Shining a spotlight on the states

For the latest in our series on organizations that inspire us to take action to build a stronger democracy, Democracy Group community manager Jessie Nguyen caught up with Bree Grossi Wilde, executive director of State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. This organization fosters academic research on state-level democracy, government institutions, and public law across the nation.‍

‍What is the State Democracy Research Initiative and how did it get started?

‍Bree: University of Wisconsin professors Miriam Seifter and Rob Yablon are the faculty directors and they founded SDRI over two years ago. As they're both law school professors, one of the things that they noticed is that there was a lack of attention to what was going on in the states, namely the state constitutions, state institutions, and state courts when it comes to protecting democracy. And so they started the initiative to try to shine a light on what was going on.

How are you helping people pay attention to American democracy?‍

‍Bree: One new thing that we started this year was to develop some interactive websites. We hope that this will be useful to other academics, practitioners, and judges, but also just to the general public, to learn more about the fact that there are state constitutions — a surprising number of people don't know that — and then also learn more about them. They're unique. They're different than the Federal Constitution. And we're so we're trying to highlight some of those differences as well.

Can you talk about the two interactive resources that SDRI currently offers, The Democracy Principle and Tracking Constitutional Change?‍

‍Bree: Sure. The first one is The Democracy Principle, what we do is we try to highlight the pro-democracy provisions or what we call The Democracy Principles that are in each state constitution. It’s not unique to a particular state constitution. So those are provisions like the right to vote which is not in the federal constitution, and not all states have direct democracy provisions, which are the ones we’re trying to draw out and place more attention on.The other website that we developed, Tracking Constitutional Change, is in a staging process. We’ve rolled out the first state, which is Wisconsin where we’re located, and we trace the state’s constitutional history or constitutions because some states have multiple constitutions from their inception to now. And we show all of their amendments so unlike the federal constitution which is relatively hard to amend, state constitutions are amended all the time.

How do you identify the problems with our democracy? And how are you working to fix that?‍

‍Bree: When we think about democracy, we think of roughly four different buckets or things we want to be aware of, and tracking and making sure that we’re being helpful where we can. Those are Voting and Election Administration, which includes proposed legislation and things like that; Redistricting, which is how state legislative maps or how Congressional maps are made and we pay particular alert to any partisan gerrymanders, whether it’s to support Democrats or Republicans; Another area that we’re interested in is Direct Democracy, which some States have and others don’t, where you might have an opportunity as a citizen to propose initiatives and have those go to a popular vote. The last area that we are concerned about is the Separation of Powers, so we certainly think about the interaction between the judicial branch, the legislative branch, and the executive branch and how they’re balanced against each other.

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