Federalism and representation: Evidence from state abortion laws in the aftermath of Dobbs vs. Jackson women’s health organization

Supporters of devolution argue that local policies better reflect citizen preferences than “one size fits all” policies enacted at the federal level. To test this claim, we leverage the sudden devolution of abortion policy-making that resulted from the Dobbs decision. Using multilevel regression with poststratification, we estimate the latest gestational age at which the average resident of each state believes abortion should be permitted and compare these estimates to state policies before and after the Dobbs ruling. We demonstrate that policies prior to Dobbs were more liberal than the average constituent’s preference in every state. In the wake of Dobbs, although this nationwide liberal bias evaporated, absolute distance between public preferences and policy was essentially unchanged. Instead of bringing policies closer to preferences, devolution allowed more liberal states to maintain policies that were “too liberal” for their average resident and opened the door for conservative states to leapfrog the preferences of their constituents.