How National Parties Transformed State Politics by Jacob M. Grumbach
As national political fights are waged at the state level, democracy itself pays the price
Over the past generation, the Democratic and Republican parties have each become nationally coordinated political teams. American political institutions, on the other hand, remain highly decentralized. Laboratories against Democracy shows how national political conflicts are increasingly flowing through the subnational institutions of state politics―with profound consequences for public policy and American democracy.
Jacob Grumbach argues that as Congress has become more gridlocked, national partisan and activist groups have shifted their sights to the state level, nationalizing state politics in the process and transforming state governments into the engines of American policymaking. He shows how this has had the ironic consequence of making policy more varied across the states as red and blue party coalitions implement increasingly distinct agendas in areas like health care, reproductive rights, and climate change. The consequences don’t stop there, however. Drawing on a wealth of new data on state policy, public opinion, money in politics, and democratic performance, Grumbach traces how national groups are using state governmental authority to suppress the vote, gerrymander districts, and erode the very foundations of democracy itself.
Required reading for this precarious moment in our politics, Laboratories against Democracy reveals how the pursuit of national partisan agendas at the state level has intensified the challenges facing American democracy, and asks whether today’s state governments are mitigating the political crises of our time―or accelerating them.
Contents
Preface
The Crises of 2020
PART I. FEDERALISM AND THE RESURGENCE OF THE STATES
1. Introduction
2. The Mythos of American Federalism
3. From Backwaters to Battlegrounds
PART II. THE NATIONALIZATION OF STATE POLITICS
4. Who Governs the State-Level Resurgence?
5. National Activists in State Politics
6. Partisan Laboratories of Democracy
PART III. DEMOCRACY IN THE STATES
7. Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding
8. Explaining Dynamics in Subnational Democracy
9. Conclusion
https://www.amazon.com/Laboratories-against-Democracy
The Flaws of Federalism: On “Laboratories Against Democracy”
Grumbach questions the conventional wisdom around federalism, providing an argument for why federalism in the United States is precipitating democratic backsliding and creating inequalities across states that have a measurable impact on the day-to-day life and wellbeing of citizens.
Grumbach argues that the nationalization of politics has resulted in Congressional gridlock, where slim majorities make policymaking difficult if not impossible. National-level gridlock has shifted policymaking to the states, where parties often command comfortable majorities. Most states have government trifectas, with one party controlling the governorship and holding majorities in the legislature, making policymaking a lot easier than in a divided and polarized Congress. As Grumbach points out, interest group activists have followed this trend and focused their efforts on states.
Implicit in this argument is the role of the country’s winner-take-all electoral rules and the geographic distribution of the base of Democrats and Republicans. This combination helps explain why congressional delegations are dominated by one party, creating gridlock at the national level, and single-party government in so many states, opening up opportunities for swift policymaking at the state level.
In the book, Grumbach marshals an array of evidence to illustrate the consequences of the shift of policymaking to the states. He shows that across many policy outcomes — whether it’s abortion, the environment, gun control, immigration, LGBT rights, labor relations, healthcare, or taxation — Democratic and Republican states are on widely divergent paths: In Democratic states it is easy to vote; in Republican states there are many barriers to vote. In Democratic states fewer people are uninsured; in Republican states there are more uninsured people. In Democratic states access to abortion is easier; in Republican states it is harder, if not criminalized. The few exceptions are outcomes related to education, criminal justice, and policing and I found myself wanting to read more on why this is the case.
The great divergence also applies to indicators of democracy: Democratic states have expanded their state-level democracies while Republican states have taken an authoritarian turn. A memorable observation from the book is that while federalism might — for now — protect the country from presidents amassing power in dictatorial ways, anti-democratic figures are able to emerge in the first place because of the resurgence of state-level policymaking that has transformed Republican states into the titular laboratories against democracy.
So where do we go from here? Grumbach has various proposals, like an independent, federal electoral commission and renewing interest in local and state politics. But this will only go so far if we do not change structural features.
Being enmeshed in the electoral reform world, Grumbach’s argument forced me to think more carefully about how different government structures can modulate the effects of electoral systems and about what the right combination of electoral rules and government type is for a country like the United States.
Federalism is here to stay, but the electoral rules can change — and they are changing, largely thanks to federalism. Cities and states are experimenting with different electoral reforms that give voters more choices and that mitigate the winner-take-all dynamics of current politics. But after reading Grumbach’s book, my worry is that these electoral reforms might become another example of policy polarization and inequality between blue and red states. Avoiding this fate is an urgent challenge for the electoral reform movement.
https://www.newamerica.org/the-thread/laboratories-against-democracy/
14 Million More Americans Will be Living Under Laws They Disagree With.
How did we get here?
How did we get here? One important reason is the weakening of democratic institutions in the states. State election maps are key. As my new book, “Laboratories against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics,” describes, gerrymandering makes it harder for majorities of voters to select a majority of state legislative seats. Republican state legislative majorities in states like Wisconsin, where partisan gerrymandering empowers conservative rural voters over more liberal urban voters, will be electorally insulated from a backlash to an abortion ban.
Gerrymandering makes it harder for majorities of voters to elect a majority of state legislative seats. In several purple states likely to ban abortion, gerrymandered legislative maps have bolstered Republicans’ state legislative majorities. In the 2018 election in Wisconsin, for instance, Democratic state legislative candidates won 190,000 more votes than Republican candidates, but Republicans won 63 of the 99 legislative seats. As a result, in states like Wisconsin, Florida and Missouri, an anti-abortion minority of voters can set the majority of the state legislature.
Gerrymandering also insulates state legislators from a backlash to state-level abortion bans: Partisan lawmakers occupy highly secure seats, rather than having to forge compromise positions that appeal to a majority of state residents.
As state governments start to play an increasingly influential role in the lives of Americans, this imbalance will become only more important, not just on abortion but on issues like taxes and state services, access to guns or organizing labor unions.
In the longer term, if reproductive rights follows the trend of previous
controversial policies, many purple states might eventually fall into step
with the views of voters in their states and liberalize their abortion laws.
If pro-choice activists and voter majorities sufficiently mobilize, bans on
abortion in these states could be short-lived. But those changes will be
contentious, argumentative and messy—all to restore the basic shape of a
majority-rule democracy.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/06/30/court-made-america-less-democratic-00043549
Protect Democracy by Bolstering Organized Labor
The 2010s ushered in a new wave of state governments that eroded democratic institutions. States like North Carolina and Wisconsin took partisan gerrymandering to new heights, enabling conservative rural voters to elect majorities in state legislatures and the US House. While today’s legislative district maps are slightly fairer than those that were drawn in the 2010s, gerrymandering continues to weaken democracy. In North Carolina, for instance, the 2022 election gave that state’s Supreme Court a conservative majority that appears poised to allow extreme gerrymandering in the future.
