I wasn’t sure where to put this. It might not have a factual answer, but it seems more debatey than most things in IMHO. It’s about political structure, but not necessarily about any current political issue. Anyway.
Nearly all states (you be you, Nebraska!) have a bicameral legislature. Why?
I understand why the US has one, as a compromise to get the smaller states to join the union in the first place. But that doesn’t really apply to states. States weren’t formed out of separate independently-governed counties.
So, did most states go bicameral just out of tradition? Good enough for Britain, for the US, good enough for us?
It appears that due to Reynolds v Sims, you can’t have the kind of urban/rural split that we have in the Federal Legislature.
One benefit (Maybe? Let’s say “feature”) of the US Senate being elected to longer terms with a fraction of the seats up each election is that it’s a low-pass filter on change. A brief political movement might elect tons of people to the House, but it has to be sustained for years to dramatically change the Senate. But do any of the states have that? They’d either have to set it up from the beginning (sucks to be one of the people running for that initial seat with the shorter term) or later expand their Senates.
There really is no good reason these days. In the past, some states had the upper house set up to send senators by county and the lower house set up by districts, similar to the US Congress. However, this has been ruled against in many cases since many states have a lot of rural counties with very few people and thus the state legislature would be hugely biased in favor of rural interests.
I can dig up some cites if necessary, I’m just going off the top of my head from what I learned in my state and local government class.
According to Ballotpedia, most states follow the model of having senators serve longer terms than representatives, though of course details vary. They also follow the model of having fewer senators than reps. The main thing from the national model that’s missing is the filibuster.
The answer is: because it’s always been that way. Americans are notoriously conservative when it comes to their political institutions. Nebraska went unicameral in 1937; others thought about it at the same time (Michigan, for example), but didn’t. Vermont, I believe, did it briefly in the 1800s. Michigan recently shot down a petition drive to do it, and I think Maine tried (passed one chamber, but not the other).
One would think that well financed interests groups would be in favor of one-house only system because it would be cheaper to bribe one house instead of 2 .
Is there any tradition of state Senators on a career path to the US Senate, and start Reps on one towards the House? I’m not saying 100%, but was that part of the idea? To create a pool of candidates from which to feed into the US Congress?
Only in a very vague sort of way. At the beginning (at least first half century) the House of Representatives was considered by far the most important body, because it was closer to the people. They elected representatives and legislatures appointed Senators. Senators often resigned to run for the House.
If a state had a similar dynamic, then ambitious men might prefer the state house over the state senate. Might. I don’t remember reading about this as a general trend or as a deliberate pathway to higher office.
In Ohio, a modern benefit for legislators is that they can escape term limits by switching back and forth between houses. My current state senator has been in office continuously since 1995, having switched three times.
zamboniracer wrote: "One would think that well financed interests groups would be in favor of one-house only system because it would be cheaper to bribe one house instead of 2 . "
Actually, since a piece of legislation has to pass both houses you’d only have to bribe one now. And most special interest groups are more into killing what they consider bad legislation than passing what they’d consider good.
You can be either very, very depressed or very, very encouraged by realizing that state legislatures were 100X as bribeable a hundred years ago than today.
