Introduction
Political and cultural polarization has led many Americans to “vote with their feet” to find communities and states more amenable to their views and values. Of course, when they do so, these foot voters often rely on an intuitive sense of where they will find their own promised land. Their assumption often seems to be that partisanship is a good proxy for the type of regime and community they want to live in. In other words, they look to how red or blue the state is during national and statewide elections. However, while partisanship is an important reflection of what a place might be like, it doesn’t necessarily reflect the quality of governance and the more specific picture of the state and local policies they’ll have to live under. States of similar partisan hue can differ greatly in their efficiency, corruption, and respect for freedom. That is where we come in.
We began this project to fill a need: Freedom in the 50 States was the first index at any level to measure both economic and personal freedoms and remains the only index to do so at the state level. We also strive to make it the most comprehensive and definitive source for economic freedom data on the American states.
This study ranks the American states according to how their public policies affect individual freedoms in the economic, social, and personal spheres. The 2023 edition updates and expands on the six previous editions of Freedom in the 50 States. It examines state and local government intervention across a wide range of policy categories—from taxation to debt, from eminent domain laws to occupational licensing, and from drug policy to educational choice.
For this new edition, we have added several more policy variables while continuing to improve the way we measure land-use regulation and occupational licensing. Our time series now covers the 22 years in the period 2000–2022. Finally, we continue to explore the causes and consequences of freedom with detailed, up-to-date methods.
This project scores all 50 states on their overall respect for individual freedom and on their respect for three dimensions of freedom considered separately: fiscal policy, regulatory policy, and personal freedom. To calculate these scores, we weight public policies according to the estimated costs that individuals suffer when government restricts their freedom. However, we happily concede that different people value aspects of freedom differently. Hence, our website provides the raw data and weightings so that interested readers can construct their own freedom rankings.
About the 7th Edition
This 2023 edition of Freedom in the 50 States presents a completely revised and updated ranking of the American states on the basis of how their policies protect or infringe on individual liberty.
This edition improves on the methodology for weighting and combining state and local policies to create a comprehensive index. Authors William Ruger and Jason Sorens introduce many new policy variables suggested by readers and changes in the broader policy environment (e.g., universal school choice and state laws that shape local zoning authority).
More than 230 policy variables and their sources are available to the public on this website. New policy variables include a battery of state-level land-use laws affecting housing, several new occupational licensing measures, a reworked household goods moving company licensing variable that focuses on the “competitor’s veto” element, qualified immunity limitations, and new abortion laws for the alternative indices. In this edition, the authors have updated their findings to
- Provide the most up-to-date freedom index yet, including scores as of January 1, 2023.
- Retrospectively evaluate how state COVID-19 responses affected freedom during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
- Refresh their analysis of how the policies driving income growth and interstate migration have changed—before and after the Great Recession and during the pandemic.
In addition to providing the latest rankings as of the beginning of 2023, the 2023 edition provides annual data on economic and personal freedoms and their components back to 2000 and for some variables, back to the 1930s.
About the Authors
William Ruger
