Analysis
How much does the weighting change the answer?
Every ranked index makes a judgment call about what counts for how much, and that call moves the results. Most indices don't show you by how much. This page does.
The four weightings
Each is a position a real reader could hold. None is a strawman, and the site default is included as one option among four rather than as the baseline the others deviate from.
Equal categories (site default)
All ten categories weighted equally. Simple and neutral between categories, but because seven of the ten are personal-freedom categories it implicitly weights personal freedom at about 70%.
Equal dimensions
Fiscal, regulatory, and personal weighted equally, matching how Cato and Fraser present their headline numbers. Raises low-tax states and lowers states that score well only on personal-conduct categories.
Economic priority
Triple weight on economic freedom and regulatory burden. Approximates how a business-relocation or cost-of-living reader would weigh the index.
Civil liberties priority
Triple weight on the 1st, 2nd, and 4th Amendment categories plus criminal justice. Approximates a reader who treats constitutional rights as the point of the exercise.
States whose rank depends most on the weighting
“Swing” is the gap between a state's best and worst rank across the four scenarios. A high swing does not mean the data is bad — it means the state is genuinely strong on one dimension and weak on another, so any single rank for it is hiding something.
| State | Equal categories | Equal dimensions | Economic priority | Civil liberties priority | Swing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maine | #15 | #34 | #28 | #5 | 29 |
| New Mexico | #30 | #41 | #40 | #15 | 26 |
| Vermont | #16 | #30 | #24 | #12 | 18 |
| Virginia | #27 | #20 | #25 | #38 | 18 |
| West Virginia | #21 | #35 | #30 | #19 | 16 |
| Nebraska | #34 | #21 | #18 | #24 | 16 |
| Louisiana | #39 | #31 | #38 | #47 | 16 |
| Washington | #41 | #40 | #42 | #26 | 16 |
| Georgia | #23 | #12 | #16 | #27 | 15 |
| Oregon | #43 | #44 | #46 | #31 | 15 |
| Minnesota | #11 | #25 | #17 | #11 | 14 |
| Maryland | #28 | #32 | #34 | #20 | 14 |
Most stable: North Carolina (2), North Dakota (2), Hawaii (3), Wyoming (3), New Hampshire (3), Utah (3). These states rank about the same no matter how you weight the categories, which makes their position a more robust claim than a high-swing state's.
Personal vs economic freedom
The two axes are only loosely related, which is why a single ranking compresses so much. States in the off-diagonal quadrants are the ones a one-number index serves worst.
Hover a point for detail. Dashed lines are the median of each axis, so quadrants describe a state's position relative to the other 49 — not an absolute threshold.
- Broadly free (14)
Above the median on both economic and personal freedom. - Economically free, personally restricted (12)
Low tax and regulatory burden alongside tighter limits on personal conduct. - Personally free, economically restricted (14)
Permissive on personal conduct alongside a heavier fiscal and regulatory load. - Broadly restricted (10)
Below the median on both economic and personal freedom.
The three dimensions
The ten categories roll up into the same three dimensions Cato and Fraser publish, so the two indices can be compared without doing the arithmetic by hand.
Fiscal
Tax burden, government spending, and public debt — what the state takes and what it owes.
1 category: Econ
Comparable to: Cato "Fiscal Policy"; Fraser EFNA "Government Spending / Taxation"
Regulatory
Barriers to using your property and entering an occupation or market — land use, licensing, and administrative burden.
2 categories: Reg, Prop
Comparable to: Cato "Regulatory Policy"; Fraser EFNA "Labour Market Freedom"
Personal
Freedoms exercised as an individual — speech, arms, privacy, conscience, education, medicine, and criminal due process.
7 categories: 1A, 2A, 4A, CJ, Drug, Rel, Edu
Comparable to: Cato "Personal Freedom"
The dimensions are not evenly sized, and it matters
Seven of the ten categories are personal-freedom categories, one is fiscal, and two are regulatory. That is a property of a category set built around constitutional liberties rather than around Cato's dimensions. The practical consequence: under the site default, personal freedom carries roughly 70% of the overall score. Under equal dimension weights it carries 33%. Neither is wrong — they encode different values — but nobody should have to reverse-engineer that from the outputs, so it is stated here and quantified in the table above.
Everything on this page is computed from the published scores and can be reproduced from the bulk data export. See the methodology for how the underlying category scores are produced.