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Testing Legislative Deferral
Abortion Policy Making in New York, 1970–2010
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2022
Abstract
The legislative deferral hypothesis posits that elected policy makers, anxious to avoid the political repercussions of taking clear positions on controversial issues, will actively seek to involve the judiciary in resolving these disputes. This study seeks to further test the legislative deferral theory by considering its applicability to the state level. What is revealed from an examination of the development of abortion policy in New York is that, despite the controversial nature of the issue, lawmakers did not seem to attempt to involve the courts in its resolution, and virtually no policy was created by the state’s judicial branch. I propose an alternative explanation for judicial noninvolvement, borrowing from path-dependence theory, that emphasizes the importance of the initial location of policy change and the issue frames that first took hold around this issue.
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- © 2018 by the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.
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