The Supreme Court Just Rolled Democracy Back. You Can Measure How Much.

The Supreme Court’s ruling last Friday to overturn Roe v. Wade will have immense consequences for the lives and healthcare of Americans. But if you’ve followed the shifts in how American democracy works over the past few decades, the decision also signals another big wave coming for the nation: It’s likely to turbocharge the trend toward greater polarization in state policies, with significant consequences for American democracy.

The Supreme Court on Friday pushed authority over one of the most controversial national issues from Washington back down to state government, a place where more and more of America’s contentious issues have been landing.

For the past 30 years, Democrats and Republicans have been increasingly fighting their national battles through subnational institutions — state governments — because with such dysfunction in Washington, that’s where they can make headway. State governments have become increasingly important policymakers, with liberal and conservative states implementing increasingly distinct policies.

One significant result is easy to see on maps: The United States is becoming more polarized, with a “red America” and “blue America” clearly emerging.

But my research also shows another, more worrisome dynamic beneath that split: This version of America is also becoming less democratic.

“Anti-democratic” is often in the eye of the beholder, a term used to label any outcome a critic happens to disagree with. But in political science, one important component of democracy is a measurable number: How many Americans are living under policies they believe in? In a working majoritarian democracy, the answer should be “most.” If citizens don’t like policies, they can, and should, be able to vote to change them.

With Roe v. Wade being overturned, however, we are heading into a world where that is no longer true.

After the Dobbs decision was first disclosed by POLITICO in May, I decided to look at how Americans view abortion, and how that lines up with their local policies. Following the polling data and analytical techniques of Devin Caughey and Chris Warshaw, I found that about 61 percent of Americans support continuing to make abortions legal. For context, the right to obtain a legal abortion is even more popular than same-sex marriage was when the Supreme Court struck down state bans on same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015.

In the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson, state governments are likely to now have the discretion to fully ban abortion, and many are poised to do so. Thirteen states had trigger laws in place to ban abortion if Roe was overturned, a handful of which have already gone into effect. According to the Guttmacher Institute, another 13 states are likely to severely limit the availability of legal abortions in the coming months.

As a result, many Americans will find themselves out of step with the new abortion bans in their state.

The easy, and positive, way to think about state-by-state differences like this is that conservatives get …read more

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/06/30/court-made-america-less-democratic-00043549