Are Americans Unwilling to Move to States with Extreme Social Policies?

• In Event: Diffusion of Policy and People across the United States

Abstract

State governments legislate many of the policy areas that affect Americans’ daily lives – including many of today’s most salient social issues. Especially in the wake of the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision, it is important to examine the potential implications of ideologically extreme state-level legislation.

I take a fresh look at one such implication: the growing concerns about geographic social sorting in an increasingly polarized political landscape. Specifically, I examine how three highly-salient social policies – abortion rights, gun control, and LGBT rights – affect which states Americans choose to live in when balanced alongside practical considerations: the cost of living, crime rates, and the quality of local public schools.

This project fills an important gap in the geographic sorting literature. Though previous work has attempted to gain leverage on the geographic sorting question (Tam Cho et al. 2013, Gimpel and Hui 2015, Mummolo and Nall 2016, Nelson and Witko 2022), none has done so using extreme state-level legislation on these highly salient ‘culture war’ issues. This means that existing research cannot determine how these state-level policies affect where Americans choose to live. In an era where states are enacting increasingly extreme state social policies (Grumbach 2018), this is a critical consideration that must be addressed.

My research design uses a conjoint experiment to understand the trade-offs people make between ideological alignment and these other considerations. Crucially, the conjoint scenarios vary the degree of ideological extremity in various state policies, mirroring real-world differences emerging between localities in the United States. I utilize a sample of approximately 15,000 adult Americans across all 50 states, collected through the Civic Health and Institutions Project (CHIP50), which uses demographic quotas to ensure that respondent demographics are representative of each state’s population. This enables my project to draw credible inferences about the types of policy environments individuals prefer to live in when balanced alongside other important factors that affect their daily lives. This research is essential for understanding the implications of political polarization on societal and demographic shifts, especially in contentious policy areas.

Author

• Alice Malmberg, University of California, Davis