I have a "Representative"; you might have a "Delegate"
As you probably already know, every state (except Nebraska) has a bicameral Legislature (meaning that there are two chambers). The “upper house” is called the Senate (or “State Senate”) in all 49 bicameral states, and the “lower house” is called the House of Representatives in most of them. West Virginia, Maryland, and Virginia have a House of Delegates; New York, New Jersey, California, Wisconsin, and Nevada have an Assembly: these are just different titles for what is essentially the same thing. This designation of upper and lower houses is borrowed from the federal system (which in turn borrowed it from the British), although it doesn’t mean as much in most state Legislatures. In the federal system, the Senate has some unique powers (ratification of treaties, confirmation of Presidential nominations, and determination of guilt in impeachment trials) which do not necessarily transfer to most state systems (some states give the Senates confirmation powers over gubernatorial appointments, but that is by no means a universal phenomenon).
Another big difference between the federal Congress and the state Legislatures is the constituency that each member represents. In the federal system, Senators represent the states (and, prior to the 17th Amendment in 1913, they were elected by state Legislatures), and there are two per state, no matter the population. Representatives in the federal system are allocated by population. In state Legislatures, BOTH chambers are allocated by population (so, to give an example, there can’t be one Senator per County, at least not since the “one man-one vote” decisions made by the US Supreme Court in the 1960s). Also, in some states, there aren’t differences in the terms served by the members. In Minnesota, for example, the Senators serve four years, and the House members serve two years. In North Dakota, however, both Senators and House members serve four year terms. In Arkansas, all legislators serve two year terms. There are NO states where the House terms are LONGER than the Senate terms: they might be same, or the Senators serve longer terms than House/Assembly members, but none where the opposite is true. So, the distinction between the two chambers at the state level tends to be less pronounced than even at the federal level. The one universal statement that we can make is in every state, there are fewer State Senators than there are State House members (or Assemblymembers/Delegates, depending on the terminology used). A 2-to-1 ratio is not uncommon, but it is by no means universal.
Leadership Roles in the House and Senate
Where the two do tend to differ is in their organization of leadership and distribution of political power. If you’ve ever watched a state Legislature on cable access TV, or either chamber of the U.S. Congress on C-SPAN, you’ve seen someone standing at the top of a dais (a raised platform) in the front and center of the room, and that person’s job is to direct the floor session and floor debate. He/she has the power to recognize speakers (in other words, decide who gets to talk, and who doesn’t), to approve parliamentary motions about how the rules are to administered, to cut off speakers who have gone over their allotted time, and other “traffic-control” types of duties. We call this the “administrative power” or “presiding power” in a chamber of the Legislature. In the majority of State Senates, the Lieutenant Governor (who is not a member of the Legislature) has the power and/or responsibility to preside over the upper chamber. However, many Lieutenant Governors choose not to do this (at least not every day), so the Senate usually elects one or more President Pro Tempores (President Pro Tem for short) to administer the chamber on a day-to-day basis while the Lt Gov is away. In states where the Lt. Gov is not the presiding officer, there is usually an office called “President of the Senate”, which functions a lot like the President Pro Tem. The Senator elected President Pro Tem (or President of the Senate in states where the Lt. Gov doesn’t preside) is usually a senior member (oftentimes the member with the most years of service) of the majority party – it is something of an honorary position in most states.
However, when it comes to making the “political" decisions in the State Senate, there is another office for that: the “Majority Leader”. This person is the real political leader of the majority party, and he/she makes decisions such as whether the leadership team (Majority Whips, Assistant Majority Leaders, Committee Chairs, etc) will get behind a certain bill or not, whether an Appropriations (spending) bill should have money taken out of it (or added to it), and whether a certain bill should be moved up or down the Calendar (the daily agenda for the chamber): a common method of delaying, or even killing, a bill is to keep moving it to the bottom of the Calendar day after day after day; since most chambers don’t make it through the entire agenda on most days. This tactic would have the effect of blocking final action on something that the leadership isn’t necessarily comfortable with. The political leadership also makes the very important decisions about which committee or committees a bill should be referred to: most states don’t have clear-cut rules about which committees are responsible for which issues, so the political leadership in both chambers has influence the outcome of a debate just by deciding which committee will get the bill in the first place. The political leaders also usually make decisions about committee assignments (who is placed on which committee), as well as who the committee leadership will be, which can be pretty important.
The minority party also has its head: a “Minority Leader”. This person’s job is represent the views of the minority party to the public and to the press, and to decide how to utilize the minority leadership’s time and resources to accomplish certain things, despite being in the minority. In a state like Minnesota, where the majority only has a very narrow lead in either chamber (in the last decade, the majority in both the House and Senate has “flipped” back and forth several times), the Minority Leaders can be more effective, since they can sometimes convince members of the majority party to vote against the wishes of their leader from time to time (as we talked about in the unit on political parties, party discipline in the United States is pretty weak because of the way parties are organized: thus, we have liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats who might occasionally break with their party leadership, depending on the issue). In states like North Dakota, where one party dominates both chambers by large margins, the Minority Leader serves in more of a public relations role.
