Freedomnomics: Why the Free Market Works and Other Half-Baked Theories Don't (37 page)

115
Ibid.

116
Stephen Bronars and John R. Lott, Jr., “Deterrence, Right-to-Carry Concealed Handgun Laws, and the Geographic Displacement of Crime,”
American Economic Review
(May 1998): 475-479.

117
Lance Lochner, “Perceptions of the Criminal Justice System,” University of Western Ontario Working Paper, January 2003.

118
John Lott,
More Guns, Less Crime
(University of Chicago Press, 2000), Chapter 9, 190-4. Other policies analyzed in this study included problem-orientated or community-orientated policing programs. Other work examining a much smaller sample has confirmed this research. See Bernard Hacourt and Jens Ludwig, “Broken Windows: New Evidence from New York City and a Five-city Social Experiment,”
University of Chicago Law Review
, vol. 73, 2006).

119
John R. Lott, Jr. and Russell Roberts, “Why Comply: The One-Sided Enforcement of Price Controls and Victimless Crime Laws,”
Journal of Legal Studies
, vol. 18, no. 2 (June 1989): 403-414.

120
John R. Lott, Jr. and Russell Roberts, “The Expected Penalty for Committing a Crime: An Analysis of Minimum Wage Violations,”
Journal of Human Resources
, vol. 30, no. 2, Spring 1995: 397-408.

121
Rich Schleif, “Project ChildSafe Begins Second Phase of Nationwide Firearm Safety Tour,” Project ChildSafe, September 1, 2004 (
http://www.projectchildsafe.org/news/092004.cfm
).

122
John R. Lott, Jr., “A False Safety,”
Washington Times
, July 6, 2006.

123
Public Health News Center, “Gun Laws Requiring Safe Storage Prevent Some Youth Suicides,” Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, August 3, 2004.

124
Sam Peltzman, “The Effects of Automobile Safety Regulation,”
Journal of Political Economy
, August 1975; W. Kip Viscusi, “The Lulling Effect: The Impact of Child-Resistant Packaging on Aspirin and Analgestic Ingestion,”
American Economic Review
, May 1984; and John R. Lott, Jr. and John Whitley, “Safe Storage Gun Laws: Accidental Deaths, Suicides, and Crime,”
Journal of Law and Economics
, vol. 44, no. 2, part 2, October 2001, 659-689.

125
John A. C. Conybeare, “Evaluation of automobile safety regulations,”
Policy Sciences
, June, 1980, 27-39. While they did not examine pedestrian deaths, other research has found that “improved automobile safety results in more accidents but fewer total injuries both in NASCAR and on the street.” Russell S. Sobel and Todd M. Nesbit, “Automobile Safety Regulation and the Incentive to Drive Recklessly: Evidence from NASCAR,”
Southern Economic Journal
, forthcoming (accepted August 2006). This idea was discovered by Sam Peltzman, “The Effects of Automobile Safety Regulation,”
Journal of Political Economy
, 1975, 677-725. Peltzman’s research found no net change in the number of deaths.

126
W. Kip Viscusi, “The Lulling Effect.”

127
Paula Spencer, “We Protect Kids from Everything But Fear,”
Newsweek
, April 2, 2007.
Http://www.msn.com/id/17770831/site/newsweek/
.

128
See the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (
http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10_sy.html
).

129
Ibid.

130
Ibid.

131
John R. Lott, Jr.,
The Bias Against Guns
, Chapter 7.

132
Ibid.

133
Ibid.

134
Ibid.

135
Ibid. See also John R. Lott, Jr. and John Whitley, “Safe Storage Gun Laws: Accidental Deaths, Suicides, and Crime,”
Journal of Law and Economics
, vol. 44, no. 2, part 2, (October 2001): 659-689. Webster et al. find evidence of a change in suicides for 14- to 17-year-olds. My work in my book and with Whitley examined those under age 15 and those between ages 15 and 19. While there were a few regression estimates that found some drop in suicides for 15- to 19-year-olds, the effects for most regressions did not show statistically significant effects. Daniel W. Webster, Jon S. Vernick, April M. Zeoli, and Jennifer A. Manganello, “Association Between Youth-Focused Firearm Laws and Youth Suicides,”
Journal of the American Medical Association
, August 4, 2004.

