Preregistration for Attitudes Toward Abortion in Germany: Moral Values, Political Attitudes, and Religiousness

Abortion is a polarizing socio-political issue. Attitudes towards abortion have been investigated in the context of various predictors. In the present study, attitudes towards abortion are investigated in the context of moral values, political ideology, and religiosity. In previous studies, only the endorsement of purity, conservatism, and religiosity consistently predicts disapproval of abortion. For other possible predictors (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, or liberty), there is inconsistent evidence: for each dimension there are studies which find it a predictor of approval, of disapproval, or to be non-significant. If significant, the direction of correlation (positive vs. negative) varies between studies. Further, there are national differences in legislation and cultural differences across countries, making generalisation of findings from one country to other countries a question of empirical research. The present study aims to address several gaps in the current empirical literature: Objective 1: Investigate how religiosity and political ideology mediate the relationship between moral values and attitudes towards abortion in Germany; Objective 2: Determine if attitudes towards abortion are multi-dimensional; Objective 3: Explore the (in-)dependence of the ATAS subscales on moral values, conditional on political ideology and religiosity; Objective 4: Identify clusters of individuals with similar moral values, political attitudes, religiosity, and abortion attitudes using cluster analysis. These research questions are investigated with Bayesian statistical methods, including the liberty dimension of the MFQ in the cultural and national context of Germany A convenience sample of German participants recruited from social media. Participants are asked to complete an online survey using the moral foundations questionnaire (J. Graham et al., 2011) with dimensions care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and purity/degradation as well as the liberty/oppression dimension (Iyer et al., 2012), the Attitudes Towards Abortion Scale (Stets and Leik, 1993; Loftus and Molenbergh, 2022), religious beliefs and practices, self-placement on the political left/right spectrum as well as socio-demographic variables.