REDUX: Unintended Political Consequences

James Taranto goes into greater depth on his theory, the "Roe Effect".

Roe v. Wade is a study in unanticipated consequences. By establishing a constitutional right to abortion, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court no doubt thought they were settling the issue for good, accelerating a process of liberalization that was already under way in 1973. But instead of consensus, the result was polarization. The issue of abortion soon after, and for the first time, took a prominent place in national political campaigns. By 1980, both major political parties had adopted extreme positions--Republicans favoring a "pro-life" constitutional amendment to ban abortion, and Democrats opposing virtually all regulation on "pro-choice" grounds. Every presidential and vice-presidential nominee since then has toed the party line on abortion.

Polarization over abortion coincided with a period of Republican ascendancy. Since the parties split on abortion, the GOP has won five of seven presidential elections, and no Democrat has had a majority of the popular vote. Republicans took over the Senate in 1980, and both houses of Congress in 1994. Obviously, many other factors have contributed to Republican success, but it is hard to look at these results and conclude that abortion has been a winning issue for the Democrats. Thus, the politics of abortion has favored the party that opposes the court-imposed "consensus."

This is not to say that America has embraced the near-absolutist pro-life position that the Republican Party formally endorses. Most Americans are moderate or ambivalent on abortion, rejecting the extreme positions on either side. One reason Republicans have an advantage is that as long as Roe remains in effect--taking off the table any restriction that imposes an "undue burden" on a woman seeking to abort her pregnancy--Republicans are an extreme antiabortion party only in theory. When it comes to actual legislation, the GOP favors only modest--and popular--regulations. The Democrats, on the other hand, must defend such unpopular practices as partial-birth abortion, taxpayer-subsidized abortion, and abortions for 13-year-olds without their parents' knowledge.

Okay, so the political analysis is pretty straightforward and historically faithful, right? Wait... there's the demography.

Compounding the GOP advantage is what I call the Roe effect. It is a statement of fact, not a moral judgment, to observe that every pregnancy aborted today results in one fewer eligible voter 18 years from now. More than 40 million legal abortions have occurred in the United States since 1973, and these are not randomly distributed across the population. Black women, for example, have a higher abortion ratio (percentage of pregnancies aborted) than Hispanic women, whose abortion ratio in turn is higher than that of non-Hispanic whites. Since blacks vote Democratic in far greater proportions than Hispanics, and whites are more Republican than Hispanics or blacks, ethnic disparities in abortion ratios would be sufficient to give the GOP a significant boost--surely enough to account for George W. Bush's razor-thin Florida victory in 2000.

The Roe effect, however, refers specifically to the nexus between the practice of abortion and the politics of abortion. It seems self-evident that pro-choice women are more likely to have abortions than pro-life ones, and common sense suggests that children tend to gravitate toward their parents' values. This would seem to ensure that Americans born after Roe v. Wade have a greater propensity to vote for the pro-life party--that is, Republican--than they otherwise would have.

(snip)

Has the Roe effect borne itself out in practice? The results are mixed. In terms of reapportionment, the trend is decidedly in favor of Republican states. The 30 states George W. Bush carried in 2000 had 271 electoral votes, a bare majority. Reapportionment after the 2000 census increased that number to 278. In the 1980s, they were worth only 267 electoral votes, not enough for a majority; in the 1970s, 260. The trend continues: Of the 10 fastest-growing states in 2003-04, Bush carried nine in 2004. (One of them, New Mexico, went for Al Gore four years earlier.)

Some might find that shocking and other unpersuasive. Statistics are funny things, and I find myself reflexively skeptical of them. But what I find most provocative, however, is his conclusion:

And if Republicans keep winning the presidency and appointing Supreme Court justices, Roe v. Wade may eventually be overturned. (This almost certainly would have happened in 1992 if the Senate had approved Robert Bork's confirmation five years earlier.) If Roe goes by the boards, one would expect fertility to increase in states that outlawed abortion, which would presumably be largely conservative and Republican ones. If the Roe effect continues to operate, though, it would make those states more Democratic and liberal, since women who otherwise might get abortions would no longer have the option in their home states. But in the end, that may not matter. If Roe were overturned, the politics of abortion would change dramatically, and in the Democrats' favor. With the legality of abortion itself on the line, the debate would shift away from the pro-choice extremes, forcing pro-choice politicians to take a more centrist (and popular) position. Republicans would be torn between their antiabortion base and more moderate voters, for whom an outright ban on abortion is a bridge too far.

The best solution for both parties would likely be a return to the status quo ante Roe--that is, for Congress and the president largely to ignore abortion, and leave its regulation to the state legislatures. This would allow politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, to tailor their views to match those of their constituents and their own consciences, and it would remove abortion as a polarizing issue from national elections. Thus, one might say that both Roe and the Roe effect contain the seeds of their own demise.

This unintended consequences effect -- bearing the seeds of demise within -- seems to a regular feature of political and economic ideologies. Take the French Revolution. Out of their zeal to remake their world, the Jacobins put everyone they could grab to the guillotine, reasoning that Louis XVI was corrupt, and that vritue was rational, so reason could arrive at virtue, and, what's more, by using terror once could rationally mold the behavior of the citizenry. Hence, one decadent, arbitrary, and absolutist politcal order was replaced by a paranoid, arbitrary, and purist political regime which equated public terror = private virtue. That didn't work out so well.

