When Policy Gets Personal: How Extremist State Policies Drive Geographic Sorting in the Post-Dobbs Era

At a time when state governments are enacting increasingly ideologically extreme policies on some of today's most salient culture war issues, it is important to examine the implications of such legislation. I use a paired choice conjoint design with a nationally representative sample of nearly 30,000 respondents and novel perceptual data on state abortion policies to evaluate whether ideologically extreme legislation may lead to geographic sorting. The results show that extremist policies---particularly related to abortion---influence location preferences. I also undertake a supplementary observational study using a matched ordered logit design to assess how voters' migration patterns shifted after the Dobbs Supreme Court decision. This supplementary analysis shows that relative to all respondents, Democratic women living in states without abortion restrictions are considerably less likely to move to those with abortion bans post-Dobbs.