Jacob M. Grumbach. Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics. Princeton University Press, 2022. vii + 261 pages. Hardcover, $29.95.

• Author: Rapala, Mark

In Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics, political scientist Jacob Grumbach deconstructs the longstanding mythos of American federalism as a champion of democratic engagement and safeguard against authoritarianism. Federalism, the sharing of power between the levels of government, is traditionally viewed as a hallmark of American democracy and lauded by prominent thinkers, such as the Decentralists, Brandeisians, and New Federalists, who argued that it holds together a diverse country and protects against tyranny, promotes policy learning and experimentation, and incentivizes government efficiency via resident sorting behavior, respectively. However, Grumbach upends these notions by arguing that the collision of nationally coordinated and polarized political parties with federalism generated the consequences of "a resurgence of state policy, the polarization of state policy learning, and, in some states, democratic backsliding" (p. 9).

The gridlock caused by polarization and divided government at the national level led policy demanders to turn to the states, which positioned states at the forefront of policymaking and led to increased variation and polarization in policy among them. Grumbach graphically illustrates the shift in fiscal activity to the state level since the 1970s as a result of the national government's slowdown in domestic policymaking. He also tests the state level relationship between party control and policy change in two timespans and finds that among the sixteen issue areas examined, only education and criminal justice policies are non-polarized. This analysis shows party control increasingly explaining policy change and highlights a seemingly authoritarian state and local policing system, where "Democratic and Republican states alike have enabled police to take excessive and violent action against journalists, protestors, and ordinary (especially Black) Americans" (p. 60). This is contrary to the notion of authoritarian national authorities, as the policing power is concentrated at lower levels of government. Grumbach then considers who is responsible for the resurgence of state policy, which he concludes to be interest group activists, not ordinary voters. He employs useful illustrations to show that "some major changes in average state opinion are associated not with correspondent policy change but with policy stasis" (p. 90). Conversely, interest group activists partake...