This article was published on VOX by Zack Beauchamp  Senior correspondent who covers challenges in Democracy. Here is an extract.

After his expulsion Thursday from the Tennessee House in response to a peaceful protest for gun control, state Rep. Justin Jones — one of two Black Democratic legislators expelled by the Republican-controlled statehouse — said that “what the nation is seeing is that we don’t have a democracy in Tennessee.”

Chillingly, data offers some support for Jones’s contention. According to one scholar’s research on democracy in the US, Tennessee is indeed the least democratic state in the entire country.

The research here comes from University of Washington political science professor Jake Grumbach, who wrote a 2022 paper (later expanded into a book) developing the first-ever numerical system for ranking the health of democracy in all 50 US states.

Get the full article here.