The political economy of Vermont’s abortion bill

ABSTRACT

Public choice literature divides the rationality of voting between instrumental and expressive. In this paper, we take the Vermont legislature in passing the H. 57 bill as a case to explain some of the determinants of expressive voting empirically. The H.57 bill declares that no government entity can interfere with, or restrict, a consenting individual’s right to abortion care across the entire gestation period. However, the bill has not changed the previously status quo of the state towards abortion rights. Thus, it creates a situation in which we can analyze the legislator’s voting behavior through the lens of an expressive voting framework. We utilize a high dimensional dataset and post-double-selection LASSO method to explain the channels that influence the expressive voting on the H. 57 bill. We web scrape the lower and upper chamber voting data on H.57 bill and use the 2017 American Community Survey 5-year estimates to retrieve 89 different socioeconomic, housing, and demographic characteristics of State Legislative Districts. Our results suggest channels of poverty, gender, and population diversity are some crucial mechanisms.

KEYWORDS:

• Expressive voting
• LASSO
• Abortion
• Vermont

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D72
• D73

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ See Greene and Nelson (2002); Copeland and Laband (2002).

² Recognized abortion nationwide before the viability of the fetus (after the second trimester). After a fetus becomes viable, States can regulate or outlaw abortions except when necessary to preserve the mother’s life or health.

³ A list of the variables is available upon request.

⁴ Channels become as good as random while properly controlling the observables, and there exist not unobservable confounding factors or common causes between channel and voting outcome.

⁵ Variables must be standardized such that variable selection does not depend on the measurement scale.

⁶ See https://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/, accessed on 4 July 2019.