So far as I know, and Wikipedia confirms, no state in the US has a parliamentary form of government.
Are there any laws that prevent such a system? Or just a result of the political culture and convention within the US?
The Constitution requires that every state maintain “a Republican Form of Government” but does not go into any detail about what that form entails.
There are a few restrictions on the form of government which have been created by case law. For example, in Reynolds v. Sims, the Supreme Court ruled that state governments must design their legislatures such that all legislative districts have roughly equal populations. So a state government could not have a body like the US Senate, where an equal number of legislators are given to each political division regardless of population.
I don’t know of any particular reason why a parliamentary form would be completely impossible, but it would certainly be unique. On the other hand, this country is full of weirdo states like Louisiana, with their crazy French laws, so who knows.
You can have a unicameral parliamentary system - all of the provinces and territories in Canada have parliamentary governments, and they’re all unicameral.
I would think that if you had a head of state that was elected in some fashion, rather than being a hereditary monarch or representative of said monarch, it would arguably be a republican form of government - see Germany and Israel for examples.
Well, India is formally the ‘Republic of India’ and it has a parliamentary system at the national level, so I concur that republic and parliament can go together.
I think that this is the likeliest explanation. The modern form of parliamentary government evolved after the American Revolution, in Britain and its colonies, with one of the earliest statements of the principles of responsible government being found in Lord Durham’s Report of 1839. Not very likely that the Americans would follow a British approach at that date, when their Congressional/Presidential system was so well-entrenched as a local model.
and as for the bicameral system - is there anything in the SCOTUS jurisprudence that would prevent a state from establishing a Senate based on proportional representation, rather than one-member-districts? As long as each person’s vote counted for the same in the PR system, I would think it would satisfy Reynolds, wouldn’t it? The problem there was gross disproportion between territorial populations in the upper house in Alabama; the Court wasn’t being asked whether other types of elections were constitutionally ineligible.
Nebraska has only 1 house in their legislature and it is nonpartisan.
There are a number of cities that have their councils elected at-large without running afoul of Reynolds, so yeah.
Until 1982, Illinois had three-member districts in its House of Representatives, with “cumulative voting” under which you could cast 3 votes for one candidate, 1.5 for two, or 1 for three. There were no problems vis-a-vis the federal constitution. We abolished the system via an initiative led by Pat Quinn, who recently became Governor.
The primary restriction a state or city faces in switching to such a system is the Voting Rights Act, which is based on the Fifteenth Amendment. If a federal court believes that the goal or effect of the redesign will be to reduce minority representation, it can intervene.
Montana’s favorite perennial candidate coot has been advocating this for years. For reasons still not entirely clear, he managed to win the Republican primary for the US Senate race in 2008:
http://www.bobkelleher2008.com/
Back in '72, during the Montana constitutional convention he was a delegate and he managed to get the parliamentary system on the table. It lost 19 to 74, but there was a fairly long and vigorous debate about it. I get the impression that, like Nebraska’s unicameral-ness, with just the right combination of an effective advocate and otherwise favorable political conditions, there’s no reason why it couldn’t happen.