Political experts often point to federalism as a check on the power of any one party in U.S. democracy; state government, they argue, more directly affects citizens’ lives and thus balances out one-party dominance at the national level.

But as explains in his new book, , the issues and interests that have driven national party agendas, such as immigration and the strengthening or curbing of voting rights, have infiltrated the state level, as well. An assistant professor of political science at the UW, Grumbach outlines the ways party politics and interest groups, especially in the past two decades, have essentially set state party agendas and inspired state-level candidates.

It is this policy shift to states, he says in the book, that “does not simply change the location of political battles. It fundamentally changes the terrain of American politics, providing new advantages to groups who have the informational capacity to monitor politicians at lower levels of government and groups that can move political and economic resources across borders.”

Grumbach analyzed the years 2000-2018 — even before the most recent developments on the national scene — to come up with what he calls the State Democracy Index, or “a measure of democratic health in the 50 states.” Using statistical modeling, Grumbach based the measure on 61 indicators of democracy, such as voter registration rules, how and where ballots are cast, and inequality as it pertains to voting and gerrymandering.

“The State Democracy Index shows that states are diverging: Some states have expanded access to voting and made their district maps more balanced, while other states have seen serious democratic backsliding,” Grumbach said. “The differences between high-performing states like Washington and lower-performing states like North Carolina and Wisconsin aren’t as big as the difference was during Jim Crow [a period of legalized segregation], but the differences are meaningful. The quality of democracy in the states determines whose voice is heard in our political system — and the policies that shape our lives.”

In the book, Grumbach maintains that while other research has ranked states on specific measures, such as educational outcomes or business climate, little has been conducted on the role of state governments in preserving democracy. He has made the State Democracy Index available on his , potentially for use by students, researchers and journalists – anyone interested in monitoring democratic backsliding.

“As the Supreme Court shifts abortion rights and other policies to the state level —including, potentially, new authorities over federal elections — the quality of democracy in the states will become even more consequential,” Grumbach said.

Laboratories against Democracy is published by Princeton University Press.

For more information, contact Grumbach at grumbach@uw.edu.

Racism, eugenics in early gay rights movement

In , published in May 2022 by University of Toronto Press, associate history professor shows how sexologist Magnus Hirschfield laid the groundwork for modern gay rights. But while Hirschfield is considered one of the founders of gay rights politics, he also borrowed from racist, imperial and eugenic ideas, including anti-Black racism.

“It’s hard to do justice to the power of this book,” said reviewer , professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Let me just say that once you open it, you’ll have trouble tearing yourself away.”

The book retells how, in 1931, Hirschfield met and fell in love with medical student Li Shiu Tong. Li became Hirschfield’s assistant for a lecture tour, the first of its scale where a renowned expert defended homosexuality.

In following the pair’s travels through the American, Dutch and British empires and into exile in Adolf Hitler’s Europe, Marhoefer provides a detailed picture of queer lives in the 1930s.

Research from Marhoefer, the Jon Bridgman Endowed Professor of History, found that Li was also a sexologist and activist whose views better align with current times. In his later years, Li started to write a book about his own theory of sexuality. Marhoefer tracked down the only known copy in Berlin. The book serves as a double biography of Hirschfield and Li.

“’Racism and the Making of Gay Rights’ decentres Magnus Hirschfeld, long revered as a ‘founding father’ of gay liberation, by revealing the racist and imperialist investments behind his overfocus on white, cisgendered men, a still-too-common feature of queer representation,” said reviewer , professor of history at George Washington University.

“Crucially, Laurie Marhoefer introduces the possibility of a better, queerer liberation in the thought of Hirschfeld’s Chinese research assistant and perhaps lover, Li Shiu Tong. This is queer history for a better future.”

For more information, contact Marhoefer at marl@uw.edu.

The evolution — and flourishing — of Filipinx American studies

A new volume edited and introduced by , professor of American ethnic studies, explores how Filipinx American studies, established decades ago, is pursuing new directions.

The 34-essay volume, , is framed as both a critique-of-study and a project to move the field forward. Co-edited by Antonio Tiongson, Jr., of Syracuse University, the book is published by Fordham University Press.