Voter suppression policies remain in effect in many states as well. Critically, Georgia’s SB 202, which passed in 2021, made it more difficult to vote by mail and in person. This legislation was countered to some extent by the implementation of automatic voter registration in the state. Meanwhile, voting rights groups and democracy activists worked hard to combat the potentially demobilizing effects of SB 202. In the end, turnout in Georgia in 2022 was up. But the danger has not passed: To avoid the major decreases in turnout that could result from voter suppression policies, it is crucial that such aggressive voter mobilization efforts continue.
Gerrymandering and voter suppression have been chronic drags on American democracy. By contrast, electoral subversion represents a more acute danger. Imagine, for example, if a set of county or state politicians or election administrators decided to ignore their state’s voters by assigning handpicked delegates to the Electoral College. Though many experts consider the probability of such a scenario to be low, it would be catastrophic for US democracy.
The good news is that many of the candidates who would have laid the groundwork for electoral subversion were defeated in the 2022 midterms. However, the failures of these “Stop the Steal” candidates in the general elections doesn’t change the alarming fact that they cleaned house in the Republican primaries, thereby pushing the GOP further down the road of opposition to a free and fair democracy.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/protect-democracy-organized-labor/
Up from Federalism - Since Trump
In the age of Trump, some progressives have embraced the division of power between state and federal government as a boon to democracy. We should be skeptical.
Grumbach sheds light on this phenomenon by asking what happens when limited national government leads to more policy activity at the state level. His focus is on the past few decades of increasing political polarization and the nationalization of the political parties.
There is little doubt that polarization has increased, particularly on the right, and that polarization has largely incapacitated Congress. At the same time, political parties at all levels of government have also become more national in focus, with increasing national coordination among groups, activists, incumbents, platforms, and candidates. Grumbach argues that the intersection of these two developments—deep polarization and nationalization of parties—has transformed American federalism into a system that exacerbates, more than mitigates, the nation’s challenges. Whereas the conventional narratives about federalism highlight its capacity for participation, accountability, experimentation, and protection against oppressive power, Grumbach finds that today’s federalism is more likely to do the opposite. It reinforces and even worsens unequal political influence, reduces political accountability, and enables antidemocratic interests, especially the wealthy, to win out, despite their unpopular policies.
Grumbach begins by showing that, whereas divided government in Congress is now fairly common, partisan control at the state level has become more unified. For both Democrats and Republicans, there are almost always a few states where they have control. To study the impact of this trend, Grumbach examines interest groups, donors to state political campaigns, and state policies between 1970 and 2018, drawing on an original dataset of 135 policies across 15 issue areas: abortion, campaign finance, civil rights, criminal justice, education, environment, guns, health/welfare, housing/transportation, immigration, labor, LGBT rights, marijuana, public sector labor, taxation, and voting.
Grumbach finds that states have been very busy over the last twenty years, with policy changes occurring across all issues. But it turns out that state elections are just as elite-driven as national ones, and donors are actually more likely to be white and wealthy at the state level than the national. Contrary to the hopes of progressive federalists, it is not grassroots groups of ordinary voters (let alone the most vulnerable political minorities) that dominate state politics but rather highly organized, highly resourced activists, donors, and organizations. Policy is being changed by the parties in power, but public opinion has been relatively static on most issues. And the adoption of “innovative” policies from other states seems to occur not on the basis of their effectiveness and consistency with public preferences in the state but, rather, on whether they were implemented by states controlled by the same political party. States, in short, don’t appear to be very robust “laboratories” of democracy (as in the metaphor made famous by Justice Louis Brandeis).
Most challenging to federalism’s aspirationalists is Grumbach’s evidence of democratic backsliding. Over the past two decades, if your state was controlled by the Republican party, it likely became less democratic than the average Democratic-controlled state: more voter restrictions, more restricted access to the ballot, more gerrymandering, more disenfranchisement, more registrations rejected, fewer resources for identifying polling places, less same-day registration and absentee voting. This assault on democracy would not have been so successful, Grumbach argues, if it were not for American federalism, which structures power in ways that facilitate elite influence at every level of government. It is worth quoting him at length here:
The major crises in modern American politics are not just the result of institutional racism, plutocratic influence, or partisan polarization. They are a product of these forces flowing in a federal institutional system of government. . . . The structure and multiplicity of these venues make it more difficult for ordinary Americans to hold politicians accountable in elections. This structure is advantageous to well-resourced interests, who can move their political money and influence across venues in highly strategic ways. Federalism makes it easier for political actors to tilt the rules of American democracy, itself, to their advantage. Antidemocratic interests need only to take control of a state government for a short period of time to implement changes that make it harder for their opponents to participate in politics at all levels—local, state, and national.
Rather than enhance political accountability, then, the multiplicity of overlapping political authorities in American federalism seems to weaken the incentives of lawmakers to perform well. One reason, Grumbach argues, is that it is harder for voters to trace which level of government is responsible for what. This information asymmetry undermines the power of ordinary people but strengthens it for economic elites, whose concentrated and narrower interests allow them to sustain mobilization, propose model legislation, and get in early on blocking policies adverse to their interests. In any political system, elites have greater access to power than the masses. But the fractured landscape of American federalism provides them with many more venues than they might otherwise have.
What do we have to show for the massive social engineering states have undertaken over the last twenty years? For Grumbach, we can hardly say that the United States as a whole is better off than it was a generation ago. “Rather than ushering in democratic responsiveness, social harmony, and economic prosperity,” he notes, “the shift in policymaking from the national to the state level since the 1970s has coincided with the weakening of democratic institutions, the precipitous rise of economic inequality, and growing mass polarization and discontent.” Aspirational federalists might counter with the observation that Grumbach’s own findings show that states under Democratic control have become more progressive and, on some issues, like environmental regulation, health, and welfare, the overall effect across the country has been more liberalizing. But on other issues, of course—abortion, civil rights, guns, immigration, labor, and voting rights—the overall trend has tacked right.
This is the devil’s deal for the left that comes with American federalism. Victories in California and Massachusetts may be gratifying, but they do not solve national problems or nationwide inequality, and losses in states controlled by conservatives or reactionaries only exacerbate unequal opportunities and outcomes. Pandemics, guns, pollution, and racist groups all travel across state borders; rules about participation and representation vary widely, too. Until there were national rules with aggressive federal enforcement, fair policies on voting rights, equal protection, clean air, the minimum wage, and labor organizing—among other areas—were not safe or fully effective. (As Jamila Michener has recently shown in relation to Medicaid, for example, variation across states has a profound impact on the lives and political disempowerment of individuals, families, and communities.) Ironically, many of the policies adopted in liberal states—like legal abortion, gun safety measures, and expansion of Medicaid—are popular nationally. Championing federalism for producing innovative liberal policies at the state level overlooks the fact that American federalism may be one of the reasons why at least some of these policies do not exist on the national scale in the first place.