136
For the period from 1977 to 1998 see John R. Lott, Jr.,
The Bias Against Guns
, 170-171. For earlier research for the period from 1977 to 1996 see John R. Lott, Jr. and John Whitley, “Safe Storage Gun Laws: Accidental Deaths, Suicides, and Crime,”
Journal of Law and Economics
, vol. 44, no. 2, part 2, (October 2001): 682.

1
The most notable exception to this rule is Chile during the Pinoche regime. Some might also include Singapore or even modern day China.

2
The gender gap was 14 points in 1980, 16 in 1984, 15 in 1988, 5 in 1992, 17 in 1996, 22 in 2000, and 14 in 2004.

3
Republicans still would have lost the 1992 election, in which Bill Clinton received 41 percent of the men’s vote compared to 38 percent for George H. W. Bush. See Karlyn H. Bowman, “Election Results from A to Z,” AEI Online, January 1, 2001 (
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.12234/pub_detail.asp
); Ruy Teixeira, “A Tour of the 2004 Exit Poll,”The Century Foundation, November 9, 2004 (
http://www.tcf.org/list.asp?type=NC&pubid=767
); and Gary Langer, “The Gender Gap Makes a Difference,”
ABCNews.com
, November 8, 1996.

4
For more examples of issues with evident gender gaps, see the 1996 Voter News Service General Election Exit Poll Survey (
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/cgi-bin/bob/archive2?study=6989&path=ICPSR&docsonly=yes
).

5
Kingsley Browne, “Sex and Temperament in Modern Society: A Darwinian View of the Glass Ceiling and the Gender Gap,”
Arizona Law Review
, 1995, 980.

6
Wyoming and Utah were ahead of their time internationally. Outside the United States, women’s suffrage was first gained in New Zealand in 1893 and in various Australian states beginning in 1895. In those Australian states, as in the U.S., women were first given the vote in somewhat out-of-the-way places where relatively few women lived. By granting women’s suffrage, these states hoped to attract more women to settle the areas. Additionally, women’s suffrage was not viewed as much of a threat, since the small number of women living there meant that their vote initially did not have much of an impact on election outcomes. In 1869, Britain began allowing some women to vote strictly in local elections. Sweden had also granted limited women’s suffrage for some local elections in 1862-63. By contrast, Wyoming and Utah granted suffrage to all women for all elections. (
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/suffrage/a/intl_timeline.htm
).

7
Unfortunately, no data exists on voting by men and women separately.

8
To the extent that voting by women reduces the return to men of voting, the simple increase in the percent of the population voting underestimates the number of women who vote.

9
Because state expenditures and revenues were missing for some years, the changes in the average state’s values between years were calculated for those states which had values in both adjacent years. When a state is missing no more than one consecutive year of data, the change between the two years for which the data is available is calculated and then divided by 2. These changes were linked to the average expenditure and revenue levels in the eleventh year after suffrage was enacted. Graphing the means for the observed state expenditures and revenues in each year produces a very similar graph.

10
Figure 2
shows the raw data, but there are other factors that are also changing over time. While giving women the right to vote was the main factor, other factors included the manufacturing wage, fraction of the population over 65, percent of population living in rural areas, total population, percent of workers that were females, percent of workers in manufacturing, and voting regulations.

11
Real per capita expenditures grew from $101 to $208. By comparison, 1994 per capita state government expenditures in 1996 dollars averaged $3,177. See John R. Lott, Jr. and Lawrence Kenny, “Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?,”
Journal of Political Economy
, vol. 107, no. 6, part 1, December 1999: 1163-98.

12
Ibid.

13
Immigrants experienced the same delay - between 1870 and 1940, for each 10 percent of Americans who were foreign born, the voter turnout rate was reduced another 5 percentage points. The younger people were when they arrived in America, the smaller the decline in voter turnout. As we shall see, a similar delay was evident among African Americans as well.