Or take communist political economies. They purport to be the magic bullet for political and economic inequality, by promising a democracy that is more democratic than democracy. But, banning private property, and making the revolution paramount above the lives of citizens, means that those who would benefit from the communist takeover would actually sink into greater slavery.

Or take the Democrat's New Deal. The rationale for a larger government assuming constitutinally questionable powers was that in a time of depression, the government would be better at deliving goods and services to the people than the private sector. Over time, the citizenry was told to think of themselves as consumers, and the government, immune from the private sector's boom-bust cycles and profit motives, as the best provider for their every need. After the successive crises of the Great Depression and WWII abated, this reasoning began to lose steam. The newly-minted consumer-citizen found out that they, in fact, were not recieving better or cheaper goods and services from the government than they would the private sector. Instead, citizens see high taxes and unresponsive bureaucracy which prevents and frustrates their opportunities -- "for their own good." As a result, they began to clamor for a reduction of the government's role in their lives. So, by creating the expectation of a consumer-provider relationship, the New Deal government model eventually undercuts its reason for increased size in order to be involved in all facets of its citizens lives.

Two more. The Democratic Party of the late 20th century was seen as a party that was more attractive to racial minorities than the Republicans. This was because they made a point of reaching out to minorities, and purported to represent them with leaders from their communities. As the party of government, they believed in using public sector solutions to rectify problems attributed to racism in the polity. The electoral incentive motivating Democratic Party leaders was to spin the spectre of racism into a near-insurmountable bogeyman for their constituents, with the only solution being the public-sector activities that they were promoting. The problem was that while the rationale for the Demoicrats' assistance was to help minorites get ahead, the solution, more government entitlement programs, actually made minorites dependent upon the Democratic Party's largesse. This led to a vicious cycle -- minorites felt marginialized because they were dependent on the government; Democratic leaders would propose a new program to ameliorate the fact of their marginalization, which created more and more electoral constituencies, but would not solve the problem; which would further deepen their dependence, etc., ad nauseum.

The last example of unintended consequences comes from the Republican party. The dawning realization of this effect is, I believe, leading the party to a down-the-road split. Republicans have long argued for less government incursion into and regulation of the private sector, rightly believing that economic freedom is vital to maintaining and upholding the rest of our rights and liberties. What is interesting is that the more economic freedom or financial independence that people experience, the more they feel empowered, and the more they feel empowered, the more they will come to their own conclusions on issues of the day, and in particular, social issues. And this is the fault-line in the G.O.P. One branch would like to promote traditional social values and solutions to social issues, while the other views such promotion as undue or inappropriate government incursion into our lives, much like excessive regulation or public sector enterprises. Sure, the more that people are empowered, many will choose to construct their lives on a more traditional footing. But this doesn't change the fact that they are choosing that footing, instead of uncritically assuming it. Greater empowerment of the citizens, especially at the expense or in the teeth of the public sector would lead to greater skepticism and self-reliance, precisely the kind of character traits which would bridle at attempts coming out of that same public sector to influence individual morality in a social context.

That long tangent aside, even as I remain skeptical about the demographic argument, the idea that overturning of Roe would ulitmately hurt the G.O.P. is a persuasive one. But Taranto's conclusion -- "a return to the status quo ante Roe" -- is unlikely. So much political and financial resources and intellectual and emotional commitment have been tied up in this fight, that it is unlikey that the parties will drop the issue and let the state legislatures fight it out. Both sides have found the tempation of Federal power too great to ignore, even if its exercise ultimately harms their political fortunes.

UPDATE: Megan McArdle offers the following analysis on what would happen if the G.O.P base was successful in getting Roe overturned:

Oh, I'm sure that striking down Roe would cause a temporary electoral backlash. But I think it'd be pretty temporary. By two years after the decision, pretty much all the states where the people live who want abortion to be legal, would have legal abortion. A handful would make abortion illegal. And eventually, all but the hard-core pro-choice activists would contentedly settle into the new status quo.

(snip)

Moreover, I think that they're vastly overestimating the importance that people in the mushy middle place on abortion. Look at me: pro-choice woman, early thirties, socially liberal. But I just don't care that much about abortion. The only people who do care that much are political activists, some health care workers, and the fairly small percentage of the population which is regularly having sex with people they don't want to bear children with. I'm not even sure that I'd vote on the issue if it were coming up for legalisation in my state; there are a lot more pressing economic issues on my mind. Two thirds of Americans may say they support Roe, but for a large number of them the question is academic, and, frankly, not that interesting.
Thus, the argument that Republicans don't dare touch Roe strikes me as so much wishful thinking. If pro-lifers can get an anti-Roe court, at the expense of a couple of years of electoral setbacks, I bet they take that deal in a New York minute.

Which is significant, because such a result would be most like Taranto's status quo ante Roe. Would striking down Roe have the unintended consequence of nuetralizing a Republican political advantage?