Ted G. Jelen

Between two absolutes : public opinion and the politics of abortion

The authors examine changes in public attitudes toward abortion in the United States. They suggest that control of abortion is being removed from the federal courts and put into the hands of elected officials at both federal and state levels and that public opinion on abortion will therefore come to play an increasing role in the molding of abortion policy. They examine the factors that influence peoples abortion attitudes the role of religion in shaping those attitudes and the consequences of abortion attitudes for electoral politics. (ANNOTATION)Abstract The new Penal Code in 2009 was an opportunity for Timor-Leste to allow some legal grounds for abortion, which was highly restricted under Indonesian rule. Public debate was contentious before ratification of the new code, which allowed abortion to save a woman’s life and health. A month later, 13 amendments to the code were passed, highly restricting abortion again. This paper describes the socio-legal context of unsafe abortion in Timor-Leste, based on research in 2006–08 on national laws and policies and interviews with legal professionals, police, doctors and midwives, and community-based focus group discussions. Data on unsafe abortions in Timor-Leste are rarely recorded. A small number of cases of abortion and infanticide are reported but are rarely prosecuted, due to deficiencies in evidence and procedure. While there are voices supporting law reform, the Roman Catholic church heavily influences public policy and opinion. Professional views on when abortion should be legal varied, but in the community people believed that saving women’s lives was paramount and came before the law. The revised Penal Code is insufficient to reduce unsafe abortion and maternal mortality. Change will be slow, but access to safe abortion and modern contraception are crucial to women’s ability to participate fully as citizens in Timor-Leste.

Causes and Consequences of Public Attitudes toward Abortion: A Review and Research Agenda

This article provides a critical review of empirical research on attitudes toward abortion among mass publics in the United States, with a view toward suggesting promising avenues for future research. We identify three such themes: Accounting for pro-life movement among mass attitudes in recent years, when the composition of the U.S. population would seem to trend in a pro-choice direction; explaining the sources of party polarization of the abortion issue; and anticipating changes in abortion attitudes which might result from public debate over human cloning.

Evangelicals and Political Tolerance

The article explores four possible explanations for the lower levels of political tolerance of evangelical Christians. First, these differences could be spurious, due to demographic differences. Second, evangelicals may be less tolerant of atheists, homosexuals, and communists, but more tolerant of groups on the other side of the political spectrum, suggesting a group effect. Third, evangelical intolerance may be the result of higher levels of religiosity. Finally, the religious doctrine of evangelicals may produce greater levels of intolerance. Using data from a national survey on tolerance and from the General Social Survey, the article concludes that demographic variables and religiosity are partial explanations for the greater intolerance of evangelicals. Group affect seems to play no role: evangelicals are less tolerant of communists, atheists, racists, and militarists. Finally, religious doctrine plays a major role in explaining evangelical intolerance.

The Political Consequences of Religious Group Attitudes

The effects of religious attitudes and membership, group identifications, affect toward outgroups, and issue attitudes on Christian Right figures and the Republican party are compared. Christian Right support is primarily driven by attitudes toward cultural and ascriptive minorities, and such support is fragmented by religious particularism. By contrast, group attitudes affect partisanship through the intervening effects of issue attitudes.

Political Christianity: A Contextual Analysis

In this paper, an attempt is made to assess the relative importance of individual attributes and congregational-level contextual variables in explaining support for New Christian Right figures and for the Republican party. Using data gathered from 14 rural midwestern churches, the analysis suggests the following: (1) contextual effects are important and often are stronger than the effects of individual-level variables; (2) the unique effects of contextual-level variables are occasionally negative, suggesting that simple social learning models of contextual effects may be inadequate; and (3) contextual effects are likely to be weaker at simpler levels of conceptualization.

Issue Voting in Gubernatorial Elections: Abortion and Post-Webster Politics

Nearly all studies of gubernatorial voting focus on the role of state economic conditions and incumbency on vote choice. Yet gubernatorial campaigns frequently focus on social issues such as abortion, the death penalty, and gun control. Using data from 1989 and 1990 exit polls in 10 states, we find that abortion was a significant predictor of vote choice in all but one. Our logistic regression analysis suggests that abortion position had a greater impact on vote choice than state economic conditions in eight of the 10 states in our analysis, and that abortion was a stronger predictor than even partisanship in Pennsylvania. This suggests the need to consider noneconomic issues in gubernatorial voting studies.

Religion in public life : a dilemma for democracy

Prayer in public schools, abortion, gay and lesbian rights - these bitterly divisive issues dominate American politics today, revealing deep disagreements over basic moral values. In a highly readable account that draws on legal arguments, political theory, and philosophy, Ronald F. Thiemann explores the proper role of religious convictions in American public life. He proposes that religion can and should play an active, positive part in our society even as it maintains a fundamental commitment to pluralist, democratic values. Arguing that both increased secularism and growing religious diversity since the 1960s have fragmented commonly held values, Thiemann observes that there has been an historical ambivalence in American attitudes towards religion in public life. He proposes abandoning the idea of an absolute wall between church and state and all the conceptual framework built around that concept in interpreting the first amendment. He returns instead to James Madisons views and the Constitutional principles of liberty, equality, and toleration. Refuting both political liberalism (as too secular) and communitarianism (as failing to meet the challenge of pluralism), Thiemann offers a new definition of liberalism that gives religions a voice in the public sphere as long as they heed the Constitutional principles of liberty, equality, and toleration or mutual respect. The American republic, Thiemann notes, is a constantly evolving experiment in constructing a pluralistic society from its many particular communities. Religion can act as a positive force in its moral renewal, by helping to shape common cultural values. All those interested in finding solutions to todays divisive political discord, in finding ways to disagree civilly in a democracy, and in exploring the extent to which religious convictions should shape the development of public policies will find that this book offers an important new direction for religion and the nation.

Religious Belief and Attitude Constraint

In recent years, both the Moral Majority and the American Catholic Bishops have taken positions on diverse public issues, presenting these issues as coherent packages with single, underlying rationales. This study investigated the extent to which members of the mass public regard these issues as parts of more general gestalts. This was accomplished by examining the levels of constraint exhibited by members of different denominational groups. No religious group exhibited a high level of attitude consistency, but religiosity was related to attitude constraint among Evangelicals across a range of sex role and sexuality issues.

Denominational Preference and the Dimensions of Political Tolerance

This study investigates the tolerance belief systems of members of different denominational categories. After controls for education are imposed, it is found that there exists a Christian consensus on the circumstances in which intolerance may be justified. The characteristics of the audience (adults versus preadults) affect tolerance belief systems to a much greater extent than does the political content of a particular message.

The Political World of the Clergy

The Roles of Religion in American Democracy Evangelical Protestantism: The Politics of Conversion Mainline Protestantism: The Politics of Individualism Roman Catholicism: The Politics of Community Religious Leadership and the Political Cultures of Democracy Appendix: Questions for Clergy Selected Bibliography