4.2 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 4 May 2023
⏱️ 49 minutes
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In Tennessee’s state assembly, Republicans are unabashedly exerting their power – over-ruling local laws, expelling Democratic lawmakers. What does Tennessee tell us about the health of democracy in U.S. state legislatures?
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0:00.0 | In 1932, Supreme Court Justice Lewis Brandeis wrote a dissenting opinion that contained a phrase |
0:11.0 | that quickly became one of the axioms of American governance. |
0:15.3 | Quote, it is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state |
0:22.2 | may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory. |
0:26.6 | Brandeis wrote, |
0:28.3 | to try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country. |
0:35.0 | While Brandeis had crystallized the idea that states are a laboratory of democracy, |
0:41.1 | and he closed his dissent with this flourish, quote, |
0:44.3 | if we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold." |
0:51.7 | Well, 90 years later, political scientist Jake Grumbach asked, |
0:56.3 | what kind of experiments with democracy are the states running now? |
1:01.6 | So he developed a democracy indexed based on a long list of metrics, |
1:06.7 | and with that index, he graded every state in the union. |
1:10.2 | I did a statistical analysis of electoral democracy in the US states going back to the year 2000, |
1:18.0 | and these 51 different variables I use measure the overall quality of electoral democracy, |
1:24.4 | that is, do majorities of voters get what they want out of their state government or not, |
1:30.2 | and how balanced our legislative districts for each party, |
1:33.7 | and how costly or burdensome is it to vote? |
1:37.8 | And what I find is over the past 20 years, some number of states, |
1:42.0 | including Ohio, Alabama, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Tennessee, |
1:47.1 | have experienced pretty significant democratic backsliding. |
1:50.5 | What that means is elections and voting became less accessible over this time period, |
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