Jake M. Grumbach has received well-deserved attention for his book Laboratories against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics, which helps to reignite the debate over federalism in the United States. It stands alongside Jamila Michener's Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid, Federalism, and Unequal Politics (2018) by calling out the shortcomings of a system that delegates more power to subnational governments than nearly any other political system. Both works elucidate the links between devolution of authority and inequality in policies ranging from access to the health care safety net to the ability to cast a ballot, showing how minority rights are put at risk by federalism in a multiracial society. Michener's book is rooted in the qualitative testimony of those who navigate state Medicaid programs, while Grumbach's book brings together impressive quantitative tests conducted on original datasets, paying close attention to causal inference.
The central argument that Laboratories against...
