POLITICS
Backslide on democracy and tourists will punish you
Yet, Americans’ vacation preferences probably won’t stop limits on democracy from occurring in the future
If you were one of the 85% of Americans who planned to travel for leisure this past summer, you likely considered several options before settling on your final destination(s). What is the weather like? How difficult is it to get there? What attractions are there?
Outside these factors directly related to your vacation experience, did you consider whether those destinations have experienced democratic backsliding?
In recent years, many US states have enacted policies consistent with democratic backsliding, such as making it more difficult for residents to vote and suppressing free speech. As these policies have gone into effect, many political elites and commentators have warned that those policies may exact economic consequences in those states such as discouraging business investment, deterring the planners of major events (such as the MLB’s All-Star Game), and discouraging tourism.
However, scant empirical evidence exists demonstrating that backsliding causes this economic harm that might dissuade states from enacting such policies. In new experimental research with Serena Smith, I examine the extent to which Americans’ vacation preferences are sensitive to backsliding, and thus whether jurisdictions who enact anti-democratic policies are punished by people withholding their leisure travel dollars.
In our first experiment, we asked approximately 2,100 Americans recruited through Lucid to imagine that they had won an all-expenses paid vacation and that we would present them with potential destinations to select. We then presented respondents with sets of three potential destinations, each of which varied along six characteristics: the average temperature; the type of community; the main attractions of the destination; the time it takes to travel there; the 2020 presidential election result for the state where the destination is located; and a piece of “recent state news.”
While some destinations were randomly assigned anodyne pieces of recent news, others were assigned news consistent with backsliding, such as that the state legislature recently limited early voting or the right to protest at the state capitol building.
By randomly assigning values for each of these characteristics in our conjoint experiment, we are able to estimate the independent effect of backsliding on Americans’ vacation preferences.
Our results, presented in Figure 1, indicate that Americans are less likely to select destinations in states that recently adopted a backsliding policy. For instance, respondents were 3 percentage points less likely to select a destination where the state legislature recently limited early voting relative to a destination where the state legislature recently created a committee to study economic growth.
Further, when conducting our analyses separately on Democratic and Republican respondents, we find that Democrats are less likely to travel to destinations in states that limited rather than expanded democratic policies, while the effect of the destination’s state legislature limiting democratic policies is similar to the legislature expanding those same rights.
In a second experiment, we focus on the case of Florida, which enacted a law limiting vote-by-mail in 2022. The 1,170 respondents recruited from CloudResearch who participated in this experiment were told to imagine they were considering vacationing in Florida and had looked for information online about traveling to the state. While half of respondents were randomly assigned to see a “control” set of search results that included a story about the state legislature designating strawberry shortcake the state dessert, the other half of respondents received a set of results that contained a story about the law limiting vote-by-mail.
Before and after seeing these search results, respondents were asked to indicate on a 5-point scale how interested they were in vacationing in Florida. As shown in Figure 2, respondents who saw the story about limiting vote-by-mail were less interested in vacationing in Florida, though this treatment effect is only significant among Democratic respondents and is of modest size (decrease of 0.08 on a 5-point scale).
Taken together, our experiments indicate that Americans — particularly Democrats —are somewhat inclined to punish states that enact backsliding policies by scheduling their vacations and spending their leisure travel dollars elsewhere.
However, the magnitude of this effect is modest; for instance, in our first experiment, respondents were only a few percentage points less likely to vacation in backsliding states compared to states that recently expanded or took no action on democratic policies. While this effect likely leads to some decrease in states’ tourism revenue, which might make state leaders think twice before enacting backsliding policies, this modest penalty must be considered alongside potential political benefits, such as stronger support among state leaders’ constituents.
Therefore, while Americans’ sensitivity to backsliding when deciding where to go on vacation may help deter backsliding in the states, it alone is unlikely to serve as a strong check on anti-democratic impulses.
