100 For the very oldest ages the graph is affected somewhat because there are fewer people in those age categories. This really doesn’t make much difference until you get to around 60 years of age, and the number of criminals in that age group is so small that making the adjustments would not make much of a difference.
101 One of the more important, politically incorrect books on crime is Wilson and Hernstein’s Crime and Human Nature, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. The book postulated and provided evidence that certain broad groups of people are more likely to engage in crime.
102 See Table 2.7 in “Murder - Crime in the United States, 2004,” Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, February 17, 2006 (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offenses_reported/violent_crime/murder.html).
103 Transcript from CNN’s American Morning, September 8, 2004 (http://transcripts. cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0409/08/ltm.05.html).
104 John R. Lott, Jr., “Hype and Reality,” Washington Times, October 28, 2005.
105 In contrast, during the same months in 2003 the murder rate fell only 1 percent.
106 Christopher S. Koper and Jeffrey A. Roth. 2002, An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets, 1994-2000. Unpublished interim report to the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice. Washington, DC: The Urban Institute. See also Christopher S. Koper, 2004. An Updated Assessment of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Impacts on Gun Markets and Gun Violence, 1994-2003. Report NCJ-204431 to the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice. Philadelphia: Jerry Lee Center of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania. Available electronically from the Jerry Lee Center (www.sas.upenn.edu/jerrylee/research.htm) and the National Criminal Justice Reference Service (www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/grants/204431.pdf).
107 James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, “Broken Windows,” The Atlantic Monthly, March 1982.
108 Brian A. Reaves and Matthew Hickman, “Police Departments in Large Cities, 1990-2000,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, Department of Justice, May 2002 (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/pdlc00.pdf).
109 Bureau of Justice Statistics, “1985-1997 Homicide and population data for cities with population of 100,000 and over in 1997,” FBI, Uniform Crime Reports (http://www.hopemcc.org/data/lgcithom.htm) and FBI Uniform Crime Reports for 2000 (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/00cius.htm).
110 Reaves and Hickman, 5 and 13-14.
111 Patrick A. Langan and Matthew Durose, “The Remarkable Drop in Crime in New York City,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, October 21, 2004, Appendix table 3. The number of police in New York City peaked in 1999 at 41,791. Earlier numbers underreported the change in the number of sworn full-time police officers. See Brian A. Reaves and Matthew Hickman, “Police Departments in Large Cities, 1990-2000,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, Department of Justice, May 2002. Large cities are defined as those with over 250,000 people (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/pdlc00.pdf). See also Bruce Frankel, “Ex-NYC officer tells stark tale of cops gone bad,” USA Today, September 28, 1993, 3A.
112 Reaves and Hickman. If I used the NYPD numbers provided by Reaves and Hickman showing that the number of sworn full-time police officers went from 31,236 in 1990 to 40,435 by 2000, the per capita increase in New York’s police force is still almost three times greater than that for other large cities.
113 John R. Lott, Jr., “Does a Helping hand Put Others At Risk?: Affirmative Action, Police Departments, and Crime,” Economic Inquiry, vol. 38, no. 2 (April 2000): 241.
114 John Marzulli and David L. Lewis, “Cop Hopefuls Face Chase Test to Mimic Run After Suspect,” New York Daily News, March 12, 1997, 7.
115 Ibid.
116 Stephen Bronars and John R. Lott, Jr., “Deterrence, Right-to-Carry Concealed Handgun Laws, and the Geographic Displacement of Crime,” American Economic Review (May 1998): 475-479.
117 Lance Lochner, “Perceptions of the Criminal Justice System,” University of Western Ontario Working Paper, January 2003.
118 John Lott, More Guns, Less Crime (University of Chicago Press, 2000), Chapter 9, 190-4. Other policies analyzed in this study included problem-orientated or community-orientated policing programs. Other work examining a much smaller sample has confirmed this research. See Bernard Hacourt and Jens Ludwig, “Broken Windows: New Evidence from New York City and a Five-city Social Experiment,” University of Chicago Law Review, vol. 73, 2006).
119 John R. Lott, Jr. and Russell Roberts, “Why Comply: The One-Sided Enforcement of Price Controls and Victimless Crime Laws,” Journal of Legal Studies, vol. 18, no. 2 (June 1989): 403-414.
120 John R. Lott, Jr. and Russell Roberts, “The Expected Penalty for Committing a Crime: An Analysis of Minimum Wage Violations,” Journal of Human Resources, vol. 30, no. 2, Spring 1995: 397-408.
121 Rich Schleif, “Project ChildSafe Begins Second Phase of Nationwide Firearm Safety Tour,” Project ChildSafe, September 1, 2004 (http://www.projectchildsafe.org/news/092004.cfm).
122 John R. Lott, Jr., “A False Safety,” Washington Times, July 6, 2006.
123 Public Health News Center, “Gun Laws Requiring Safe Storage Prevent Some Youth Suicides,” Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, August 3, 2004.
124 Sam Peltzman, “The Effects of Automobile Safety Regulation,” Journal of Political Economy, August 1975; W. Kip Viscusi, “The Lulling Effect: The Impact of Child-Resistant Packaging on Aspirin and Analgestic Ingestion,” American Economic Review, May 1984; and John R. Lott, Jr. and John Whitley, “Safe Storage Gun Laws: Accidental Deaths, Suicides, and Crime,” Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 44, no. 2, part 2, October 2001, 659-689.
125 John A. C. Conybeare, “Evaluation of automobile safety regulations,” Policy Sciences, June, 1980, 27-39. While they did not examine pedestrian deaths, other research has found that “improved automobile safety results in more accidents but fewer total injuries both in NASCAR and on the street.” Russell S. Sobel and Todd M. Nesbit, “Automobile Safety Regulation and the Incentive to Drive Recklessly: Evidence from NASCAR,” Southern Economic Journal, forthcoming (accepted August 2006). This idea was discovered by Sam Peltzman, “The Effects of Automobile Safety Regulation,” Journal of Political Economy, 1975, 677-725. Peltzman’s research found no net change in the number of deaths.
126 W. Kip Viscusi, “The Lulling Effect.”
127 Paula Spencer, “We Protect Kids from Everything But Fear,” Newsweek, April 2, 2007. Http://www.msn.com/id/17770831/site/newsweek/.
128 See the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10_sy.html).
129 Ibid.
130 Ibid.
131 John R. Lott, Jr., The Bias Against Guns, Chapter 7.
132 Ibid.
133 Ibid.
134 Ibid.
135 Ibid. See also John R. Lott, Jr. and John Whitley, “Safe Storage Gun Laws: Accidental Deaths, Suicides, and Crime,” Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 44, no. 2, part 2, (October 2001): 659-689. Webster et al. find evidence of a change in suicides for 14- to 17-year-olds. My work in my book and with Whitley examined those under age 15 and those between ages 15 and 19. While there were a few regression estimates that found some drop in suicides for 15- to 19-year-olds, the effects for most regressions did not show statistically significant effects. Daniel W. Webster, Jon S. Vernick, April M. Zeoli, and Jennifer A. Manganello, “Association Between Youth-Focused Firearm Laws and Youth Suicides,” Journal of the American Medical Association , August 4, 2004.
136 For the period from 1977 to 1998 see John R. Lott, Jr., The Bias Against Guns, 170-171. For earlier research for the period from 1977 to 1996 see John R. Lott, Jr. and John Whitley, “Safe Storage Gun Laws: Accidental Deaths, Suicides, and Crime,” Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 44, no. 2, part 2, (October 2001): 682.
Chapter Five: Voting Rights and Voting Wrongs
1 The most notable exception to this rule is Chile during the Pinoche regime. Som
e might also include Singapore or even modern day China.
2 The gender gap was 14 points in 1980, 16 in 1984, 15 in 1988, 5 in 1992, 17 in 1996, 22 in 2000, and 14 in 2004.
3 Republicans still would have lost the 1992 election, in which Bill Clinton received 41 percent of the men’s vote compared to 38 percent for George H. W. Bush. See Karlyn H. Bowman, “Election Results from A to Z,” AEI Online, January 1, 2001 (http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.12234/pub_detail.asp); Ruy Teixeira, “A Tour of the 2004 Exit Poll,”The Century Foundation, November 9, 2004 (http://www.tcf.org/list.asp?type=NC&pubid=767); and Gary Langer, “The Gender Gap Makes a Difference,” ABCNews.com, November 8, 1996.
4 For more examples of issues with evident gender gaps, see the 1996 Voter News Service General Election Exit Poll Survey ( http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/cgi-bin/bob/archive2?study=6989&path=ICPSR&docsonly=yes).
5 Kingsley Browne, “Sex and Temperament in Modern Society: A Darwinian View of the Glass Ceiling and the Gender Gap,” Arizona Law Review, 1995, 980.
6 Wyoming and Utah were ahead of their time internationally. Outside the United States, women’s suffrage was first gained in New Zealand in 1893 and in various Australian states beginning in 1895. In those Australian states, as in the U.S., women were first given the vote in somewhat out-of-the-way places where relatively few women lived. By granting women’s suffrage, these states hoped to attract more women to settle the areas. Additionally, women’s suffrage was not viewed as much of a threat, since the small number of women living there meant that their vote initially did not have much of an impact on election outcomes. In 1869, Britain began allowing some women to vote strictly in local elections. Sweden had also granted limited women’s suffrage for some local elections in 1862-63. By contrast, Wyoming and Utah granted suffrage to all women for all elections. (http://womenshistory.about.com/od/suffrage/a/intl_timeline.htm).
7 Unfortunately, no data exists on voting by men and women separately.
8 To the extent that voting by women reduces the return to men of voting, the simple increase in the percent of the population voting underestimates the number of women who vote.
9 Because state expenditures and revenues were missing for some years, the changes in the average state’s values between years were calculated for those states which had values in both adjacent years. When a state is missing no more than one consecutive year of data, the change between the two years for which the data is available is calculated and then divided by 2. These changes were linked to the average expenditure and revenue levels in the eleventh year after suffrage was enacted. Graphing the means for the observed state expenditures and revenues in each year produces a very similar graph.
10 Figure 2 shows the raw data, but there are other factors that are also changing over time. While giving women the right to vote was the main factor, other factors included the manufacturing wage, fraction of the population over 65, percent of population living in rural areas, total population, percent of workers that were females, percent of workers in manufacturing, and voting regulations.
11 Real per capita expenditures grew from $101 to $208. By comparison, 1994 per capita state government expenditures in 1996 dollars averaged $3,177. See John R. Lott, Jr. and Lawrence Kenny, “Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?,” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 107, no. 6, part 1, December 1999: 1163-98.
12 Ibid.
13 Immigrants experienced the same delay - between 1870 and 1940, for each 10 percent of Americans who were foreign born, the voter turnout rate was reduced another 5 percentage points. The younger people were when they arrived in America, the smaller the decline in voter turnout. As we shall see, a similar delay was evident among African Americans as well.
14 John R. Lott, Jr. and Lawrence Kenny, “Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?,” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 107, no. 6, part 1, December 1999: 1183.
15 Ibid. Interestingly, men raising children on their own are only three percent more likely to vote Democratic than single men without children.
16 The poll tax also made Prohibition more likely by reducing the political influence of the poor, who generally opposed prohibition.
17 While the original thirteen U.S. states had some type of property or tax requirement to vote, all of them had cancelled the requirement by 1856. See Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff, “The Evolution of Suffrage Institutions in the New World,” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper 8512.
18 Much of this discussion is based upon John R. Lott, Jr., “Evidence of Voter Fraud and the Impact that Regulations to Reduce Fraud have on Voter Participation Rates,” SUNY Binghamton working paper (http://ssrn.com/abstract=925611).
19 The Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the Constitution banned poll taxes for federal elections, while the Voting Rights Act abolished them in state elections.
20 John E. Filer, Lawrence W. Kenny, and Rebecca Morton, “Voting Laws, Educational Policies, and Minority Turnout,” Journal of Law and Economics , vol. 34, October 1991: 371-393.