In a final challenge to the hopes of federalism’s progressive aspirationalists, Grumbach argues that, by creating new opportunities for the states to gerrymander, suppress votes, and diminish the power of labor unions, American federalism may have indirectly contributed to the rise of Trump, rather than served as its antidote.
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/up-from-federalism/
The War for Democracy in America Will Be Lost—or Won—in the States
States were meant to be “laboratories of democracy.” Instead, they are pioneering new ways to restrict voting and distort representation.
In his concurrence with the majority decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Brett Kavanaugh made a familiar argument about the states. “The Court’s decision properly leaves the question of abortion for the people and their elected representatives in the democratic process,” he wrote, by allowing “the numerous States” to decide the matter. Kavanaugh’s claim rested upon an abiding myth: that state governments are more accurate representations of the will of the people and therefore more democratic than the federal government.
But are they? This is the question at the heart of Jacob M. Grumbach’s landmark book, Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics. While many recent books, understandably, fixate on Donald Trump’s menace to democracy, Grumbach proposes that “it was the states that were the wrecking ball [of democracy], clearing a path for Trumpism throughout the American political system.” By undermining labor unions, for example, Republican states have driven down Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts, beginning with Wisconsin under Scott Walker and spreading to Michigan and beyond. Research has shown that the passage of state right-to-work laws on average reduces Democrats’ share of the presidential vote by 3.5 percent. Trump won Wisconsin and Michigan by less than one percentage point.
At the state level, the views most likely to prevail are not those of the people but of powerful corporations. Corporations use the threat of taking their operations to a different, more favorable state, in order to coerce state governments into giving them tax incentives, regulatory relief, and other benefits that can—and often do—outweigh the value of the employment they provide. The rivalry they set off among states works in their favor to lower wage and other standards, as federalism’s current advocates on the right well understand.
Well-resourced players gain even more leverage from the catastrophic decline in media coverage of state politics. The number of full-time reporters on this beat bled down by a third in just the decade from 2003 to 2014. The same period saw the rise of social media, which directs attention toward divisive national issues. Without robust local media to keep the focus on candidates for state office and their policies, state governments have become “voters’ ‘electoral blind spot.’” State legislators have the ability to operate in the dark. This, combined with their relative inexperience and lack of resources, leaves state legislators particularly in thrall to capital and wealthy donors.
Even the most unpopular state actions are rarely punished at the polls. When the state legislature of Wisconsin, long a moderate pro-choice state, enacted one the nation’s most restrictive gestation limits on legal abortion in 2015, the legislators who voted for it faced no penalty—even though public opinion was becoming more liberal on the issue. Similarly, even as public support for increased education spending grew, state governments cut education budgets. The exceptions Grumbach finds are telling: Only on LGBTQ rights and marijuana legalization has public opinion led to changes in state policies—responsiveness that cost nothing on issues that are also easy for voters to understand and monitor.
The relative inability of even the most attentive citizens to hold state legislatures accountable for serving special interests is compounded by gerrymandering, which has profoundly distorted the voters’ will. My own state, North Carolina, is a case in point: In 2018, Republicans won less than half of the vote, yet the legislative map they created awarded that minority party 10 of 13 congressional seats (77 percent) and a near supermajority in the state legislature. One expert Grumbach cites calls this “the most gerrymandered map in modern history.” Its shameless designer said he would have drawn the districts to ensure 11 seats for Republicans and only two for Democrats if he could have found a way. These are the deformed systems of representation that are deciding state policy on abortion, education, health care access, the penal system, and much, much more. They bear no resemblance to those Justice Kavanaugh imagines in his paeans to the virtues of federalism.
A quantitative political scientist, Grumbach has developed a new and sophisticated method to measure just how bad things have gotten in many places, including North Carolina and Wisconsin, which saw “precipitous drops in democratic performance after 2010.” His “State Democracy Index” compares changes in states between 2000 and 2018 across multiple measures, such as the difficulty of voter registration, the extent of gerrymandering, the criminalization of protest, incarceration rates, election turnout rates, voting wait times, and more. What it reveals is a systematic divergence between states based on which party controls government, with many Democrat-controlled states providing for more robust democracy and Republican-controlled states devising ways to constrict it.
Grumbach deploys his impressive tool kit to solve an important puzzle: Why has policy changed so dramatically in so many states, particularly “red” states, without significant shifts in public opinion? After all, there was little demand among ordinary voters for most of the stark policy changes that many legislatures enacted, from anti-union measures to radical gerrymandering to steep cuts in taxes on corporations and the wealthiest residents, let alone their rejection of Medicaid expansion, curbing of environmental protections, and adoption of Stand Your Ground laws, which in Florida notoriously enabled Trayvon Martin’s killer to escape punishment.
Grumbach offers two answers. One starts from the fact that in the majority of states today, one party has control over the state assembly, state Senate, and the governorship. Republicans currently hold 23 trifectas, and Democrats 15. Only 12 states have divided government. As a result of this development, Grumbach argues, the national parties have seen an opening to focus on the states, where they can pass agendas that would face gridlock in Congress. He describes states “dominated by national groups who [can] exploit the low-information environments of amateurish and resource-constrained state legislatures, declining local news media, and identity-focused voters.” While this case sometimes makes it seem like both parties are doing the same thing, Grumbach’s second explanation suggests otherwise. From his cumulative index, Grumbach predicts something that should alarm all of us: “Republican control of [state] government will be democracy-reducing.”
In states under Republican control, that is, Republican legislators have adopted a range of measures to hold down participation of voters from the rival party—from grabbing far more than their fair share of seats in redistricting to criminalizing the distribution of water to people waiting hours to vote in Georgia. This is a national Republican strategy that was enabled by the Supreme Court’s 2013 pro-federalist decision, Shelby County v. Holder. That 5–4 ruling swept away the key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which required states with a history of voter suppression to pre-clear any changes in voting systems with the Justice Department. Almost immediately those states adopted various schemes to hold down the Democratic vote share. They included purges of registration lists, ending preregistration programs for young voters and same-day registration for all voters, curtailing early voting periods and sites, and requiring a limited variety of state-issued voter IDs. (A Texas voter ID law, resurrected immediately after Shelby by then–Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, would have excluded some 600,000 registered voters had successful civil rights litigation not barred its implementation.)
Why does all this matter so much? Even though most Americans cannot name their state representatives, state legislatures decide key elements of their quality of life: the strength of their schools; the extent of health and welfare provision and public services; how at risk they and their children will be from gun violence and tobacco smoke; and whether they will have access to clean air and water and other environmental protections, let alone a legal right to abortion.
