Where you stand depends on where you live: county voting on the Texas secession referendum

Curtis Bram and Michael Munger ()
Additional contact information
Curtis Bram: Duke University
Michael Munger: Duke University

Constitutional Political Economy, 2022, vol. 33, issue 1, No 4, 67-79

Abstract: Abstract During the first half of the 19th century, Western Texas was a “trap baited with grass” that attracted migrants hoping to farm. When settlers on the wrong side of an unknown, invisible line could not build successful farms, residents in those counties voted to remain in the Union at far higher rates than residents in neighboring counties who could farm. The connection between the vote and economic interest was obvious, as those without suitable land could not make use of enslaved labor, which was too expensive given the implicit marginal product of labor. Because the location of settlement was plausibly random, these results highlight the importance of economic interest as a determinant of even fundamental moral beliefs that affect vote choice.

Keywords: Voting; Secession; Slavery; Constitutions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 P16 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10602-021-09334-w Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:copoec:v:33:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1007_s10602-021-09334-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/10602/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10602-021-09334-w

Access Statistics for this article

Constitutional Political Economy is currently edited by Roger Congleton and Stefan Voigt

More articles in Constitutional Political Economy from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().