Content area
Full Text
Email: [email protected]
American legislatures differ from those of other advanced democracies in many ways, but perhaps the most important aspect of their distinctiveness lies in their bicameral structure. Unlike nearly all of the world's other federal democracies, the United States employs bicameralism for its national legislature as well as for the vast majority of its subnational (state) legislatures. Moreover, the particular form that bicameralism takes in the United States is quite unusual. In the U.S. Congress and the forty-nine bicameral state legislatures, both chambers have absolute veto power over almost all pieces of legislation and neither chamber enjoys major formal advantages over the other in the lawmaking process.1 This form of bicameralism makes the process of bill passage in American legislatures considerably more cumbersome and abstruse than in the legislatures of most other countries.
Since the American Founding in 1787, the bicameral structure of an American state legislature has been eliminated only once. This singular instance occurred in the fall of 1934, when the people of Nebraska, responding to an active campaign spearheaded by progressive Senator George Norris, voted to turn their state legislature into a nonpartisan, unicameral body. With this vote, Nebraska's state government embarked on an unprecedented political experiment with an institution whose long-term fate initially seemed in doubt but which quickly proved durable. Today, the Nebraska unicameral legislature is thoroughly embedded in the Cornhusker State's political system and enjoys widespread support from its residents.2 Scholarly evaluations of the Nebraska's unicameral system have been scant but have generally yielded positive assessments.3
And yet, despite its longstanding experiment with unicameralism, Nebraska to this day remains the only state in the union with a unicameral legislative body. The fact that Nebraska's adoption of unicameralism did not lead to the adoption of unicameralism in other American states is puzzling given what we know about the diffusion of major institutional innovations in state government during the twentieth century. Since at least the late nineteenth century, state-level institutional innovations have tended to spread across the country once they have been adopted by a single state. For example, significant changes, such as the citizen initiative, the direct primary, judicial retention elections, legislative term limits, and others, all rapidly spread to many states after an initial adoption...