Laboratories of Inequality: The Diffusion of Smokefree Regulations Throughout the United States

• In Event: 568 - Regular Session. Health, Class, and Inequality

Abstract

The decline in cigarette smoking has been hailed as one of the greatest public health victories of the past century. Unfortunately, not all have benefited equally, and smoking has become a highly economically stratified health behavior. This study examines the role of smokefree regulations in the establishment and maintenance of the socioeconomic inequality in smoking. I show that the smokefree regulations diffusion was non-random, and that states with more advantaged populations were more likely to enact smokefree laws sooner than others. Then, I estimate the effect of enactment on state-level smoking rates in the states that put in place a smokefree law, and on different subpopulations of smokers within states. Finally, I quantify the reduction in the number of smokers across educational groups we would expect to see if a state enacted a smokefree law. My paper demonstrates that implementation of smokefree regulations within states that currently do not have them would contribute to the lessening of educational inequalities in smoking within those states. The present sociological research in this area has focused on isolating the individual mechanisms that have linked lower education to continued smoking, while institutional arrangements that promote or prevent smoking have remained neglected in our work. The findings of this study show that institutional determinants of smoking, such as whether one lives in a state that has taken a proactive stand against cigarettes, should not be underestimated by scholars studying the origin and persistence of the socioeconomic inequality in smoking.

Author

• Lucie Kalousova, University of Michigan