In their introduction, Bonus and Tiongson lay the foundation of Filipinx American studies in historical experience — violence and colonization first by Spain, then the United States — that manifested in racism and labor extraction. They write: “But despite their persistent characterization as an unassimilable racial problem or as ill-disposed troublemakers, and notwithstanding their status as colonial subjects who were not eligible for citizenship, Filipinxs proactively and creatively devised ways to resist, recover, and remember.”

Bonus and Tiongson describe how Filipinx American studies evolved as an interdiscipline, both in alliance with other groups, communities and fields, and in contrast to more “U.S.-centric, and therefore narrow and limiting modes of analysis” often found in more conventional American and ethnic studies.

“It’s been an ongoing tradition in our field,” Bonus said. “We’ve always considered how our identities are related to others, how we cross national and ethnic boundaries when it comes to forming communities, and how certain rules of belonging do not apply to us. As a consequence, other race- and ethnic-based fields of study have admired and emulated us, as we continue to question and exemplify the powers of both solidarity and resistance.”

The book aims to move scholarship forward, from historic ideas of immigration, settlement and assimilation to the ways imperialism, globalization and racialization exist today. The editors argue for reorienting the understanding of what it means to be Filipinx American, so that the U.S. is not the only defining factor. Among the essays are those that examine Filipinx American studies and student identities in higher education; gender and sexuality; and the various forms of labor.

For more information, contact rbonus@uw.edu.

How revolution transformed Russia’s Jewish community

is the first book from��, assistant professor in the Jackson School of International Studies and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

Recently published by Harvard University Press, the book uses post-revolutionary Russian and Yiddish literary, cinematic and journalistic sources to examine how the Jewish community of the former czarist empire was transformed by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and during the first two decades of Bolshevik rule.

The requirement that most Jews live in what had been Russia’s western borderlands — known as the Pale of Settlement — was abolished in 1917.

With this new opportunity, many Jewish communities moved to larger cities or headed to Europe, America, Palestine or the new Jewish Autonomous Region in the Far East, a Soviet experiment that since has dwindled. It was developed as a home for Jewish people in the Soviet Union, but there was no mass migration to the area. Today, most of the settlers in the region are ethnic Russians.

“Besides colleagues and fellow scholars, I am grateful to the students in my course on the Soviet Jewish Experience, which I’ve now offered three times at the UW,” said Senderovich, who is also a faculty affiliate at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies. “Discussing with them some of the materials, about which I ended up writing in my book, greatly enriched my thinking.”

For more information, contact Senderovich at senderov@uw.edu.

As Congress considers expanding voting rights legislation and some Republican-led states restrict access to voting, faculty from institutions around the country are calling for national election standards.

In an on the New America website, a growing list of signatories — more than 175 as of early June — warns of the dire threat to democracy posed by efforts to curb voter access and alter election oversight.

, an assistant professor of political science at the 91̽�� who specializes in state politics and voting issues, signed the letter “because the threat has reached a crisis level. The U.S. is at risk of significant backsliding into a mixed authoritarian regime.”

The specific way that federalism in the United States is decentralized — allowing election administration and legislative districting, for example, to be determined by the states — makes these democratic institutions vulnerable to the decisions and partisan leanings of state governments, Grumbach said.

Initiatives to change electoral procedures in several GOP-led states, authors of the letter on the New America site write, “are transforming several states into political systems that no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections.”

Grumbach addressed some of the issues raised in the letter with 91̽��News.

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Why are some of the current state-level efforts viewed as so egregious, and how do they stack up against other voting-related restrictions in the country’s history?

My research has tracked democratic backsliding in the states over the past two decades. Democratic backsliding has come from state government efforts to suppress votes and gerrymander districts, as well as to criminalize forms of protest and speech. These moves exacerbate the preexisting problems of unequal representation in the Senate and Electoral College, where the votes of millions of Americans don’t matter. Furthermore, some Republican state legislatures are signaling that they might engage in electoral subversion — refusing to certify the Electoral College votes of a Democratic presidential candidate should they win the majority of the states’ votes.