14
John R. Lott, Jr. and Lawrence Kenny, “Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?,”
Journal of Political Economy
, vol. 107, no. 6, part 1, December 1999: 1183.

15
Ibid. Interestingly, men raising children on their own are only three percent more likely to vote Democratic than single men without children.

16
The poll tax also made Prohibition more likely by reducing the political influence of the poor, who generally opposed prohibition.

17
While the original thirteen U.S. states had some type of property or tax requirement to vote, all of them had cancelled the requirement by 1856. See Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff, “The Evolution of Suffrage Institutions in the New World,” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper 8512.

18
Much of this discussion is based upon John R. Lott, Jr., “Evidence of Voter Fraud and the Impact that Regulations to Reduce Fraud have on Voter Participation Rates,” SUNY Binghamton working paper (
http://ssrn.com/abstract=925611
).

19
The Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the Constitution banned poll taxes for federal elections, while the Voting Rights Act abolished them in state elections.

20
John E. Filer, Lawrence W. Kenny, and Rebecca Morton, “Voting Laws, Educational Policies, and Minority Turnout,”
Journal of Law and Economics
, vol. 34, October 1991: 371-393.

21
A $1-2 fee in 1940 is roughly equivalent to $14-28 today. Larry Kenny and I set up an extensive empirical analysis to test the impact of these fees and other voting rules. Data on up to 36 biennial elections from 1870 to 1940 were obtained for the 48 states. Infrequent elections and recent statehood reduced the sample to 1,215 elections. The dependent variable is defined as the fraction of the total population aged 21 or older who voted in the state’s gubernatorial election. This variable ranges from 2 to 83 percent, with a mean of 37 percent. The socioeconomic and voting law variables that are used to explain changes in voter participation rates include: fixed year and
state effects, fraction of population age 65 and older, fraction of population that is illiterate, relative manufacturing wage, real manufacturing wage, female workers, rural population, rural population squared, fraction of the population that is foreign born, winning governor vote share, dummy for a Senate election, and dummy for a presidential election, as well as variables for female suffrage, poll tax, literacy test, and secret ballot. For a more extensive discussion see Lott and Kenny, “Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?” 1163-1198, and Filer, Kenny, and Morton, “Voting Laws, Educational Policies, and Minority Turnout,” 371-93.

22
However, there were only three statewide elections from the late 1970s to 1984 where Republicans won by less than one percentage point and the outcome would thus have been affected (Texas U.S. Senate and Governor races in 1978 and Virginia U.S. Senate 1978). There is also the Arkansas U.S. Presidential race in 1980, but Reagan’s landslide would not have been altered by the Arkansas vote. See John R. Lott, Jr., “Evidence of Voter Fraud and the Impact that Regulations to Reduce Fraud have on Voter Participation Rates,” SUNY Binghamton working paper (
http://ssrn.com/abstract=925611
).

23
“Citizens vote by secret ballot so that they can vote without fear of how others will react” (
http://www.voteutah.org/learning/elections/voting.html
).

24
This occurred when states introduced secret ballots during the 1882-1950 period. This 4 or 5 percentage point drop in turnout is equivalent to an 8-12 percent drop. See Lott and Kenny, “Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?,” 1196.

25
Frederic Charles Schaffer, “Might Cleaning Up Elections Keep People Away from the Polls? Historical and Comparative Perspectives,”
International Political Science Review
, vol 23, no. 1, 2002: 69-84.

26
Mark Lawrence Kornbluh,
Why America Stopped Voting: The Decline of Participatory Democracy and the Emergence of Modern American Politics
(New York: New York University Press, 2000).

27
John R. Lott, Jr., “Why is Education Publicly Provided?: A Critical Survey,”
Cato Journal
, Fall 1987, 475-501. My study with Kenny, as well as many others, found that higher income individuals are more likely to vote. See Lott and Kenny, “Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?,” 1175.

28
Jac C. Heckelman, “The effect of the secret ballot on voter turnout rates,”
Public Choice
, volume 82, numbers 1- 2, January 1995: 107-124.

29
Some literacy tests also asked factual questions about the constitution and current events. Take the questions from Alabama’s test at the time that the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed: