Abstract

Individuals with access to multiple jurisdictions can choose to distribute their consumption of many government policies across various polities to avoid costs imposed by their own government. This alters preferences over their own government's policies, suggesting such voters should disproportionately favor policies whose costs are evadable. Referendum voting from the Switzerland and the United States confirms this theorizing: border areas, where the populations have systematically greater access to other jurisdictions, see significantly different levels of support for a variety of policy measures, including abortion policy, legal retirement age, and sales tax rates.