Public health researchers have found that since federal powers were devolved to the states, beginning in the Reagan era, even life expectancy has diverged sharply according to which party controls state government. In 1980, the difference in life expectancy at birth in New York and Mississippi was 1.6 years; now it is 5.5 years. As New York’s life expectancy has approached Denmark’s, Mississippi’s has slid down to Romania’s. The “excess deaths,” as the field refers to them, result from policy choices. If you live in a red state, you now can expect to die earlier than you would in a blue state.
The climax of Grumbach’s account is the chapter “Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding.” Here he demonstrates in detail how Republican elected officials have turned on its head Justice Louis Brandeis’s classic argument that states serve as “laboratories of democracy.” Today’s GOP uses the states it controls to carry out experiments in choking democracy; other red state legislatures then import those same measures. Several, for instance, copied Scott Walker’s attacks on unions and the North Carolina GOP’s attacks on one person, one equal vote. Prior to the Republican takeover of 2010, both Wisconsin and North Carolina were among the most democratic in the nation; now they rival Deep South states like Mississippi for the distinction of being the least democratic.
Readers may discern an internal tension in the case Grumbach is making. On the one hand, he argues that the “nationalization of [both] parties” is driving the growing split between states, with each party shifting resources to the state level. On the other hand, deeper in the book one finds a more hard-hitting analysis that suggests something else at work here. Republicans working at the state level are simply “more active, extreme, and nationally coordinated” than their counterparts across the aisle. Later, Grumbach notes that as special interest donor money rises, “the Republicans in the state legislature become more conservative” but that “we don’t see the same for Democrats.”
Yet Laboratories Against Democracy does not look closely at the donor influence driving GOP extremism. While Grumbach mentions the outsize role of the fossil fuel industry, for example, he spends little time examining how that influence plays out. Ditto the most influential Republican “investor coalition,” to borrow a term from Thomas Ferguson’s field-defining quantitative studies of the impact of money in politics—the network of billionaire and multimillionaire donors convened by Charles Koch. Indeed, Grumbach groups the Koch network with MoveOn at one point as analogous “interest group activists” influencing state politics. To compare these two groups is beyond apples and oranges: It’s cannon ball versus tennis ball.
The Koch donor network funds literally hundreds of organizations with an integrated division of labor, whereby many of them put out toxic disinformation, especially on climate change and alleged voter fraud. The most recent calculation of its political spending on these organizations in the 2020 election cycle put it at $1.1 billion. MoveOn is a single organization, with fewer than 50 staff, which engages in online petitioning and advocacy and fundraising for candidates. It aspired to raise $20 million in 2020. Grumbach suggests a false equivalence, perpetuating old norms of evenhandedness that are preventing many in the media and academy alike from conveying forthrightly the authoritarian peril now coming from the political right alone.
Grumbach uses phrases such as “as the parties polarize,” when in fact there is no such equal motion, as other parts of this book and other books prove. One party has turned against democracy, cynically exploiting federalism to its advantage. The other party is scrambling to curb that takeover after the fact, its members and leaders having been obsessed with national and city politics and all but oblivious to the states.
What is to be done? If Democrats claim larger majorities after the 2022 midterms, then, Grumbach proposes, pro-democracy coalitions should deploy “the power they gain at the national level to shift authority upward and away from the state level, where budgets are constrained, voters have less information, business and the wealthy can quickly flood political battles with money—and where threats to democracy continue to arise.” The problems that come from the states require greater vigilance and ongoing voter mobilization in all of them, but also the kinds of national structural democracy reforms that Democrats in Congress support nearly unanimously, with the exceptions of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. With two more Democrats in the Senate, that is, and a House majority, America could have automatic voter registration (like most democracies), campaign finance reform, independent redistricting instead of partisan gerrymandering, greater election security, and better ethics rules, including for the Supreme Court.
Federalism is killing us. It is doing so quite literally, in rising morbidity and mortality in Republican-dominated states. It is doing so figuratively in the way some of its enthusiasts work to divide us by race, religion, sexuality, and immigration status to the point that some on the right are embracing not only violence but visions of secession and civil war. The right’s exploitation of state control of elections has put the United States on par with Poland, Slovenia, and Hungary as a faltering democracy.
It is past time to give up the myth that federalism is an advantage of the U.S. system of government. Its defenders must come to terms with the hard truth: Even the most equal U.S. states—the poster cases of both democratic and Democratic governance—are less equal than other major democracies that don’t have our unusually decentralized system. Not coincidentally, that system came at the insistence of most arch defenders of human enslavement at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, men who well understood that the national government might one day turn the premise of the Declaration of Independence against their extreme variant of capitalism. And now, Republican elected officials and their backers are enlisting that exceptional federalism to strangle democracy, state conquest by state conquest.
Laboratories Against Democracy reminds Americans of an essential truth: We all live in states. And they are diverging more rapidly than we can track, in a manner that exposes Justice Kavanaugh’s happy talk about how this court’s decisions will work in practice as cynical in the extreme. One conclusion is inescapable: The war for democracy in America will be lost—or won—in the states. The reality in the U.S. today is the opposite of what Kavanaugh avowed. Federalism is not the solution to our problems. Federalism is the problem.
Nancy MacLean is the William H. Chafe Distinguished Professor of History and Public Policy and author most recently of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.
How States Went from the Laboratories of Democracy to Working Against it
“Today’s nationally coordinated parties have fundamentally changed the way that American federalism operates,” Grumbach writes in his book, “Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics.” “State governments do not serve as a safety valve for national politics. Instead they exacerbate national challenges.”
Rather than looking at each other and emulating what policies work, states are looking at political parties and emulating what helps them win.
And, as the book’s title points to, states, particularly Republican-controlled ones, are making changes that make government less representative, less responsive, less democratic, Grumbach says.
...Local and state governments are supposed to be closer to the people, more responsive, easier venues to turn the voters’ will into action.
But, Grumbach says, for a variety of reasons — gerrymandering, decline of local news, big investments from national groups in local issues, voters’ ties to a national party — that’s largely become a myth.
He sees it playing out now, after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The nation is notoriously split on abortion, but there are only eight states where more than 50% of voters think abortion should be mostly illegal, according to a recent New York Times analysis of 10 years of surveys.
But in about half the states, abortion is now mostly illegal or soon could be. Wisconsin, widely seen as one of the most gerrymandered states in the country, now has one of the most stringent abortion bans in the country.
“Because state policies are traditionally understood to be highly responsive to public opinion, one might assume that the Wisconsin law reflected the preferences of the mass public,” Grumbach writes. “It did not.”
