According to an article in Forbes by Joe Walsh, “Republicans were unlikely to hold onto the presidency or retake a majority of U.S. House seats [following the 2020 elections], but the party still scored a low-profile yet crucial win this week: It held control of most states’ legislative bodies and governors’ offices, giving Republicans outsized power when state lawmakers begin carving new congressional districts next year.” An article in Vox is by Zack Beauchamp reports the findings of an interesting new study that found out that Grand Old Party (GOP) control state government is bad for democracy. Here is an excerpt:
In late March, Georgia passed a restrictive new voting law that, in effect, permits the Republican state legislature to put partisan operatives in charge of disqualifying ballots in Democratic-leaning precincts. The law is one of at least eight proposals from GOP lawmakers in state legislatures around the country for increasing partisan influence over electoral administration — and one of more than 360 state bills that would curtail voting rights in one way or another.
New political science research suggests this wave of attempts to restrict the franchise is not an anomaly: Republican control over state government is correlated with large and measurable declines in the health of a state’s democracy.
The paper, by University of Washington professor Jake Grumbach, constructs a quantitative measure of democratic health at the state level in the US. He looked at all 50 states between 2000 and 2018 to figure out why some states got more democratic over this period and others less. The conclusions were clear: The GOP is the problem.
Read the full article here.
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