Yes, which has made countries like Burgundy even more broken than before.
In every Paradox game I've ever played, the being laissez-faire bourgeouisie is almost always better, the more so the more the game progresses.
For example, HoI2: Free Market + Open Society makes you produce faster, cheaper and have less dissent and more manpower from occupied provinces.
EU3: Free Trade and Free Subjects makes you incredibly effective as a military and economic power.
The same is true for Victoria. Basically, whatever sliders make you sound more like America in 1880 are going to make you awesome.
The only exception is if you start out very far on the side of socialism or protectionism, in which case the middle-ground can often be so terrible and the journey so long as to make it worth just sticking with what you've got. But in a game the length of the EU3 grand campaign or Victoria it's pretty much always worth it to (Eventually) become more libertarian.
I rather disagree about Victoria.
Laissez Faire may be cheaper in the short run, but it results in a ton of horrible factories; even if you delete them, your capitalists tend to just rebuild the same factory over and over again. Virtually the only way to take a minor unindustrialized country (Wallachia, Brazil, etc) and get it into the top three is via Planned Economy/State Capitalism; it may cost more to get set up, but after all that's what loans are for. Gamey tactics make the gap even larger: you can manipulate tax rate to get a laissez faire party into power for a little while to build you free railroads, then go right back to State Capitalism.
America in 1880 would be Residence, or perhaps Limited Citizenship. In Victoria, Full Citizenship has huge advantages (not only can you convert non-national POPs, but it also speeds up the assimilation rate immensely). Really not much more to say; Full Citizenship is imbalanced enough that you can buy Poland from Russia, drain it almost completely of its population (and if you have everything else lined up, assimilate said population completely) within ~25 years, then sell it back so you don't have to bother protecting it. It also provides a big boost to immigration.
Political system -wise, the only benefits Democracy has over Constitutional Monarchy is the large drop in revolt risk. That is really insignificant though, as a well-managed empire should have little problems with revolt risk, especially after some reforms are passed. The advantages of Constitutional Monarchy however are pretty large: you can swap parties at will (if you're the right kind, you don't even suffer revolt risk) and deny vote rights. This makes it incredibly easy to get a good party into power, while democracies often struggle on that front. And it's not like Constitutional Monarchies can't get 100 plurality for the immigration bonus too.
IIRC, the major US parties have Pluralism as their religious policy (which is somewhat historical; Catholic hate was pretty big, but never on an official level), and that is in fact the religious policy you should be going for, although Secularized and Atheism work just as well.
And the last significant factor: reforms. You want to stay as far away from The Gilded Age as possible. Every reform provides a significant boost to immigration, and a third of them have very nice side-effects. Health Care increases population growth quite a bit; if you somehow manage to afford it early on, its benefits increase exponentially. Unemployment Benefits, afaik, only makes you pay for the POPs that are actually unemployed, making it often the most cost-effective way of reducing militancy. Furthermore, combined with a non-Moralism religious policy, it pretty much eliminates emigration. Pension Funds is nice too; while it doesn't do anything special, it's the only other reform that doesn't affect efficiency.
A Socialist, State Capitalist, Secularized, Full Citizenship, Brazilian Constitutional Monarchy with great Health Care, decent Unemployment Benefits, and decent Pension Funds performs far better than a historical 1880 US would. Despite the fact that Victoria gives a hard-coded advantage to countries with the USA tag.
Edit: Oops. I went a bit off-topic there.
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