21 A $1-2 fee in 1940 is roughly equivalent to $14-28 today. Larry Kenny and I set up an extensive empirical analysis to test the impact of these fees and other voting rules. Data on up to 36 biennial elections from 1870 to 1940 were obtained for the 48 states. Infrequent elections and recent statehood reduced the sample to 1,215 elections. The dependent variable is defined as the fraction of the total population aged 21 or older who voted in the state’s gubernatorial election. This variable ranges from 2 to 83 percent, with a mean of 37 percent. The socioeconomic and voting law variables that are used to explain changes in voter participation rates include: fixed year and state effects, fraction of population age 65 and older, fraction of population that is illiterate, relative manufacturing wage, real manufacturing wage, female workers, rural population, rural population squared, fraction of the population that is foreign born, winning governor vote share, dummy for a Senate election, and dummy for a presidential election, as well as variables for female suffrage, poll tax, literacy test, and secret ballot. For a more extensive discussion see Lott and Kenny, “Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?” 1163-1198, and Filer, Kenny, and Morton, “Voting Laws, Educational Policies, and Minority Turnout,” 371-93.
22 However, there were only three statewide elections from the late 1970s to 1984 where Republicans won by less than one percentage point and the outcome would thus have been affected (Texas U.S. Senate and Governor races in 1978 and Virginia U.S. Senate 1978). There is also the Arkansas U.S. Presidential race in 1980, but Reagan’s landslide would not have been altered by the Arkansas vote. See John R. Lott, Jr., “Evidence of Voter Fraud and the Impact that Regulations to Reduce Fraud have on Voter Participation Rates,” SUNY Binghamton working paper (http://ssrn.com/abstract=925611).
23 “Citizens vote by secret ballot so that they can vote without fear of how others will react” (http://www.voteutah.org/learning/elections/voting.html).
24 This occurred when states introduced secret ballots during the 1882-1950 period. This 4 or 5 percentage point drop in turnout is equivalent to an 8-12 percent drop. See Lott and Kenny, “Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?,” 1196.
25 Frederic Charles Schaffer, “Might Cleaning Up Elections Keep People Away from the Polls? Historical and Comparative Perspectives,” International Political Science Review, vol 23, no. 1, 2002: 69-84.
26 Mark Lawrence Kornbluh, Why America Stopped Voting: The Decline of Participatory Democracy and the Emergence of Modern American Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
27 John R. Lott, Jr., “Why is Education Publicly Provided?: A Critical Survey,” Cato Journal, Fall 1987, 475-501. My study with Kenny, as well as many others, found that higher income individuals are more likely to vote. See Lott and Kenny, “Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?,” 1175.
28 Jac C. Heckelman, “The effect of the secret ba
llot on voter turnout rates,” Public Choice, volume 82, numbers 1- 2, January 1995: 107-124.
29 Some literacy tests also asked factual questions about the constitution and current events. Take the questions from Alabama’s test at the time that the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed:1.What body can try impeachments of the president of the United States?
2. Check the applicable definition for responsibility: ___ a duty, ___ a speech, ___ a failure
3. Name the attorney general of the United States.
4. May women now serve on juries in Alabama State courts?
5. If a person charged with treason denies his guilt, how many persons must testify against him before he can be convicted?
6. At what time of day on January 20 each four years does the term of the president of the United States end?
7. If the president does not wish to sign a bill, how many days is he allowed in which to return it to Congress for reconsideration?
8. If a bill is passed by Congress and the President refuses to sign it and does not send it back to Congress in session within the specified period of time, is the bill defeated or does it become law?
The answers in order: 1. The Senate; 2. a duty; 3. Nicholas Katzenbach; 4. Yes; 5. two; 6. 12 noon; 7. ten; 8. it becomes law unless Congress adjourns before the expiration of 10 days. The number of correct answers required to pass the test was left up to each county election board. See http://www.crmvet.org/info/litques.htm.
30 See Lott and Kenny, “Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?” For an interesting discussion on literacy test voting requirements in North and South America, see Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff, “The Evolution of Suffrage Institutions in the New World,” National Bureau of Economic Research working paper 8512.
31 Literacy tests became less effective over time, reducing turnout by only 1 percentage point by 1960. See John Filer, Lawrence Kenny, and Rebecca Morton, “Voting Laws, Education Policies, and Minority Turnout,” Journal of Law and Economics, October 1991, 383.
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