Banning Abortion:

This paper contrasts bimodal and unimodal issues, and identifies abortion as a bimodal issue. While unimodal issues exhibit continuous issue positions, a range of policy options, greater possibility of consensus, and often include financial proposals, bimodal issues are charcterized by dichotomous and mutually exclusive policy options, conflict, use of emotion-laden symbols, and often include civil liberties and soical issues. This paper examined two Senate votes on abortion in 1982 and 1983-the Helms proposal to restrict abortion and the Hatch human life amendment. Social variables were more important than political variables in explaining voting outcomes. When the impacts of constituency and Senators' characteristics were compared, those of constituencies were found to have greater impact. For abortion votes, social and constituency variables outweigh political and Senators' characteristics since public opinion is very intense and the issue is of high salience to constituents.