Polling shows 54% of Wisconsin voters think abortion should be legal.
https://seattletimes.com/states-went-from-labs-of-democracy-to-working-against-it/
What Happens in Wisconsin Doesn’t Stay in Wisconsin
American federalism is strangling democracy and fueling the far right. Is
there anything the Left can do about it?
by JAKE GRUMBACH - FALL 2022
For decades, Wisconsin embodied Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis’s vision of the states as “laboratories of democracy.” It was in the vanguard of progressive government for much of the twentieth century, acting as the proving ground for policies that later spread to other states across the region and the country as a whole – namely, workers’ compensation, direct election of US senators, and progressive income taxation, among other innovations. The avatar of the Wisconsin Idea was “Fighting Bob” La Follette, the progressive Republican who dedicated his life to “winning back for the people the complete power over government—national, state, and municipal—which has been lost to them,” and who still inspires the state’s progressives and radicals to this day.
But other figures have long had very different Wisconsin Ideas of their own. America’s Dairyland has also given us Joe McCarthy, Tommy Thompson, and Scott Walker, who led an all-too-successful assault on the state’s institutions of public education, electoral administration, and labor unions. This reactionary vision of state government has gone national, revealing the ways in which the states have become, as the title of political scientist Jake Grumbach’s new book puts it, laboratories against democracy.
Socialist Forum recently invited Grumbach to discuss his book, Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics, and its analysis of contemporary US politics. In his view, many of our problems are traceable to the friction between nationalized parties and a political system that grants an outsized degree of authority to states and localities – the level of government where powerful private interests arguably hold the most sway. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Socialist Forum: If you say the word “federalism” to someone who’s not a political scientist, it’s likely that they won’t know what you’re talking about. Or maybe they’ll half remember it from a high school social studies class. But to paraphrase an old revolutionary, “You may not be interested in federalism, but federalism is interested in you.”
Jake Grumbach: Federalism is a structure of government in which there are multiple levels of government that each have separate authority. So in the US we have the national government, federal government, and state governments. Around the world, there are dozens of countries with federalism. That’s contrasted with countries that don’t have multiple levels of government, where there might be a little bit of delegation to cities or provinces, but the national government really has all the legal, constitutional authority.
The big difference in the US form of federalism is how it puts a lot of authority at the state level, at the lower level. Other federalist democracies around the world, like Germany, Canada, Mexico, India, Switzerland, and so forth, have some decentralization and delegation to the lower level, but nowhere near as much as the US. What I argue is that’s actually a really underemphasized source of problems in American politics and the political economy.
Socialist Forum: What are some of the reasons for that? How did the US become one of the few federalist countries in the world with state level governments that are this powerful?
Jake Grumbach: The first thing is that institutional design, or the design of a constitution, is not purely from high minded principles. In this case, there was a battle among the founders between different proposals. One was called the Virginia Plan, which featured a strong national government that would look like governments in other wealthy democracies around the world. The other was the New Jersey Plan, which essentially put all authority at the state level, so one single state could veto a national governmental policy of any form. What they ended up doing at the Constitutional Convention was compromising between these plans, giving birth to US federalism.
There have been fluctuations over time in how much the national government intervenes in politics, compared with how much authority the states, and by extension, cities and municipalities get. Since the 1970s, we’ve been in a period of rising inequality, the growth of climate change, the growth of corporate power, and all types of other changes. But one other major change in the US that goes along with all of this is the return of expansive authority to the US states, in all sorts of policy areas.
Socialist Forum: Many of the leading founders, people like Madison and Hamilton, thought that the state and local levels of government would be more amenable to democracy and popular control – and they didn’t necessarily like that prospect. That’s one of the big reasons why they wanted a stronger national government coming out of the Articles of Confederation. But things didn’t exactly turn out that way, right?
Jake Grumbach: There’s some truth to that. Madison himself started out wanting a big national government with the ability to tax and spend for the benefit of property owning white men. People like Thomas Jefferson or the anti-Federalists wanted more state level authority, and some of them were worried about a strong national government with the capacity to put down rebellions of poor farmers. They thought that small-D democracy and the popular will would be better served by state level, lower level authority.
Over time, the politics of slavery changed. A critical mass of anti-slavery sentiment and mobilization occurred in the North, for example. Later in the twentieth century, with the rise of an industrial society, state level authority became massively problematic for democracy.
Socialist Forum: So let’s make a big leap to the current period, because that’s the focus of your book. You focus on how the nationalized political parties we have today interact with American federalism, and what the effects of that interaction are. Walk us through some of the main aspects of that dynamic, as you see it.
Jake Grumbach: As I mentioned before, US federalism puts authority over democratic institutions, like election administration, counting votes, drawing legislative districts for both state and Congressional elections, and police power at the state level. This is really unique stuff compared to many other countries around the world. There’s no institution in the American system that’s been consistently pro-democracy, or some sort of consistent champion of the people. But Congress has tended to be the most small-D democratic, and the state governments, especially state legislatures – enabled often by the Supreme Court – have been the main democratic backsliders.
During the end of Reconstruction, for example, the Supreme Court enabled a Congressional retreat from Reconstruction, and the states established a new system of racial authoritarianism in the US south. The Supreme Court further enabled Jim Crow through a series of rulings like Plessy v. Ferguson. Many of the states acted on this, and started disenfranchising black Americans in the South after the first real democratic revolution in the US.
State-level battles over democracy in the US, and often, democratic backsliding, hasn’t always mapped on to partisanship as much as it does now. For example, in the mid-twentieth century the decentralized Democratic Party contained the Southern Dixiecrat segregationists. But it also contained the Northern labor civil rights activists affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), proto-civil rights groups, and the rising black middle classes in Chicago, Detroit, New York, and so forth, creating what is the modern left. Those groups were in the same highly decentralized political party. So politics was more strongly based in regionalism, and the decentralized parties really matched the decentralized institutions of American federalism. Things certainly weren’t great, but there certainly was progress in terms of democratic expansion during this period.
What’s happened since the 1970s is, and especially since the 1990s, is the parties have nationalized. We know what Democrats and Republicans stand for nationally, with few state or local variations. It’s hard for politicians below the national level to step outside of their national party coalitions. There are a million reasons for why the parties nationalized, from racial realignment over the long twentieth century; the Southern strategy of the Republican Party; the nationalization of media through the rise of cable news and the Internet; the decline of state and local politics, journalism, and newspapers; major investments by interest groups like the Koch network and the American Legislative Exchange Council on the right, as well as among liberals in the form of MoveOn-org-style national liberal groups that hire staff lawyers and receive donations from across the country, often facilitated by the Internet. Politicians’ own fundraising has been nationalized. Everybody seems to get those annoying text messages and e-mails from candidates like, “I’m crying because I didn’t meet my goal today for fundraising.” Now, it may be from somebody you may like, but they may be running for office somewhere across the country.
