Laboratories against Democracy

How National Parties Transformed State Politics

Jacob M. Grumbach

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691218472
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

PART I

Federalism and the Resurgence of the States

1

Introduction

“I GUARANTEE YOU we can draw four Republican congressional maps,” Republican Kansas State Senate leader Susan Wagle told donors at a closed-door fundraiser in 2020. “That takes out [Democratic U.S. House Representative] Sharice Davids.… But we can’t do it unless we have a two-thirds majority in the Kansas Senate and House.”¹

Such an appeal might have sounded strange a generation ago. Here was a legislative leader in Kansas state government outlining a national strategy for the Republican Party. Wagle’s appeal to contribute money to state-level Republicans was light on the Kansas-specific issues, but it emphasized how state government could play a role in the national tug-of-war over American politics and policy. It outlined a strategy of gerrymandering—a way for this coalition to tilt the rules of democracy in its favor.

The United States has a unique constitutional system. Many of its distinctive institutional features have come under fire in recent years. The Electoral College has been criticized for installing presidents who do not win the popular vote, Senate apportionment for granting equal influence to Wyoming’s 573,000 residents as California’s 40 million, and even the unitary executive for granting too much authority to presidents. But Wagle was describing a way to take advantage of a less often discussed but critically important feature of the U.S. political system: American federalism, a system in which authority is dispersed across multiple levels of government.

While institutional authority is highly decentralized, American political parties no longer are. Over the past half century, the Democratic and Republican parties have transformed from loose networks into more tightly knit partisan teams of activists, organizations, and candidates. Like Wagle at the Kansas fundraiser, these partisan teams coordinate across the many decentralized institutional venues of American federalism to pursue their increasingly national political visions.

Federalism expands the number of institutional venues in which American politics is fought, and it puts the main levers of democracy, such as legislative districting and election administration, at the state level. American federalism has existed in one way or another for well over two centuries—but nationally coordinated and polarized political parties have not. As the Kansas example shows, national political coalitions have developed new strategies to exploit the decentralized institutional features of American federalism.

What happens when today’s national Democratic and Republican parties collide with the critically important subnational institutions of American federalism? That is the subject of this book. Classic theories of federalism often lead us to expect that institutional decentralization is a “safety valve” in times of political crisis, and such an attitude is commonplace in contemporary political discourse. CNN analyst Asha Rangappa and political scientist Michael McFaul each separately tweeted that they were “thankful for federalism”; legal scholar Erin Ryan proclaimed that “I’ve never been more grateful for federalism than I am right now.” For many, the era of national partisan polarization makes the decentralized institutions of federalism all the more appealing, a harkening back to a time when “all politics [was] local.”

But today’s nationally coordinated parties have fundamentally changed the way that American federalism operates. State governments do not serve as a safety valve for national politics. Instead, they exacerbate national challenges, including unequal political influence and declining accountability—leaving American democracy at risk of backsliding. Indeed, contrary to the hopes of James Madison, a large federal republic may not help contain factions but empower them. And contrary to the hopes of Louis Brandeis, state governments may not be “laboratories of democracy” but laboratories against democracy.

I argue, in brief, that the nationalization of the Democratic and Republican parties—the increased national coordination among activists, groups, and candidates in each party coalition—has produced three consequences: a resurgence of state governments as the center of American policymaking, reduced policy learning between states controlled by opposing parties, and democratic backsliding in states controlled by the Republican Party.

These three consequences lead me to take a fresh look at two prominent theories of American federalism. The first is that state governments are efficient and effective laboratories of democracy, learning from and emulating successful policy experiments from other states and rejecting the failed ones. The second is that the decentralization of power in federalism improves the relationship between the governing and the governed, fostering representation, responsiveness, and democratic inclusion. These theories enjoy wide appeal among scholars and pundits across the ideological spectrum.

These ideas are alluring—and deeply embedded in the American ethos. But this book provides new arguments and evidence that they no longer accurately describe the functioning of federalism. Instead of emulating successful policy experiments from other states and rejecting failed ones, laboratories of democracy exist in separate partisan “scientific” communities. And instead of safeguarding democracy, some state governments have become laboratories against democracy—innovating new ways to restrict the franchise, gerrymander districts, exploit campaign finance loopholes, and circumvent civil rights in the criminal justice system.

Federalism or State Politics?

The U.S. Constitution occupies a position of admiration in popular culture, “remain[ing] an object of reverence for nearly all Americans,” in the words of former U.S. attorney general Ed Meese.² Scholars go so far as to call it “the Bible” of “American civil religion” (Lerner 1937, 1294; see also Levinson 2011; Franks 2019).³ But the tone of discourse about American institutions has shifted quickly and dramatically since 2016. Scholars, journalists, and observers increasingly worry about the erosion of norms in American politics—and the apparent inability of the rules of the Constitution to contain the erosion. Support for the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, and the U.S. Senate has polarized and declined. Federalism, however, has remained popular across partisanship and among scholars, pundits, and the public alike.

This is not to say that there has not been some prominent scholarly skepticism toward American federalism. Progressive Era thinkers worried that state governments were woefully amateurish and easily captured by the powerful. Historians highlight the triumphs of national state building to take on the challenges of the Depression and World War II (e.g., Smith 2006). Economists have emphasized the gains from scale to be obtained by greater national investment and standardization (e.g., Konczal 2016). And, profoundly, historical scholars of race and democracy would note that state governments were the institutional enemy of abolitionists, anti-lynching activists, and civil rights pioneers.

More recently, historical institutionalist scholars in political science have engaged in critical studies of federalism. In Fragmented Democracy (2018), Jamila Michener uses the case of Medicaid administration to investigate how federalism creates inequality in access to political resources and how this affects democratic inclusion. Lisa Miller’s The Perils of Federalism (2008) points to the potential for a greater decentralization and numerosity of political venues to disincentivize ordinary people’s political participation. Rob Mickey’s Paths Out of Dixie (2015) investigates the “authoritarian enclaves” of the Jim Crow South and their implications for democracy in a federal republic. Although this book uses mostly quantitative empirical methods, I draw on theories from this and other qualitative critical federalism scholarship (e.g., King 2017).

I also draw on a related literature that conceptualizes parties as networks of groups and politics as “organized combat” between them over their policy goals (e.g., Karol 2009; Hacker and Pierson 2010; Bawn et al. 2012). Recent books, such as State Capture by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Short Circuiting Policy by Leah Stokes, speak to the importance of groups, such as green energy firms or conservative organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), in state politics and throughout the American federal system. Understanding the group-based structure of party coalitions is crucial for understanding how their nationalization transformed American federalism.

These critical federalism studies, however, have remained mostly outside of the political science mainstream (at least in the American politics subfield).⁴ By contrast, there has been something of a resurgence of research in the American politics subfield of state and local politics. Scholars of American politics have long used variation across states as a way to test theories of legislative rules, public opinion, and other political forces.⁵ To understand whether term limits decrease polarization, for instance, a scholar might compare trends in states that have term limits to those that do not, drawing conclusions about how term limits are likely to work in legislative institutions in general. These studies matured from investi...