(Small D-democratic) vacation, all I ever wanted? The effect of democratic backsliding on leisure travel in the American states

Abstract

As many American states have considered policies consistent with democratic backsliding in recent years, political elites and scholars have speculated on the consequences of these policies for political behavior. We examine the effect of backsliding policies on Americans’ preferences over leisure travel destinations; because vacationing is transitory, this focus allows us to isolate the role of individuals’ democratic predispositions and values in preference formation from the implications of these policies on their self-interest that they would experience from living under those policies themselves. Through pre-registered conjoint and vignette survey experiments, we find that Americans, and especially Democrats, express less interest in vacationing in states that recently adopted backsliding policies. Our results spotlight an accountability mechanism by which Americans may sanction backsliding states, though the modest magnitude of these sanctions – less than 1% of backsliding states’ gross domestic products – may not deter backsliding behavior on their own.