News web site Vox has posted an article about the recent expulsion of two representatives in the Tennessee House and used Prof. Jake Grumbach's data.
"After his expulsion Thursday from the Tennessee House in response to a peaceful protest for gun control, state Rep. Justin Jones ...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...
...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.
Grumbach’s State Democracy Index (SDI) grades each state on a series of metrics — like the extent to which a state is gerrymandered at the federal level, whether felons can vote, and the like — and then combines the assessments to give each state an overall score from -3 (worst) to 2 (best).
...maps, taken from his paper, shows each state’s grade on the SDI in 2000 and in 2018. You’ll see that Tennessee is by far...has the lowest score of any state in the country."
Please link here for the full article on the Vox web site.