I ran across this article in a source I am not familiar with called Motherboard. Clearly the title is catchy:The More Environmental Disasters a State Suffers, the More Repressive Its Laws. The two authors, from the Univ. of MD, have created an interesting index of states and their characteristics. Below are a few excepts from an interview with the authors of the full study:
* * * Ecological factors contribute to people growing tighter—the idea being that, when you have a lot of threat, tightness is a reaction to that,” he said. “The data is all correlation. We can’t prove it at this time, but theoretically we think it’s causal.”
In fact, environmental vulnerabilities are the ones that most closely correlate with a tight society, not factors such as external threats. In fact, even long histories of being discriminatory are less correlated with this idea of a “tight” state than natural disasters. I suggested that, maybe, a history of slavery or traditional values could have had something to do with longstanding inequality in the South. And yes, there was a connection between the number of families that owned slaves at the end of the Civil War with tightness today, but it wasn’t as strong as the environmental factors: “Floods and natural disasters seem to be the strongest,” he said.
Again—really, this isn’t something that can be proven. There are any number of reasons why antiquated laws have persisted in the certain areas of the country, and there are a lot of reasons why some have been slower to embrace equality for all of its citizens. But now we know that being put in a bad situation, environmentally-speaking, might have something to do with it.
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The original source of the content was is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: See: Tightness–looseness across the 50 united states by Jesse R. Harrington and Michele J. Gelfand. The full text is 6 pages; it is available as a free download, but you have to fish around to find it.
The article is quite dense and not an easy read. Nevertheless, the topic is quite fascinating and I would like to get readers’ reactions.
Recovery Diva 
Thanks for writing. Your work sounds very interesting. Keep us posted when you have your results.
We are currently working on a paper investigating how environmental degradation and natural disasters may increase violence. Although this is a hot topic based on a scarcity-resource argument, we find that it also has to do with the breakdown of social structures. “The continuous erosion of social capital increases cycles of violence, which are further intensified by consequences of climate shocks which include displacement and migration. Furthermore, eroded social capital decreases the ability of communities to survive and recover from extreme climatic events. This paper explores the non-linear feedback loop between violence, social capital, and climate shock in the context of some of the most violent countries in Latin America-El Salvador, Honduras, and Colombia.” The Harrington paper supports this thesis on the back end–government or community-level tightness or looseness responses will impact this cycle, for better or worse.