LIST OF PANELS

The past five years have seen tremendous upheavals in reproductive health laws around the globe. Numerous longstanding restrictions on abortion access in Latin America and other countries have been relaxed (e.g., Chile, Argentina & Mexico) while the U.S. has adopted unprecedented abortion restrictions in the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade. These upheavals have been spurred by different and somewhat competing trends. Whereas powerful social movements centered on women’s rights in Argentina and Mexico recently succeeded in making salient and passing landmark abortion liberalizations, growing right-wing movements have pushed alarmist concern about population decline and pronatalist policies geared at restricting access to reproductive health services. 

Research on policy feedback effects has demonstrated that while politics creates policies, policies, in turn, can reshape public opinion (Barabas, 2009), can reduce or generate political mobilization (Campbell, 2002; Mettler, 2002; Soss and Schram, 2007) and can even produce behavioral adaption that can either support or undermine policies’ intended goals (Pacheco, 2013). Research on the mechanisms underlying policy feedback effects have centered on two primary explanations: resource effects of policy and interpretive effects. Whereas resource effects are more closely tied to self-interest, for instance, the effect of earning or losing a benefit, interpretive effects occur through messages construed via policy design (Campbell, 2014) that can either empower beneficiaries or demobilize individuals. However, research to date on policy feedback effects has concentrated more on redistributive or economic policies, which are often hidden, submerged, or not as immediately salient in people’s lives (Mettler, 2011).  

This call for submissions builds on emerging policy feedback research in the domain of “highly tangible policies” (Pacheco, 2013) and “morality politics”  (Kreitzer, 2015) that exhibit low complexity and high visibility.  These  issues are generally easy for the public to grasp, commonly experienced and are frequently high-profile in media and politics.  Highly tangible, morality policies affect mass attitudes by educating the public about what is socially acceptable, influencing support for analogous policies and impacting directly on self-reinforcing behaviors in ways that can entrench policy. This latter mechanism is an important alternative to previous research, as it implies that the goal of policies is not to narrowly influence behavior in response to a particular policy, but rather to more broadly reshape cultural norms and expectations.   For instance, policies banning indoor smoking sent powerful signals about the harms of combustible cigarettes and its social acceptability that ultimately denormalized the behavior, producing dramatic reductions in combustible cigarette smoking rates (Pacheco, 2013). By contrast, Prohibition in the 1930s failed because the policy did not succeed in changing mass attitudes or cultural norms towards drinking.

In the context of restrictive abortion and reproductive health policies, the broader goal of proponents is arguably not limited to ceasing the practice of abortion, but rather is the production of a cultural transformation to reshape gender norms and a broader set of sexual and reproductive health behaviors in ways that will further entrench the policy. Yet, despite the critical importance of abortion and other reproductive rights issues as a cultural flashpoint (Kimport & Kreitzer, 2023), relatively little literature exists on how changes in reproductive health laws have affected public attitudes towards abortion and reproductive rights or behavioral changes, political participation, and the social citizenship of the people affected by these policy changes the most.

This panel seeks submissions for papers applying policy feedback theories to reproductive health policies. We are interested in the papers examining the following questions and related to these general topics:

·         How have abortion restrictions shaped the publics’ view of abortion and other sexual reproductive health policies- has it been mobilizing or demobilizing for the reproductive rights movement?

·         How are people adapting their sexual and reproductive behaviors in light of landmark reproductive health policy changes?

·         How have abortion restrictions affected young people’s political participation, citizenship, and perceptions of government?

·         What are the gender ideologies behind restrictions on reproductive rights and how is this contributing to attitudinal feedback effects?

·         Are reproductive rights ‘countermovements’ shifting mass opinion and voting behavior?

References

Barabas, Jason. 2009. “Not the Next IRA: How Health Savings Accounts Shape Public Opinion.” Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law 34:181–218.

Campbell, Andrea. 2002. “Self-Interest, Social Security, and the Distinctive Participation Patterns of Senior Citizens.” American Political Science Review 96:565–74.

Kimport, Katrina; Kreitzer, Rebecca. “Introduction: The Politics of Abortion 50 Years after Roe,” J Health Polit Policy Law (2023) 48 (4): 463–484.

Kreitzer, R. J. (2015). Politics and morality in state abortion policy. State Politics & Policy Quarterly, 15(1), 41-66

Mettler, Suzanne. 2002. “Bringing the State Back into Civic Engagement: Policy Feedback Effects of the GI Bill for World War II Veterans.” American Political Science Review 96:351–65.

Mettler, S. (2011). The submerged state: How invisible government policies undermine American democracy. University of chicago Press.

Pacheco, Juliana. “Attitudinal Policy Feedback and Public Opinion: The Impact of Smoking Bans on Attitudes towards Smokers, Second Hand Smoke and Anti-Smoking Policies,” Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 77, No. 3, Fall 2013, pp. 714–734.

Soss, Joe, and Sanford F. Schram. 2007. “A Public Transformed? Welfare Reform as Policy Feedback.” American Political Science Review 101:111–27.