As dangerous as these moves are, there are two important pieces of context. First, it is important to note that the U.S. was not a “real” democracy until the abolition of Jim Crow disenfranchisement of Black Americans. Today’s democratic backsliding is not yet at that level. Second, my research shows that democratic performance has polarized��in recent decades. Some states, like Colorado and Washington, are expanding access to voting and making districts more fair, while others, like North Carolina and Wisconsin, are doing the opposite. The ballot is probably as accessible in today’s Washington state as it has ever been in U.S. history, which is a triumph. But in other states, voter suppression has made the ballot more inaccessible.

On the other��hand, the potential for election subversion is especially high today. Because the Constitution gives state legislatures power over election administration, it might be legal for them to refuse to give their Electoral College votes to a presidential candidate from the opposing party regardless of the election results. This is an extreme risk.��

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How did the outcome of the 2020 election set the stage for these developments?��

Republican state legislatures introduced and passed hundreds of voter suppression bills after the 2020 presidential election. Building on decades of conspiracies about “voter fraud,” Republican candidates and officeholders have endorsed the “Stop the Steal” conspiracy that the 2020 election was fraudulent. These trends, among others, suggest that the Republican coalition has turned against democratic institutions, and refuses to accept the legitimacy of its political opponents.

Across the world and throughout history, conservative political parties have decided whether democracy lives or dies. Conservative parties of business and the wealthy, like the Republican Party, tend to have a less popular economic agenda as the economy becomes more unequal (as the U.S. is now). That means that these parties face a dilemma: Do you moderate your economic platform and accept some defeats, or do you introduce other forms of conflict (like racial conflict) and reject democracy?��

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Why are some of the laws proposed at the federal level, such as the For the People Act or the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, insufficient to address these concerns?��

Neither bill contains sufficient protections against election subversion, the potential for state legislatures to refuse to certify election results.

The For the People Act, or H.R. 1, is a national policy with a number of critically important reforms to election administration, voter registration, legislative districting and campaign finance. The John Lewis Voting Rights Act is a much narrower bill that would restore many of the provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, such as federal preclearance for election administration changes, which were dismantled by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2013 decision.��H.R. 1 would be a much stronger reinforcement of American democratic institutions than the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, especially with its anti-gerrymandering provisions. Still, neither bill looks likely to get through the Senate, as it would require getting around the filibuster (which Sen. Joe Manchin has opposed).��

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How are national voting and election administration standards a solution?

Throughout U.S. history, it has been the national government that has stepped in to enforce rules establishing electoral democracy against state governments. Today, a national coalition is using state governments to make American democracy more unequal and narrow. It’s crucial for the national government to step in to enforce election and other democratic standards across the states.

For more information, contact Grumbach at grumbach@uw.edu.

But allegations of fraud, chaos and partisan bias – most prominently from President Trump, who recently urged people to to “test” the system — are simply unfounded, says , an assistant professor of political science at the 91̽��, who earlier this year published research about mail-in voting in Colorado. In , he and his co-authors showed how vote-by-mail increased turnout across demographic groups.

Grumbach points to an that showed a majority of Republicans and Democrats support providing all voters with a mail-in ballot in the November election. Other research shows that vote-by-mail .

“Mail voting benefits all kinds of voters, of all ages, races, geographies and partisan identities. And despite Trump’s attacks on mail voting, voters from both parties support it,” Grumbach said. “The very few��documented cases of attempted fraud have quickly been detected. The risk of��human and technological error is also no more prevalent than with traditional ballots.”

In light of ongoing interest in mail-in voting, Grumbach weighed in with some research-based perspective.

Why do you see vote-by-mail as positive?

Mail-in voting makes it more convenient��for people to vote. It saves voters time, making voting more convenient for those without easy access to transportation, and mitigates the effects of Election-Day obstacles like bad weather or issues at work. It avoids potentially long lines at polling places. Moreover, it gives voters more time to consider the issues and candidates with their ballot in hand, rather than feeling rushed at the polling place. That is why mail voting increases voter turnout.

What role could mail-in voting play in the outcome of the 2020 presidential election?

