Death and Taxes: How Political Policies Are Tied to Mortality – By Steven Ross Johnson (US News) / Oct 31, 2022
An analysis of conservative and liberal state policy categories across areas like the economy, marijuana and gun safety shows which are linked to lower death rates for working-age adults.
Political ideology can be a predictor of death among working-age adults, a new study indicates, with lower rates of mortality associated with more liberal state policies on topics like the environment, gun safety and taxes.
“State policies, which have been relatively ignored in research on explanations for U.S. mortality trends, turn out to be really important for understanding geographic disparities in mortality,” says study co-author Shannon Monnat, a professor of sociology and director of the Center for Policy Research at Syracuse University.
For the study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, researchers merged state mortality rates among adults ages 25 to 64 from 1999 to 2019 with state-level policy data across eight categories scored on a conservative-to-liberal continuum: criminal justice, marijuana, environment, gun safety, health and welfare, private labor, economic taxes and tobacco taxes.
The policy data spanned from 1970 to 2014. Policies were defined as being liberal if they expanded a state’s power to regulate the economy and redistribute wealth, restricted its power to punish deviant behavior, or protected the rights of marginalized populations. Those aimed at doing the opposite were considered conservative.
