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The residentsnascarUSUS Your browser does not support the element. of Bristol, Tennessee and Bristol, Virginia share a border, a downtown and even a speedway. But thanks to the quirks of American federalism, the 27,800 Bristolians who live in the Volunteer State, as Tennessee calls itself, reside in what one ranking determines to be America’s least democratic state, while their 16,800 neighbours to the north live in one of the most democratic.This, at least, is the portrait drawn by the State Democracy Index, developed by Jake Grumbach, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been measuring within America’s 50 states over the past 24 years. For the 12th year in a row Tennessee has come in dead last.To score the condition of a state’s democracy, Mr Grumbach focuses on four main components: which citizens are eligible to vote and how burdensome it is for them to do so, how responsive state policies are to public opinion, the fairness of electoral maps, and finally .It may come as a surprise that since Mr Grumbach last measured the health of America’s states, up to the end of 2018, his model’s assessment of state-level democracy has modestly improved. Both Democrat-led and Republican-led states have seen upticks on average. Much of this is thanks to a slight decrease in the prevalence of partisan gerrymandering. The expansion of postal and early voting in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic and afterwards also improved Mr Grumbach’s scores. Yet a stark partisan divide remains: 19 of the 20 worst-performing states in the index voted to the right of the nation in the most recent election, and in all but two of them Republicans control the governorship and both chambers of the legislature.Twenty states have seen their democracy scores decrease since 2018. And the variance among state scores has increased substantially. For example, Tennessee is now an underperforming outlier even among Republican states, which are on average two standard deviations more democratic than the Volunteer State. The explanation is straightforward, says Sekou Franklin, a political scientist at Middle Tennessee State University: “There’s a non-democratic political culture that’s taken hold of the state.” Gerrymandering is one expression of this. For years the Republican supermajority in the state legislature has gone to battle with Democratic cities like Nashville, the state’s capital, and Memphis, a familiar pattern in other states too. In 2022 state legislators split voters in Nashville across three redder congressional districts. Over the years, they have also passed a series of laws restricting local-government authority.In Mr Grumbach’s model one of the best things a state can do is to produce fairer legislative maps. In 2024 Republicans won just under two-thirds of the vote in Tennessee. Yet they won eight of the state’s nine congressional districts on election day. All else being equal, were Tennessee gerrymandered less severely, Republicans today would probably have a slim one-seat majority in the House of Representatives rather than a hefty five-seat advantage. The spread of early and alternative voting may have improved America’s democracy, but rigged district maps undermine those gains.