Mail-in voting will probably increase turnout in 2020 more than it has before, simply because it’s the safest way to vote during a pandemic. However, there is a big concern that Trump and the Republican Party will attack the legitimacy of mail-in ballots if the election turns out to be close. For instance, if mail ballots are still being counted but Trump is ahead slightly, the Trump team may attempt to say that the ballot counting should stop. In the midst of a pandemic, Americans should be prepared for ballot counting to be ongoing potentially after election night, and they should wait until all ballots are counted before accepting someone as the winner.

What do you see as the biggest potential challenge to successful administration of vote-by-mail this year?

There are some challenges for state and county election administrators to switch to mail voting, but none are extreme. California is implementing it statewide for the first time this year, and it appears to be going very well because all administrators are pushing in the same direction: to make it easy for people to vote. The main issue, as I said earlier, is in challenges to the legitimacy of mail voting and mailed-in ballots.

With news of some of the changes in services, should voters be worried about the ability of the U.S. Postal Service to handle mail-in ballots this fall?

Given concerns about deliberate attempts to slow down the USPS, voters should request mail ballots as soon as possible, and they should turn them in early. However, many USPS operatives are making clear that they will deliver mail ballots no matter what, so voters should not be discouraged.

Nine states, plus Washington, D.C., have universal mail-in voting, while 34 other states allow all residents to vote by absentee ballot. How could vote-by-mail become more standard, and more accepted, nationwide?

Mail-in voting is popular everywhere it is implemented, as well as where it hasn’t been yet. State governments are constitutionally in charge of administering elections, so it’s really a question of whether state governments will do what their constituents want, and make it more convenient to vote. This should go along with automatic and same-day voter registration, as Washington state provides. These kinds of reforms are crucial for making it possible for people to make their voiceS heard in American democracy.

For information, contact Grumbach at grumbach@uw.edu.

By far, most campaign donations historically have come from white voters. But new 91̽��-led research indicates that if more candidates of color ran for office, donations from individuals of color would likely increase as well.

The findings are described in a new by , 91̽��assistant professor of political science, with Alexander Sahn, a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley. The paper is forthcoming from the American Political Science Review.

Grumbach said he was not surprised by the findings themselves — which largely match what common sense would indicate — but by how clear the results were.

“In terms of voting, it’s unclear whether people of color are more likely to turn out to vote when a candidate of color runs — studies disagree,” he said. “But it’s very clear that candidates of color increase contributions from donors of color.”

To investigate campaign giving across populations, Grumbach and Sahn combined federal data on campaign contributions with a statistical technique that tries to predict the individuals’ racial background based on their name and location. Using this process they estimated the ethnoracial identity of 27 million campaign contributors making in all about 87 million individual campaign contributions in the years between 1980 and 2012, totaling about $33 billion in all.

“Across this time period, we find a highly unrepresentative contributor class,” they write. “Black and Latino representation in contributions is much smaller than in the general population, electorate, and elected offices, and has remained mostly static since 1980.”

They found that the presence of an Asian, black or Latino nominee in a political race significantly increases the proportion of contributions from “coethnic” contributors, or those of the same ethnic background.

Republican Latino candidates, they also found, received significantly lower contributions from whites than white Republican candidates.

Grumbach said also wondered if candidates of color underwent “backlash,” or white voters either giving less to them or actually turning to donate to their opponent.

“We ended up finding a bit of decrease in money from white donors to minority candidates, but it’s more than made up for by increased minority contributions. And, opponents don’t raise any additional money when running against minority candidates.

“Overall, minority candidates — especially Democrats — are at least as competitive in fundraising as white candidates. This should assuage fears that running more minority candidates would hurt fundraising.”

As to why black and Latino donating to candidates has remained static since 1980 — years in which candidates of color have been more plentiful and successful — Grumbach cited the ever-growing racial wealth gap, “so black and Latino people in the United States just don’t have enough money to be a larger share of money in politics.”

It also may be, he said, that “people of color may feel unrepresented and that donating money is unlikely to change the system, whereas white voters may feel like their money can have a real effect on politics.”

Grumbach and Sahn added that they hope this study “sparks greater interest in the political economy of race.”

The study was funded in part by a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship.

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For more information, contact Grumbach at grumbach@uw.edu.