The More Environmental Disasters a State Suffers, the More Repressive Its Laws

The deep south and the Bible Belt have long been criticized for the regions' poor record on civil rights, high incarceration rates, and persistent inequality. There are some obvious reasons for this (fundamental conservatism and a long history of slavery immediately come to mind)—but there might there be other, less apparent factors as well? A new study suggests that strict laws may be an adaptation to environmental disasters and other ecological hardships.

The idea isn't completely insane: Sociological, anthropological, and psychological theory suggests that areas that experience the most threats have the "tightest" societies—that is, they "have many strongly enforced rules and little tolerance for deviance." Meanwhile, "loose" societies have been shown in several global studies to exist in places that don't experience near-constant existential crises—that's part of the reason societies in Nordic countries may foster a considerable amount of civil liberties, while, say, see war-torn societies in the Middle East harbor some of the strictest laws.

Conservativism and "tightness" are correlated, as are liberalism and "looseness"—but they aren't exactly the same thing. Here's the strict definition, from a paper published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and funded by the US Army Research Laboratory and the National Science Foundation.

"Tight societies have more authoritarian governments, more media restrictions, less civil liberties, and greater use of the death penalty; have much more constrain in everyday situations; and have citizens who exhibit greater prevention-focus, cautiousness, impulse control, need for structure, and self-monitoring ability relative to loose societies. Tight societies have also experienced a greater number of ecological and historical threats, including fewer natural resources, more natural disasters, a greater incidence of territorial threat, higher population density, and greater pathogen prevalence compared to loose societies. Such threats increase the need for strong norms and the sanctioning of deviant behavior, which help humans coordinate social action for survival."

In the past, tightness/looseness scales have only been done on a global level—Jesse Harrington and Michele Gelfand at the University of Maryland wanted to see if, within one country, they could find different levels of tightness and looseness.

Turns out you can, and the results aren't overly surprising. The team created an index based on nine items—four of which reflect the "strength of punishment" (existence of / prevalence of corporal punishment in schools, number of executions in the state, severity of marijuana laws); two reflect permissiveness (ratio of dry to total counties in a state and legality of same-sex marriage/civil unions);  state-level religiosity and percentage of people claiming no religious affiliation; and the percentage of the population that is foreign, which roughly reflects a state's diversity.

I'm explaining all of this to make it clear that there's a method to the madness—a reason why certain states were considered "tight" or "loose." Given those inputs, here are the "tightest" states: Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, and North Carolina. And here are the loosest: California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Hawaii, New Hampshire, and Vermont.

Shocked? I wasn't either.

The study found that, according to national indicators from various government groups, people who live in tight states "have higher levels of social stability, including lowered drug and alcohol use, lower rates of homelessness, and lower social disorganization." They also, unfortunately, have "higher incarceration rates, greater discrimination and inequality, lower creativity, and lower happiness relative to loose states."

Being a "tight," authoritarian place isn't in and of itself discriminatory—Harrington told me that certain places in Israel, for instance, are very "tight" but are, essentially, without discrimination and inequality. It just so turns out that, in the United States, tight states are much more likely to foster inequality and discrimination: Using measures from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, tight states had higher rates of employment discrimination cases than loose states. Tight states also had lower political and legal equality, according to a measure developed by sociologists in the late 1980s. Finally, "tightness was also negatively associated with the percentage of minority-owned firms and negatively associated with percentage of women-owned firms, although not significantly," the study found.

So far, none of that is terribly controversial—assuming you agree with the premise of a tight state versus a loose state, those conclusions are backed up with facts.

Here's where Harrington might lose you. His team also tried to find reasons why a state might become tight—and the results are closely correlated with these existential crises. In essence, discriminatory, "tight" laws might be a reaction to natural disasters and other hardships.

"Tight states have higher death rates due to heat, and storms and floods. Tight states also have much higher tornado risk. Tightness is also negatively associated with environmental and ecological health," meaning that less-polluted states tend to be "looser," he suggests.

Of course, correlation is not causation, and it's near impossible to prove that a tornado or a hurricane or a heat wave causes a government to have a tighter leash on its populous. But, as I mentioned earlier, it's an idea that has been supported by sociological theory for a while, and it's one that Harrington and his team propose here, as well.

"In localities with high degree of either environmentally induced or human-inflicted threat," the study suggests, "it is adaptive to develop a cultural milieu with stronger norms, greater behavioral constraint, and lower deviance tolerance."

A study published by the same team back in 2011 in Science found that, on a worldwide level, countries impacted by major natural disasters were likely to tighten up its policies. Likewise, a study published earlier this year found that "frequent naturally occurring events such as storms require (and provide opportunity for) societies to work closely together to meet their challenges. While natural disasters can have devastating human and economic impacts, a potential spillover benefit of greater disaster exposure may be a more tightly knit society."

I called up Harrington to see whether he thought there might be a causal relationship between the two.

"Theoretically, we think they're causal. Ecological factors contribute to people growing tighter—the idea being that, when you have a lot of threat, tightness is a reaction to that," he said. "The data is all correlation. We can't prove it at this time, but theoretically we think it's causal."

In fact, environmental vulnerabilities are the ones that most closely correlate with a tight society, not factors such as external threats. In fact, even long histories of being discriminatory are less correlated with this idea of a "tight" state than natural disasters. I suggested that, maybe, a history of slavery or traditional values could have had something to do with longstanding inequality in the South. And yes, there was a connection between the number of families that owned slaves at the end of the Civil War with tightness today, but it wasn't as strong as the environmental factors: "Floods and natural disasters seem to be the strongest," he said.

Again—really, this isn't something that can be proven. There are any number of reasons why antiquated laws have persisted in the certain areas of the country, and there are a lot of reasons why some have been slower to embrace equality for all of its citizens. But now we know that being put in a bad situation, environmentally-speaking, might have something to do with it.