Bright Line Watch - Report on March 2019 Expert Survey on State Democracy

The Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy

Survey Report

Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy >> University of Michigan

May 2019

Bright Line Watch - Report on March 2019 Expert Survey Our March survey of academic experts included a state democracy module cosponsored by the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School for Public Policy. The module asked expert respondents to rate the quality of democracy in their state. We received 713 responses. The figure below shows the mean democracy rating by state for the 47 states from which we received responses as well as the District of Columbia. As a point of reference, the graph also includes respondents’ mean rating for the quality of U.S. democracy overall.1

Expert ratings of the quality of democracy in state governments, March 2019 Vermont (n = 7) Delaware (n = 1) Washington (n = 7) New Hampshire (n = 8) Minnesota (n = 3) Massachusetts (n = 24) California (n = 50) Maryland (n = 10) Connecticut (n = 20) Colorado (n = 20) Rhode Island (n = 6) Maine (n = 6) Nebraska (n = 8) New Jersey (n = 15) Oklahoma (n = 11) Nevada (n = 2) Mississippi (n = 1) Michigan (n = 16) Illinois (n = 33) Kentucky (n = 4) Iowa (n = 11) New York (n = 45) Virginia (n = 29) Pennsylvania (n = 39) Oregon (n = 2) United States (n = 676) District of Columbia (n = 13) Indiana (n = 19) New Mexico (n = 1) Georgia (n = 35) Florida (n = 28) Wisconsin (n = 10) Idaho (n = 7) Missouri (n = 18) Texas (n = 51) West Virginia (n = 4) Ohio (n = 25) Montana (n = 1) Alabama (n = 10) South Dakota (n = 3) Louisiana (n = 8) Wyoming (n = 2) Tennessee (n = 7) North Carolina (n = 14) Utah (n = 14) South Carolina (n = 12) Kansas (n = 4) Arkansas (n = 4) Arizona (n = 8)

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0

25

● 50

75

Rating, where 0 is least democratic and 100 is most democratic

100

The Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy and Bright Line Watch We first note the existence of substantial variation in our expert respondents’ assessments of democratic quality at the state level -- mean values range from the 51 to 91 on a 100-point scale. It is also striking that the statelevel estimates are almost equally distributed around the overall rating for U.S. democracy, with 25 states rated above the U.S. mean value of 68, and 22 states and the District of Columbia rated lower.

The states ranked highest tend to cluster in the Northeast, particularly in New England (for example, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts) and on the West Coast (for example, California and Washington).

By contrast, many of those ranked lowest are in the South (Arkansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas) and Mountain West (Utah and Arizona).2 Methodology From March 12-26, 2019, Bright Line Watch conducted its eighth survey on the state of democracy in the United States. We conducted previous surveys in February (Wave 1), May (Wave 2), and September (Wave 3) of 2017, and in January (Wave 4), April (Wave 5), July (Wave 6), and October (Wave 7) of 2018. Waves 1 and 2 targeted expert respondents only. Waves 3-8 have paired the expert survey with a representative survey of the American public.

Details on the Wave 8 survey are provided below: Expert: Between March 12, 2019 and March 21, 2019, we sent an email invitation and two reminders to 10,747 political science faculty at universities in the United States. By March 26, 2019 our sampling process had yielded 788 complete responses, for a response rate of 7.3%.

Public: YouGov fielded the public survey from March 12-18, 2019, producing 2,000 complete responses.

Both the expert and public samples in Wave 8 responded to a battery of questions about democratic performance in the United States and the importance of various principles to democracy. Afterward, they were asked to evaluate the quality of American democracy overall on a 100-point scale. Experts were also asked to evaluate the quality of democracy in their state, on the same 0-100 scale. Expert respondents were then asked to respond to a second battery in which they were presented with a series of statements about current political events and asked to rate them on normalcy and importance.

1. The marker sizes correspond to a log transformation of the number of responses from each unit of government to accommodate the wide range, and the skew, of values. We received no responses from experts in three states (Alaska, Hawaii, and North Dakota) and the next thirteen states with the fewest responses returned just 32 responses among them. Our estimates for many smaller states are thus imprecise and should be interpreted cautiously.

2. We note that states where reforms to adopt ranked-choice voting (RCV) have flourished in recent in recent years tend to rate high on democratic quality. The one state that has adopted RCV for all statewide offices, Maine, ranks 12th, whereas other states where RCV had been adopted at the municipal level are ranked fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and 28th.

About Bright Line Watch One of the greatest threats to democracy is the idea that it is unassailable.

At a time of potential danger to American democratic norms and institutions, it is more urgent than ever for scholars to highlight the risks to our system of government. In this spirit, Bright Line Watch brings together a group of political scientists to monitor democratic practices, their resilience, and potential threats. www.brightlinewatch.org

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www.closup.umich.edu

University of Michigan Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy Joan and Sanford Weill Hall 735 S. State Street, Suite 5310 Ann Arbor, MI 48109-3091

Regents of the University of Michigan The Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy (CLOSUP), housed at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, conducts and supports applied policy research designed to inform state, local, and urban policy issues. Through integrated research, teaching, and outreach involving academic researchers, students, policymakers and practitioners, CLOSUP seeks to foster understanding of today’s state and local policy problems, and to find effective solutions to those problems. web: www.closup.umich.edu email: closup@umich.edu twitter: @closup phone: 734-647-4091

Michael J. Behm

Grand Blanc

Mark J. Bernstein

Ann Arbor

Shauna Ryder Diggs

Grosse Pointe Denise Ilitch

Bingham Farms

Andrea Fischer Newman

Ann Arbor

Andrew C. Richner

Grosse Pointe Park Ron Weiser

Ann Arbor Katherine E. White

Ann Arbor

Mark S. Schlissel

(ex officio)