We ground our conception of freedom on an individual rights framework. In our view, individuals should be allowed to dispose of their lives, liberties, and property as they see fit, so long as they do not infringe on the rights of others. This understanding of freedom follows from the natural-rights liberal thought of John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and Robert Nozick, but it is also consistent with the rights-generating rule-utilitarianism of Herbert Spencer and others.

The freedom index stands within the tradition in social science of measuring normatively desired phenomena, such as democracy, civil liberties, and human rights. Clearly, our index will have intrinsic interest for classical liberals and libertarians. However, non-libertarian social scientists will also benefit from the index because it is an open question how individual liberty relates to phenomena such as economic growth, migration, and partisan politics in the American states. In the same way, while political scientists may value democracy for its own sake, they can also research empirically what causes democracy and how democracy affects other phenomena.

The index does not take up matters that fall squarely within the purview of the federal government, such as immigration and homeland security. While those things do affect the experience of freedom in all 50 states, they do not fall within the purview of state and local governments.

The index also gives users control over whether to include or exclude the high-profile issue of abortion, where there is disagreement on how policy on that issue affects freedom. As we discuss more extensively in the study’s introduction, rather than take a stand on one side or the other (or anywhere between), we have coded the data abortion policies and provide in the Appendix indices based on pro-life, moderate pro-choice, and strong pro-choice interpretations of the data.

For data other than taxes and debt, we code laws enacted as of December 31, 2022 (even if they come into force later). We also code these variables for 2000–2021 and, in some cases, for prior years. For taxes and debt, the latest available data covering states come from fiscal year (FY) 2022 and for local governments from FY 2021, which for most states ran from July 2020 to June 2021. To create a fiscal policy index, we assume that FY 2022 local debt, assets, and taxes are equal to FY 2021 local debt, assets, and taxes, whereas we have actual FY 2022 data for the state level. For each year’s freedom index, we use tax and debt data from the subsequent fiscal year because state budgets are enacted in the year before. As noted earlier, the most recent fiscal year featured in the index is FY 2022, which represents the budget that had been enacted as of December 31, 2021, in each state.

For a few variables in the index that we do not have available for every year, we have to carry forward or back or interpolate the data for these policies to include them. The master spreadsheet includes comment fields explaining exactly what was done in each of these cases.

Note, that the scores and rankings given in the 2021 edition for past years are not necessarily exactly the same as the scores and rankings given in the 2009, 2011, 2013, 2016 and 2018 editions. In every edition we update and improve our methodology and add new policies. However, there are high correlations among the freedom scores from all these editions (r>0.8)

The book scores all 50 states on their overall respect for individual freedom, and also on their respect for three dimensions of freedom considered separately: fiscal policy, regulatory policy, and personal freedom. In order to calculate these scores, we weight public policies according to the estimated costs that government restrictions on freedom impose on their victims. 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. See our How It’s Calculated page for individual contributions of variables to the overall freedom index.

The first difference is that this index includes personal, not just economic freedom. Another big difference lies in how the two indexes are weighted. The approach employed in the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of North America, is to weight each category equally, and then to weight variables within each category equally.¹ This approach assumes that the variance observed within each category and each variable is equally important. In the large dataset used for the freedom index, such an assumption would be wildly implausible. We feel confident that, for instance, tax burden should be weighted more heavily than court decisions mandating that private malls or universities allow political speech. In our newest edition, variables are weighted according to the value of the freedom affected by a particular policy to those people whose freedoms are at stake.

It is total, annualized personal income growth, adjusted for change in cost of living. The Bureau of Economic Analysis has produced real personal income estimates for the 2008–2019 period at the state level, using state-specific price indexes. Cost of living in 2000, as measured by William Berry, Richard Fording, and Russell Hanson.

First note that we split economic freedom by looking at fiscal and regulatory policy separately.

The fiscal policy dimension consists of categories for state and local tax revenues, government employment, government consumption, government debt, and state and local financial assets. Each of these categories consists of a single variable. The variables are measured for each year or fiscal year.

The regulatory policy dimension includes categories for the liability system, land use and environment (eminent domain, zoning, rent control, renewable portfolio standards), health insurance freedom, labor market freedom, occupational freedom, cable and telecom, and miscellaneous regulations that do not fit under another category. Regulations that seem to have a mainly paternalistic justification, such as homeschool and private school regulations, are placed under the personal freedom dimension.

The personal freedom, or paternalism, dimension consists of the following categories: gun policy, alcohol policy, marijuana-related policy, travel policy, gaming policy, mala prohibita and miscellaneous civil liberties, education policy, civil asset forfeiture, law enforcement statistics, marriage policy, campaign finance policy, and tobacco policy. Weighting these categories was a challenge because the observable financial impacts of these policies often do not include the full harms to victims.