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Gender and Ideology in the Spread of Anti-Abortion Policy

Published: 07 May 2016 Publication History

Abstract

In the past few years an unprecedented wave of anti-abortion policies were introduced and enacted in state governments in the U.S., affecting millions of constituents. We study this rapid spread of policy change as a function of the underlying ideology of constituents. We examine over 200,000 public messages posted on Twitter surrounding abortion in the year 2013, a year that saw 82 new anti-abortion policies enacted. From these posts, we characterize people's expressions of opinion on abortion and show how these expressions align with policy change on these issues. We detail a number of ideological differences between constituents in states enacting anti versus pro-abortion policies, such as a tension between the moral values of purity versus fairness, and a differing emphasis on the fetus versus the pregnant woman. We also find significant differences in how males versus females discuss the issue of abortion, including greater emphasis on health and religion by males. Using these measures to characterize states, we can construct models to explain the spread of abortion policy from state to state and project which types of abortion policies a state will introduce. Models defining state similarity using our Twitter-based measures improved policy projection accuracy by 7.32% and 12.02% on average over geographic and poll-based ideological similarity, respectively. Additionally, models constructed from the expressions of male-only constituents perform better than models from the expressions of female-only constituents, suggesting that the ideology of men is more aligned with the recent spread of anti-abortion legislation than that of women.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '16: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2016
    6108 pages
    ISBN:9781450333627
    DOI:10.1145/2858036
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 07 May 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. abortion
    2. policy diffusion
    3. political science
    4. public policy
    5. social media
    6. text analysis

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    • (2020)Every Colour You Are: Stance Prediction and Turnaround in Controversial IssuesProceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Web Science10.1145/3394231.3397907(174-183)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2020
    • (2020)Representativeness of Abortion Legislation Debate on Twitter: A Case Study in Argentina and ChileCompanion Proceedings of the Web Conference 202010.1145/3366424.3383561(765-774)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2020
    • (2019)How Representative is an Abortion Debate on Twitter?Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science10.1145/3292522.3326057(133-134)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2019
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    • (2018)Framing a ‘social problem': Emotion in anti‐abortion activists' depiction of the abortion debateBritish Journal of Social Psychology10.1111/bjso.1224957:3(666-683)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2018
    • (2017)Analyzing Ideological Discourse on Social MediaProceedings of the 2017 International Conference of The Computational Social Science Society of the Americas10.1145/3145574.3145577(1-8)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2017
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