Suppression by Stealth: The Partisan Response to Protest in State Legislatures

• Author: Chan S. Suh,Sidney G. Tarrow
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00323292211039956
• Published date: 01 September 2022
• Date: 01 September 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00323292211039956

Politics & Society

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DOI: 10.1177/00323292211039956

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Article

Suppression by Stealth:

The Partisan Response to

Protest in State Legislatures

Chan S. Suh

Chung-Ang University

Sidney G. Tarrow

Cornell University

Abstract

Many scholars have investigated the relationship between protest and repression.

Less often examined is the legislative suppression of protest by elites seeking to

make protest more costly to protesters. Because state legislatures are largely

invisible to the public, this “wholesale” suppression of protest is less likely to

trigger public opposition than repression by the police. This study explains the

sharp increase in the number and the severity of state legislative bills to repress the

right to protest both before and after the election of Donald Trump. In particular,

it examines whether these can be attributed either to Republican control of state

legislatures or to protest threat. Contrary to the findings in much of the literature,

bills aimed at suppressing protest are less closely related to threat than to the

realignment of state politics. The article also finds that these proposals were

influenced by diffusion through policy brokerage.

Keywords

protest threat, repression, state legislatures, policy brokerage, ALEC (American

Legislative Exchange Council)

Corresponding Author:

Sidney G. Tarrow, Department of Government, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA.

Email: sgt2@cornell.edu

1039956PASXXX10.1177/00323292211039956Politics & SocietySuh and Tarrow

research-article2021

2022, Vol. 50(3) 455–484

State and local governments have long been considered backwaters of American

politics.1 But postelection efforts by Republican state legislatures to restrict minority

voting and to curtail the possibilities for protest have drawn the attention of the pub-

lic and the commentariat back to the state level. As Jacob Grumbach writes, “The

state level has returned as a critically important part of American federalism, and as

deeply consequential for the lives of Americans.”2 Political scientists like Matt

Grossmann in his Red State Blues, Ben Merriman in his Conservative Innovators,

and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez in his State Capture, as well as legal experts like

Jessica Bulman-Pozen, have put state politics back on the front burner of constitu-

tionally and politically crucial institutions.3

This increased attention to state politics has grown out of the changes in both

national and federal politics in the last decade. “Nationally,” writes Merriman, “the

2010 election opened a period of bitterly divided and unproductive national govern-

ment. [But] at the state level, the election yielded enormous gains for Republicans and

saw unusually conservative candidates winning office.”4 This was not a one-shot vic-

tory: “From 1990 to 2016,” writes Grossmann, “Republicans gained 813 state house

seats, 360 state senate seats, and 23 governorships—moving from full control of just

three states to full control of 23 states.”5 The second decade of the twenty-first century

marked a full-scale Republican takeover of state legislatures and governorships.

The takeover contributed to a dramatic shift to the right in the center of gravity of

the Republican Party. As Grumbach writes, “Over the past two decades, the Republican

party has eroded democracy in states under its control. Republican governments have

gerrymandered districts, made it more difficult to vote, and restricted civil liberties to

a degree unprecedented since the Civil Rights era.”6

Experts differ on the actual policy impact of these electoral gains. They agree

that, especially after the emergence of the Tea Party movement, there was a full-

scale move from the ideological median to the right within state Republican parties.

As Merriman notes, “Many state executive officeholders elected in 2010 went on to

govern well to the right of public opinion.”7 New Republican members vowed to

reduce taxation and government expenditures, to use private or market means to

provide services, and to reduce the scope of federal agency discretion, as well as to

resist the implementation of the ACA (Affordable Care Act) within their states, to

limit federal regulation and increase state regulation of elections, to reduce govern-

ment oversight of commercial activity and of the labor market, and to resist federal

efforts to liberalize immigration law.8

Yet these ideological aims did not automatically translate into policy success. When

it comes to policy, writes Grossmann,

The Republican Party’s widespread gains in state legislative and gubernatorial elections

over the past quarter-century have resulted in only limited success in changing state

policy direction or affecting social and economic outcomes. . . . Republican-controlled

state governments have not reduced the size or scope of state governments, overcome

long-standing state idiosyncracies in policy and practice, reversed liberal gains, or

enacted a substantive policy agenda that advances conservative values and goals.9

456 Politics & Society 50(3)