Abstract
Previous research has explored the changing role of Republican women in legislatures through the lens of abortion policy to understand the ideological shift of these legislators, but very little research has been done to explain the concrete policy effects of this change in the nature of Republican women on policy outputs. My research asks the question how does the presence of partisan women affect a state’s abortion regime over time? I hypothesized that a higher presence of Republican women would be correlated with more restrictive abortion policies, and a higher presence of Democratic women would be correlated with more expansive abortion policies. In order to better understand this effect, I employ quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the shifting role of Republican women. My research uses a calculated policy innovation score (tallying the amount of restrictive and expansive abortion policies passed in a state in a certain year) as a dependent variable and the percentage of partisan women in state legislatures as an independent variable. To test the correlation between these two variables, I ran several negative binomial regressions which revealed a few periods where the presence of partisan women was significantly correlated with policy innovation. While the presence of Democratic women was positively correlated with expansive bills, the presence of Republican women was negatively correlated with restrictive policies. Qualitatively, the exploration of two trigger bans passed in South Dakota and Tennessee reveal shifts in the role of Republican women in abortion policy outputs over time.