Thread by @JakeMGrumbach

In light of Georgia voting rights news, here's my new working paper.

tl;dr I create & validate a measure of democracy in the states 2000-2018 and test theories of democratic backsliding. It's all about the national Republican Party.

ungated: dropbox.com/s/c682q88keqyc…

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In the ongoing crisis of US democracy, a lot of focus is on Washington. There's renewed interest in V-Dem, Polity, etc measures of democracy at the national level.

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But the US has an especially decentralized form of federalism that puts election administration, districting, policing, and other democratic institutions at the state level. And that's where the crisis is.

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Yet there's no comprehensive state level democracy measure like the cross-national measures. So I modeled a new measure of state democratic performance 2000-2018 based using 61 indicators and Bayesian IRT, which I call the State Democracy Index.

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The State Democracy Index shows some major changes in state democratic performance, and partisan divergence, especially from gerrymandering & voter suppression post-2010.

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I test theories of democratic expansion & contraction based in:

-partisan competition
-polarization
-demographic change & racial threat
-the national GOP coalition

It's all about GOP control. When the GOP wins your state, it will reduce democracy.

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(If you care about the diff-in-diff debates, the Callaway & @pedrohcgs ATT aggregations show even larger effects)

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State democracy doesn't seem to be about local changes. States doing the most backsliding aren't experiencing especially big demographic changes, or polarization, or competitiveness.

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This is really about the incentives facing the national GOP coalition, a coalition of big money and an electoral base motivated by white identity politics. Both of these groups have an interest in keeping democracy narrow.

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Thanks to @cwarshaw & @ProfNickStephan, the @MITelectionlab, and @hill_charlotte for amazing data, and thanks to my usual crew for the great discussions. This is a first public draft so plenty of time for feedback.

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