That’s quite different from before. That nationalization of the parties matches how parties are organized in many countries around the world. The big difference is that US political and electoral institutions remain decentralized through federalism. So there’s a big collision between nationalized parties and subnational, decentralized institutions. This leads to all sorts of democratic problems, and leads to a biased politics in favor of groups that are wealthier and narrower relative to workers or social movements, or voters in general. It makes holding politicians accountable more difficult. In some states, it’s really causing democratic backsliding, where it’s harder to vote and districts are drawn in a more skewed and biased manner.
Socialist Forum: The story you lay out in your book is definitely at odds with many of the more traditional accounts of federalism and its virtues. Those don’t just come from right-wing or conservative quarters. Positive accounts of federalism in the states sometimes come out of more progressive quarters, too. Both conservatives and liberals have viewed federalism as a kind of safety valve for political conflict, instead of an incubator of it. How does your argument depart from those kinds of arguments?
Jake Grumbach: There’s been a ton of serious argumentation over these questions going back to the 1780s. One major argument, going back to the eighteenth century, is that one-size-fits-all policy solutions don’t work in a big, diverse country like the US. There are so many different cultures and regions of that country, the argument goes, and they should be able to customize policy based on the wills of whoever they conceive to be worthy democratic subjects of that region. So the need for flexibility and customization is one big argument in favor of US-style federalism.
Another, going back to that time too, is that it protects against autocracy and tyranny. The idea here is that it would be much easier for an autocrat to take over the entire electoral system if it was all regulated by the national government, as opposed to 50 state governments where some of them would oppose a tyrannical national regime. James Madison called this dynamic “double security.” So those are some old school arguments that still persist to this day. While Trump was president, you heard a lot of liberal commentators say “Thank God we have this decentralized form of election administration that can’t be captured by Trump.”
Then there is a series of new arguments, mostly conservative, rooted in the idea that people vote with their feet by simply moving to a place where government policy matches their preferences – sort of like how capital seeks out the most favorable business environment. On this view, it’s a good thing that capital can pick up and move, and take away investment and potential tax revenue in the process. This forces state governments to be very efficient, balance their budgets and things like that. That’s one line of argument, a conservative one.
The liberal version is called progressive federalism. It is focused on the post-civil rights era, and it holds that with the development of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and other progressive legislation state and local government is really good for racial minorities and new immigrant groups. For example, there are majority Latino areas in the Southwest, and California is very diverse. In these conditions, you can get a coalition of people of color to really achieve descriptive representation, meaning electing people of color in office in a way that you can’t in the country more broadly. There’s some truth to that, and the research does show, for example, that black legislators do a little better for black Americans than an equivalent white legislator on the margin. But those effects are diminishing with the increased importance of partisanship.
I think all of those optimistic takes on federalism are definitely outweighed by the set of counterarguments I advance in the book. I used to be a progressive federalism type of guy. When I was growing up in the Bush administration I really cared about climate change and there was an oil magnate in the Presidency. But I thought this was OK because I lived in California, where we could still do all kinds of green stuff. There are some huge wins on fuel efficiency standards, regional cap and trade networks, and things like that. But the point here I really want to emphasize is, on balance, we would be farther along without the states. Those victories in some states are better than nothing. But we would be farther along in all the things we want to talk about, whether it’s climate policy, economic equality and social democracy, the welfare state, civil rights and liberties, reproductive rights, all of these things, if there were a unitary government that didn’t pay attention to states as coherent units with boundaries that matter. We could just count up the votes of everybody in the country, and put a national government in power. If the voters don’t like what it does, they can then change the party in national power.
Socialist Forum: Last year, Donald Trump tried to use precisely this decentralization to cement himself in power at the national level. One of the key points you make in your book is that federalism isn’t just what happens in the states, without any kind of relationship to the federal government. Federalism is really about that system of relations between the states and the federal government, right?
Jake Grumbach: I don’t want to dismiss the double security argument entirely. If there’s a would-be autocratic party in national power that controls both chambers of Congress, the presidency and the court, that is not the time to centralize election administration. That is true. I’d say it’s narrowly true.
But over longer stretches of time, putting election administration, districting, police powers, and so forth at the lower level actually increases the likelihood that you’ll get that would-be autocratic coalition or autocrat in national power in the first place. What I mean by that is the fact that we have multiple levels of government distorts politics in a series of ways that makes it harder for voters to hold politicians accountable. It increases the relative influence of narrow groups, like corporations, over broader groups, like workers. And it allows an anti-democratic coalition to, when they happen to take power in a particular state, the opportunity to change the rules of elections and districting, and vote counting, and so forth. States regulate elections, from local dog catcher, up to US president. What this means is if a state passes a bunch of voter suppression policies, for example, and makes it more difficult for some groups to vote, that affects who gets in national power in the first place. So there’s a tradeoff there that I want to illustrate.
I don’t have the perfect answer here, but we have to weigh that tradeoff. Decentralization leaves the US vulnerable to anti-democratic coalitions taking national power in the first place. But once that anti-democratic coalition’s in national power, it is probably better to have decentralized democratic institutions.
Socialist Forum: What happens in Wisconsin doesn’t stay in Wisconsin, right?
Jake Grumbach: Exactly, yeah. Thinking it more broadly, I’ve been talking about voter suppression or gerrymandering, which matters hugely. Those are traditional electoral democratic institutions, but the destruction of labor in the US, for example, is also important for democracy. My research with Paul Frymer on labor is also about how labor unions facilitate racial solidarity, and are really crucial for protecting multiracial democracy from this sort of resentment-based culture war politics that are, at the mass level, the main threat to democracy. The main reason that ordinary, non- elite Americans might support an anti-democratic coalition is through that sort of racial, resentment-based politics.
Socialist Forum: Changing gears a bit, your book provides very strong evidence of state level polarization in terms of policy outcomes across nearly every single policy area. States run by Democrats are tending to pursue a similar suite of policies, and the same goes for Republicans. Can you broadly summarize that process? You also highlight important exceptions to that general rule, like education and criminal justice, in particular.
Jake Grumbach: From the New Deal through the 1970s, we experienced policy nationalization. National policy standardized life across the states in a lot of key ways. There were huge differences between the states, for example, during the Jim Crow period. Being in a Jim Crow state was very different from being in a Northern non-Jim Crow state. Being in a state that had some state level old age insurance and a state level minimum wage, was very different from living in a state that did not prior to the New Deal. Prior to the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, it was very different to live in the South versus the North.
But those national policies in the New Deal, Social Security, later on in the Great Society of Medicare and Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, the Clean Air Act in 1970, Roe v. Wade, all reduced the differences across states. There was a kind of regional convergence, including economically, where the US South, which was really, really poor, was more closely integrated with the rest of the country. We forget that many people didn’t have running water and toilets, or things like telephones, for so long in the US South. Major national investments brought the US South into convergence with the Northern states, to build a broader middle class society during that long New Deal period.
