Religious Affiliation as a Predictor of Voting Behavior in Abortion Reform Legislation.

In this research religious affiliation is taken as an independent variable and an examination is made of the voting behavior on abortion reform legislation of members of two sessions of the slate legislature of a western state which has large groups of Catholics, Mormons, and Protestants religious groups with differences on the abortion issue. As expected, knowledge of the religious affiliation of the legislators allows better prediction of such voting behavior than constituency, party. or age, and controlling for these three variables affects the size of the association only slightly and occasionally. The effect of the religious affiliation variable is particularly dramatized in the shift of Mormon lower house members votes from 1967 to 1969, a time period during which the Mormon Church made official statements against abortion reform legislation. Ramifications and alternative explanations of the data an presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]