Immigration, prohibition, and cultural conservativism in the United States

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation by EUI Research Daniel Urquijo.

This paper studies the emergence of punitive moral legislation and its potential to catalyse broader culturally conservative changes. We posit that increasing violations of moral norms can mobilise norm-upholders to protect them through law. This mobilisation, in turn, generates organisational and discursive resources that can be used by members of the upholder coalition to advance broader political agendas. We focus on the case of alcohol prohibition in the United States—a landmark victory for evangelical Protestants who sought to codify their morals into law. We argue that German and Irish immigration disrupted Temperance social order in rural America, spurring local alcohol bans as a defense against perceived rising norm violations by immigrants. We document this using a shift-share instrumental variable design. We then examine how Prohibition affected the spread of other culturally conservative movements, particularly nativism. Leveraging staggered state-by-state adoption of dry laws, we show that Prohibition significantly increased anti-immigration voting in Congress without affecting votes on economic issues. This historical case demonstrates how moral crusades emerge to protect social order and how their success can generate broader reactionary reforms.

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