminating among types of help and by exercising commiseration, exemption, or discretion. This endeavor reveals both how personal values affect social support processes and how the nature of interaction shapes outcomes of moral decision-making.

Category: Abortion, Public Opinion, Political Sociology, Social Networks

Updating A Time-Series of Survey Questions: The Case of Abortion Attitudes in the General Social Survey

Cowan, Sarah K., Michael Hout & Stuart Perrett*

Published in Sociological Methods & Research, 2022

Long-running surveys need a systematic way to reflect social change and to keep items relevant to respondents, especially when they ask about controversial subjects, or they threaten the items' validity. We propose a protocol for updating measures that preserves content and construct validity. First, substantive experts articulate the current and anticipated future terms of debate. Then survey experts use this substantive input and their knowledge of existing measures to develop and pilot a large battery of new items. Third, researchers analyze the pilot data to select items for the survey of record. Finally, the items appear on the survey-of-record, available to the whole user community. Surveys-of-record have procedures for changing content that determine if the new items appear just once or become part of the core. We provide the example of developing new abortion attitude measures in the General Social Survey. Current questions ask whether abortion should be legal under varying circumstances. The new abortion items ask about morality, access, state policy, and interpersonal dynamics. They improve content and construct validity and add new insights into Americans' abortion attitudes.

Category: Abortion, Measurement, Public Opinion, Political Sociology

COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Is the New Terrain for Political Division among Americans

Cowan, Sarah K., Nicholas Mark* & Jennifer A. Reich

Published in Socius 7 (2021)

Politically conservative Americans are less likely than those who identify as liberal to report a willingness to get a vaccine against coronavirus disease 2019. Using data from the Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus Survey from November 2020 to February 2021, the authors find that this partisan divide in vaccine hesitancy has increased over time. Recent scholarship has suggested that these differences can be attributed to personal characteristics, including varying levels of trust in institutions. The authors find that although the data supported this hypothesis in mid-November, by early February differences in demographics, concern about the pandemic, and institutional trust no longer explained the partisan gap. The authors explain the deepening divide by turning to recent evidence that political party affiliation has become a source of identity that shapes personal decision making.

Category: Public Opinion, Political Sociology

“It could turn ugly”: Selective Disclosure of Political Views and Biased Network Perception

Cowan, Sarah K., and Delia Baldassarri

Published in Social Networks 52 (2018)

This article documents individuals selectively disclosing their political attitudes and the consequences for social influence and the democratic process. Using a large, diverse sample of American adults, we find Americans keep their political attitudes secret specifically from those with whom they disagree. As such, they produce the experience of highly homogeneous social contexts, in which only liberal or conservative views are voiced, while dissent remains silent, and often times goes unacknowledged. This experience is not the result of homogeneous social contexts but the appearance of them. Pervasive selective disclosure creates a gap between the objective social network and the perceived social network in which political agreement is over-estimated. On the micro-level, the processes of social influence on the formation and modification of political attitudes that occur when people converse with those with whom they disagree are thwarted and on the macro-level, this mechanism of selective disclosure leads to the perception of a greatly polarized public opinion.

Category: Public Opinion, Secrets, Social Networks

* indicates student co-author