Chapter 1 Case Study: Fifty States, Fifty Democracies?

In April 2023, Representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, two African American Democratic members of the one-hundred-person legislative chamber, were expelled from office by overwhelming majorities. Jones was removed by a vote of 72–25, while Pearson was removed by a vote of 69–26. They were removed for “knowingly and intentionally [bringing] disorder and dishonor to the House of Representatives” as part of their peaceful protests against gun violence.^[1] A third Democrat, Representative Gloria Johnson, a White woman who also participated in the protests, was not expelled, short one vote of the necessary two-thirds threshold required. Almost all the votes followed party lines, as Republicans held a supermajority with seventy-five of the one hundred seats. ^[2] Representative Jones offered, “What the nation is seeing is that we don’t have a democracy in Tennessee.”^[3]

Tennessee is not alone in making headlines for a potential undemocratic turn. North Carolina “is no longer classified as a democracy,” according to headlines from one of the authors of the Electoral Integrity Project (EIP).^[4] The study cites the degree of gerrymandering, or the drawing of legislative lines to give the Republicans (in this instance) an unfair advantage, and how the state implements voter registration and election administration among other challenges. The EIP was no fan of Tennessee, either, ranking the state forty-ninth out of fifty in electoral integrity. ^[5]

However, political scientists have somewhat in the past and are starting, more and more, in the present to assess and compare how the states are faring in the basic functions of democracy. ^[6]The Elections Performance Index from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Pew Research Center empirically assesses how states administer elections and finds many of them lacking. ^[7] More broadly, political scientists are increasingly focusing on “democratic erosion” or “democratic backsliding” in the United States as states seem to be getting less, not more, small-d democratic.^[8]

This significant state variation ought to make one question how well the country and each of the fifty states are doing at meeting the promise of small-d democracy that started in places like Jamestown, Virginia—where a five-day meeting in August 1619 is considered the birthplace of American democracy.^[9] Others point to and romanticize the town hall meetings of New England that predate the founding of the country and are still practiced today.^[10]

However, no state is perfect—each has more and less democratic components. How can one country and fifty states possibly represent more than 345 million Americans? This debate today, and one you will embark on by reading this book, is the same debate the founders had almost 250 years ago—how best to set up a democratic government. We have organized the remaining chapters against two considerations:

• • Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote, “It is one of the happy accidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”^[11]
  • Others paint a less optimistic view, identifying that states have become laboratories against democracy or laboratories of autocracy.^[12]Political scientist Jake Grumbach proposed a novel way to empirically assess how democratic each of the fifty states is today. In his book Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics, the two states that were the least democratic…were Tennessee and North Carolina.

The variation across the fifty states is exciting. As we will discuss throughout the book, the rules and political institutions vary in meaningful ways. States differ considerably, choosing divergent public policies. When should we consider these just differences of opinion? When should we consider that states have gone too far in limiting the rights of their citizens? Each chapter will begin with a short case study written by the editors providing just one example highlighting how states can serve as laboratories of democracy or autocracy across the remaining eleven substantive chapters written by six distinct authors.

In their assessment of democratic backsliding in the United States, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt challenge the reader, “Few societies in history have managed to be both multiracial and genuinely democratic. That is our challenge. It is also our opportunity. If we meet it, America will truly be exceptional.”^[13]

Critical Thinking Questions

What does it mean for a country to be a democracy? Are there degrees to democracy? Can a state be more or less democratic?

What are the necessary and sufficient conditions (or minimal requirements) that make a country a democracy?

What sort of previous knowledge, values, and political opinions are you bringing with you as you begin to read this textbook?