Religion
In reply to the discussion: When religious people do bad things in the name of religion... [View all]okasha
(11,573 posts)Last edited Mon Jul 28, 2014, 11:58 PM - Edit history (1)
1. The "tighter" states include areas marked by persistent, endemic, intergenerational poverty. These states also have large minority populations. Both conditions constitute threat to the areas' privileged population. Poverty and the uncertainty that goes with it constitute a daily threat to the poor themselves. I would suspect that these two factors have a lot more to do with the level of "tightness" than historic slaveholding patterns.
2. Many of the "looser" states are not liberal but libertarian. They place a high value on individual rights and a low value on centralized authority. The areas of tolerated "deviance" in these states are rather constricted.
The study is interesting, but possibly not terribly useful.