What you see now is the reversal of that trend. Since the 1970s, there’s bee divergence between states on all sorts of policy areas, like tax rates on the wealthy, how easy it is to join a labor union, abortion restrictions and reproductive rights, environmental policy, gun control and gun rights. All these policy areas are diverging. Now your state of residence is much more determinative of all sorts of outcomes, from the taxes you pay, your ability to obtain a legal abortion, and so forth. Your state of residence really matters now in a way it didn’t a generation go.
But there are two key exception areas. In education, there’s maybe a little bit of divergence in areas like higher education spending, as conservative states seem to dislike universities more. There’s some divergence, but less than you’d expect. Criminal justice is the glaring exception. Criminal justice policy, whether that’s policing or mass incarceration there’s been consistently bipartisan politics around this since the 1970s. There’s been a ton of discourse, especially in recent years, about why is US policing is so authoritarian to all racial groups, but especially black Americans. Why are incarceration rates higher than any authoritarian regime, in terms of overall population or per capita? There have been many discussions about structural racism, the profiteering of the prison industrial complex, etc. But I think an underemphasized point is decentralization and federalism. In most developed democracies, authority over policing and incarceration is mostly at the national level, whereas in the US 95% of prisoners are in state and local prisons and jails.
We see a lot of TV about the feds, but it’s actually all state and local. I think that’s a crucial reason why Democratic Party state and local officials, even when they campaign on reforming the police, for example, don’t really do it. I no longer think they secretly don’t want to reform the police.
Socialist Forum: Look at how the police treated Bill de Blasio when he was mayor of New York. He wouldn’t have been able to put them under effective civilian control, if he wanted to.
Jake Grumbach: Exactly. What’s becoming much clearer is that there’s no institutional capacity for state and local governments to rein in their police forces. That police forces, and to some extent, prisons and correctional officers’ organizations and unions, have separate spheres of authority. They are more like cartels that are insulated from popular democratic control. So just in the past couple years, we saw the politics of policing and criminal justice go from the 2020 George Floyd/Black Lives Matter social movement, one of the largest protest waves in US history, to a backlash and crime-panicked politics. But you still don’t see much fluctuation in policy. You see fluctuation in political inputs, but not policy.
In many other areas of American politics, when there are big swings in public opinion, like LGBT rights, cities and states started implementing things like gay marriage. You generally see some correspondence between political inputs, whether that’s public opinion, or voters or social movements, or even just investments by wealthy organizations. Some sort of input happens, and then things change. But you don’t see that in policing.
And again, in other countries there’s usually a much more military-style hierarchy, where there is sanction if you go against the commander-in-chief. In the US case, that tends to be mayors. So De Blasio was the legal commander-in-chief of the NYPD during his tenure as mayor, but that doesn’t mean you actually can influence their behavior very much. That’s, again, a product of this decentralization.
To contrast this with the US military, there are of course all sorts of problems with the US armed forces. We know this very well. But I don’t think we should lose sight of the fact that there is some difference in holding soldiers in the US military accountable, versus holding police officers accountable. There’s also a difference in the way the military responds to orders by the White House, compared to how police forces respond to reformist mayors. That’s not to say the armed forces are all rosy or something like that.
Socialist Forum: It can also lead to bad policing, even on its own terms. If you watch enough serial killer documentaries on Netflix, it seems like some of these killers were able to get away with slaughtering people for months or even years on end because they traveled around from state to state. None of the police departments involved were talking to each other or sharing resources, and they spent absurd amounts of time investigating cases.
Jake Grumbach: That’s a critical point. We haven’t talked about that yet, but this lack of coordination is a crucial downside of this level of decentralization. We saw that during COVID and in other national or global crises, when there were not incentives to organize via information sharing, resource sharing, having a unified plan of attack, and things like that. This is true in terms of vote counting, or redistricting. There’s no centralized data. Commercial firms are the only ones that have aggregated all the voter rolls. Same thing with driver’s licenses. If you’re in a voter ID state, you have to go to your local DMV with your state driver’s license. There’s no national ID system like in other countries around the world, where you automatically, through your enrollment in the welfare state, get an ID from the country.
There’s just issue after issue, not to mention collective action problems like climate change, or what’s called fiscal federalism – really the race to the bottom, bidding wars between states and localities for investment that end up being worse off for all the states. A firm can put states into competition in a way they can’t put countries. Saying “Ireland, Ethiopia, India, we’re putting you all in a bidding war” doesn’t work quite as easily as pitting Nevada and Idaho against California. Firms just massively exploit that, as well as wealthy individuals.
Regular working people don’t have the luxury of threatening to vote with their feet in that way, and it’s not as much of a punishment to a state or local government for individual working people to do that. When the abortion bans start hitting, you can’t just expect people to leave family and social networks and their livelihoods, and pick up and move to blue states – especially as blue states experience an ongoing housing crisis. That is hindering the already semi-non-existent ability to vote with your feet in the US.
Socialist Forum: Shifting gears a bit, let’s talk about some of the practical or organizing questions that arise from reading your book. It seems like the Left, broadly speaking, has been late to the game when it comes to addressing and contesting this arena of state politics, and that the Right has beat us to the punch by quite a bit. Do you agree with that? If so, what do you think may account for it?
Jake Grumbach: In my book I’m criticizing what’s called institutional decentralization, the idea that rules of governing are set at these lower levels. But crucially, organizing is necessarily a local or federated affair. Whether it’s the labor movement, a social movement, or DSA, membership organizations are based in local chapters but are networked more widely, and that is absolutely crucial for any mass organization or movement. It is absolutely crucial that movement organizations are federated, their members meet in person and get to know each other through these federated organizational structures.
At the same time, that shouldn’t lead us to think that localism, in terms of authority, is effective for democracy. If you’re in the labor movement, a DSA chapter, or some environmental group, it’s really important to organize locally. But then, if given the chance, we should centralize institutional authority at the national level. But it’s also true, given this decentralized federalism we have right now, the states are so crucial. Liberals and the left, but especially liberals and the Democratic Party, have certainly neglected the state level in terms of political strategy, spending resources, and just paying attention. That’s true broadly. It’s not like Republicans and conservative Americans are just more into local politics in an abstract sense. They tend to be older and tend to be homeowners, so that tends to embed them more strongly in local and state politics. They have some advantages in that way.
But it’s also true that big right-wing funders and the Republican Party really did focus on the states. The American Legislative Exchange Council, Americans for Prosperity, and other groups like that have been working for decades to organize across the local Chambers of Commerce – the business wing – and the evangelical religious right. They have found ways to coordinate and win at least some of what each part of the coalition wants, even though it’s not a perfectly organized coalition. The religious right and the gun rights people like are not always best friends.
