4 reasons why abortion laws often clash with the majority's preferences in the US, from constitutional design to low voter turnout

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) Matthew A Baum; Alauna Safarpour, and Kristin Lunz Trujillo (THE CONVERSATION) Kansas voters opted against overturning a state constitutional right to an abortion on Aug. 2, 2022. A few days later, Indiana lawmakers banned nearly all abortions. Both are conservative-leaning states that supported President Donald Trump’s reelection bid by near-identical margins in 2020 – 56.1% to 41.5% in Kansas and 57% to 41% in Indiana. So what explains the different outcomes? The answer is that in Kansas, voters decided the outcome directly. In Indiana, legislators did so. This distinction matters because for contentious issues like abortion, as well as in other high-profile instances, state legislatures do not always represent public preferences within their states. We are a multi-university team of social scientists that has been regularly polling Americans in all 50 states since April 2020. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning the constitutional guarantee of the right to abortion, our polling found a disconnect between the wave of new state laws restricting abortion access and the preferences of those states’ residents. This raises the question of why public policy is sometimes inconsistent with what the public wants. Here are four factors that help explain such disconnects. 1. Gerrymandering Gerrymandering, or the practice of drawing electoral districts in ways that favor one political party over another, contributes to policy outcomes that do not reflect the will of a majority of voters. In many states, partisan state legislatures often create districts to maximize their party’s dominance in upcoming elections. In North Carolina, despite a 50%-49% presidential vote in 2020, indicating an evenly divided voting public, an electoral map proposed by the Republican-controlled state legislature would, if implemented, result in Republicans likely winning 10 of 13 congressional seats in 2022. In Illinois, Republicans won 41% of the 2020 presidential vote. Yet the proposed electoral map ‘” drawn by Democrats ‘” would, if implemented, likely yield Republicans only 3 of 17 congressional seats in the 2022 election. Gerrymandering can lead to elections in which one party’s candidate is primed to win, resulting in noncompetitive general elections where the only real contest occurs during the primary election. Since the abortion issue is strongly polarized between the two major political parties, gerrymandering can result in elected officials who do not represent the majority of constituents on this issue. 2. Low and uneven voter turnout Policies enacted by democratically elected governments can fail to reflect the will of the people they represent if people don’t ‘” or can’t ‘” vote. Turnout in U.S. elections, especially at the state and local levels, and in nonpresidential years, can be abysmal. For instance, turnout in national midterm elections since 2002 has averaged just 42% of eligible voters. Democratic representation is especially distorted when low turnout is combined with uneven turnout, with certain sociodemographic groups voting in particularly low numbers. In 2020, 70.9% of white voters turned out to vote in the presidential election, compared with 58.4% of nonwhite voters, while 76% of eligible adults ages 65 to 74 turned out, compared with 51.4% of those ages 18 to 24. Outcomes in the U.S. democracy ‘” for example, policies and regulations adopted ‘” are skewed toward representing people who vote over those who do not, so policies can become biased against people who don’t turn out.