There are all sorts of cleavages, of course, but it’s crucial to coordinate and to find ways to continue those partnerships. The Right did that. They also focused on the states, and were ready when partisan control of states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and so forth, changed to the Republican Party. They were ready with an agenda that really kneecapped their opposition, especially labor. That paid huge, huge dividends. And that kind of approach has just not been the case among liberals and Democrats, although it’s changing a bit in the Democratic Party with the renewed emphasis on labor in some quarters.
Socialist Forum: Are there any specific policy demands or campaigns that an organization like DSA, working together in coalition with other broadly small-D pro-democracy groups should pursue to move governing authority up the scale and centralize it in the federal government where possible?
Jake Grumbach: Use any political venue you have access to. If you can get a local minimum wage change, subsidized health insurance policy at the state level, state level campaigns for single payer healthcare or climate policy, go for it. In red and purple states especially, battles over partisan control that really do have ramifications for all types of things, especially when it comes to things like a full nationwide abortion ban. A lot of the policies that would centralize authority in important ways, like the PRO Act for labor for example, would essentially set a higher baseline for the states so they couldn’t restrict labor organizing beyond a certain level. It would overturn a lot of the anti-labor laws in states, including these newer ones in Midwestern states.
It’s important to not get too enthralled with the idea of localism in democracy, and in radical democracy. I used to be oriented in a more localist direction. But with movements like Right to the City or Occupy Wall Street, I came to the view that the idea of a very intense and deliberative localist democracy was unfortunately misguided, in that this will consistently advantage the advantaged. Most people don’t have the personal time and capacity to do that kind of thing. We know much more about the direction of the country we want, and about who national and party representatives of those visions might be nationally.
So fight at the local and state level, but don’t get enthralled with the idea that delegating more authority downward is necessarily going to be more small-D democratic. Fight hard and organize locally, but fight to move authority nationally, where we can actually see the choices in front of us.
About Jake Grumbach
Jake Grumbach is an associate professor of political science at the
University of Washington. He is the author of Laboratories against
Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics (2022), which
investigates the causes and consequences of the nationalization of state
politics since the 1970s.
Is Democracy Declining in the American States? A Talk With Jacob Grumbach
Federalism is supposed to allow policy to vary with local opinion and circumstances. But American politics has nationalized, with many seeing states as arenas for national political debates among partisan networks rather than opportunities for state-specific solutions. And states are even fighting about the basic ground rules of democracy. Jacob Grumbach finds that nationalization made state policy respond more to party control, with legislators responding to activist donors over public opinion, states copying electorally successful policies only from states controlled by the same party.
Matt Grossmann: Let’s start with the summary. What were the big findings and takeaways?
Jacob Grumbach: That sounds great. Thanks for having me, Matt. So the big point of this book, the main argument is that there is a new kind of collision between the decentralized institutions of American federalism that put great amount of authority at the lower level, the state level in the US, even relative to other Federalist democracies around the world. That coalition with those decentralized institutions and newly nationalized, nationally coordinated and polarized political parties, the Democratic and Republican parties, and that when those institutions and party coalitions collide, you see big changes at both the national and state level in terms of American public policy and political outcomes.
Matt Grossmann: So federalism is supposed to be something that can help governance be closer to the people and can help it better reflect differences across geographic areas. How well does it live up to that? What’s the best case we can make for that? And what’s holding it back?
Jacob Grumbach: Yeah. So that sort of decentralization and customization and tailoring of policy to the wishes of constituents in a large, heterogeneous, diverse country, like the US is a potential real advantage of institutional decentralization and federalism. People can live under the particular policy regimes they may want. And this sort of argument goes back to all the way to the Federalist Papers and James Madison, that it would produce national harmony in a large diverse country. And to some extent there is real virtue in that theory. At the same time, the nationalization of American politics and the parties means that that function has really diminished. So now partisan control of state government really drives policy outcomes, and you see big swings in public policy when party control changes, even when constituent opinion doesn’t change all that much.
And that’s because the state level parties are now integrated into the sort of national party networks in ways that they weren’t through long periods of American history where you had a much more decentralized set of parties, where, for example, in the mid 20th century, Northern and Southern democratic parties in the states were highly distinct and decentralized on key issues.
More...
https://www.niskanencenter.org/is-democracy-declining-in-the-american-states/
How the States Went Wrong
At the time she endorsed Koch, Ronald Reagan was ascendant, and his much touted “new federalism” was laser focused on shrinking the footprint of the federal government (at least when it came to taxation and social welfare spending) and expanding the power of the states. Under Reagan’s leadership, Congress consolidated 77 (categorical) federal grants into nine block grants. This gave states much wider discretion over the implementation of federal policy and expanded the power of state governors. Chisholm saw the writing on the wall for Black communities, and she forecast states’ outsized role in shaping the trajectories of those communities. Though a distant memory for even the most invested onlookers, and lost knowledge to nearly everyone else, Chisholm’s unpopular support of Koch in strategic response to the pressures of federalism is the perfect starting point for grappling with the political dynamics and exigencies of U.S. federalism in the contemporary moment. Contending with Chisholm’s logic pushes us to center two vital realities in any useful discussion of federalism today. First, decentralization enabled by federalism multiplies the potential for Black suffering (and that of marginalized people more generally). Second, the dynamics of national politics profoundly shape state politics. That Reagan’s “new federalism” could compel the first Black woman elected to Congress to endorse a gubernatorial candidate who openly stoked the politics of racial resentment demonstrates federalism as a powerful thread binding national and state politics in complex webs that we still do not fully understand.
https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/65/how-the-states-went-wrong/
Laboratories of Democratic Backsliding
Abstract: The Trump presidency generated concern about democratic backsliding and renewed interest in measuring the national democratic performance of the United States. However, the US has a decentralized form of federalism that administers democratic institutions at the state level. Using 51 indicators of electoral democracy from 2000 to 2018, I develop a measure of subnational democratic performance, the State Democracy Index. I then test theories of democratic expansion and backsliding based in party competition, polarization, demographic change, and the group interests of national party coalitions. Difference-in-differences results suggest a minimal role for all factors except Republican control of state government, which dramatically reduces states’ democratic performance during this period. This result calls into question theories focused on changes within states. The racial, geographic, and economic incentives of groups in national party coalitions may instead determine the health of democracy in the states.
Interview: How the states went nuts: Democratic backsliding in state
capitals — and how to defeat it
Political scientist Jacob Grumbach on his new book and how U.S. states
became "Laboratories Against Democracy"
https://www.salon.com/2022/07/23/how-the-states-went-nuts-democratic-backsliding-in-state-capitals--and-how-to-defeat-it/