Now, in a few states, like Florida, for example, the President of the Senate serves both the administrative function and the function of political leadership, thus merging both roles into one office. In other states, particularly Texas and Mississippi, the Lieutenant Governor is much more than just an administrative figurehead: he/she has real power to make politically-influential decisions such as which bills are to be assigned to which committees, as well as which bills will go where on the Calendar. However, these are outliers: they are exceptions to the norm, which is that most State Senates separate the “administrative” from the “political” functions.
In most Houses or Assemblies; however, both of those roles are usually merged into a single office: the Speaker of the House (or Speaker of the Assembly). That it, the Speaker is in charge of both the administrative oversight of the daily floor session, as well as the political decision-making. Most Houses/Assemblies have “Majority Leaders”; however, their primary function is to assist the Speaker in counting votes, lobbying other majority-party members, occasionally twisting arms, and being something of a “behind-the-scenes” leader. This is not to say that the Majority Leader is unimportant or unknown: Tim Pawlenty, for example, was Majority Leader in the Minnesota House just prior to being elected Governor in 2002.
Like with the Senate above, of course, there are occasional exceptions to the rule. In North Dakota, for example, the Speaker is primarily an administrative figurehead, much like the role of the Lieutenant Governor in most State Senates, and the Majority Leader in the North Dakota House makes most of the important political decisions. However, again, this is an exception: as a rule, in almost all State Houses/Assemblies, the administrative and political powers are merged into a single office, and that office is almost always called the Speaker of the House.
The Legislative Process (aka "How a Bill Becomes a Law")
You might remember the Schoolhouse Rock cartoons from when you were a kid (“I’m just a bill, I’m only a bill, and I’m sitting here on Capitol Hill….”). The basic process by which a bill becomes a law in the State Legislatures is similar to that of the federal government. I’ll start with the basics, and then explore some other topics which are commonly not understood by most casual observers of State Legislatures.
The first step in the process is for a bill to be introduced. That is, some legislator has to have a brilliant idea (or maybe it’s not-so-brilliant, but you can’t tell a legislator that, can you?), and then draft it into the appropriate legal language. In some states, people other than legislators can propose bills. In Massachusetts, for example, any citizen can propose a bill to the Secretary of the Senate or the Chief Clerk of the House, as long as it happens before a certain deadline. In some states (Washington and North Dakota, for example), Executive Branch agencies are allowed to introduce bills directly to the Legislature during the opening weeks of the session.
Once a bill is introduced, it needs to be referred to a committee. All states divide their Legislatures into what are usually called Standing Committees, and both the House and Senate in any given state are going to have standing committees for the major sub-areas of state policy (e.g. Education Committee, Judiciary Committee, Health and Human Services Committee, Tax Committee, Budget Committee, etc). The distribution and organization of these is not identical from state to state (some states divide out budgeting, which is viewed as more of a planning activity, from appropriations, which is the actual authorization to spend money, and assign those to different committees). Others might take a major policy area (like education, for example), and create two committees, one for Education Finance, and one for Education Policy (Minnesota has done this in the past, for example). Keep in mind also that it’s common for each chamber in a bicameral legislature to EACH have a full set of Standing Committees for each of these areas, so there’ll be a House Judiciary Committee AND a Senate Judiciary Committee (just to give an example).
As was mentioned above, whomever holds political power in the chamber (such as the Speaker of the House or the Senate Majority Leader) is going to have the ability to decide WHICH committee is going to get that bill, especially since there are very few hard and fast rules about which committees have jurisdiction over which issues. When I was Chief Clerk of the House in North Dakota many years ago, the Speaker sent a bill to establish a State Human Rights Commission to the House Government and Veterans Affairs Committee [which deals with the organization of Executive branch agencies, amongst other issues], rather than to the House Judiciary Committee [which deals with civil rights issues], because the makeup of the GVA Committee was more agreeable to the Speaker’s position (he didn't want the bill to pass). In Multiple Referral states (see below), this is less likely to be an issue, but the order in which a bill is sent to certain committees can affect its passage.
In most states, the Committee Chair holds a lot of power, because s/he can choose not to schedule a hearing or discussion on the bill, and then that’s usually the end of the issue. In New York, for example, well over 10,000 bills are introduced in the Assembly alone in the average two-year-long session, but only about a 100 are commonly passed and signed by the Governor. The other 9,900 never make it very far, and a vast majority die upon first referral, since the Committee Chair commonly chooses not to take an action. Some states (Colorado, for example), have rules which allow the committee membership to force a hearing on a bill, usually with some sort of super-majority vote (2/3 or 3/5) of the committee members, and in North Dakota (both chambers) and New Hampshire (House only), there’s a standing rule that requires ALL bills to get a committee hearing (and a floor vote). If a bill is scheduled for a hearing (or two or three), then the Committee will take testimony from lobbyists, executive branch officials, other legislators, and even average citizens. Many times, the real purpose of this process is to explore whether amendments (changes to the bill) are necessary (or desirable). In some states, the Committee can amend the bill; in others, they can only recommend amendments which the full House or Senate would have to adopt when the bill comes up for a final vote.
Assume that our bill has made it this far. It has a hearing (or two), and some amendments are attached to it. Now it will be “reported” back to the full House or Senate (remember that we’re still in the first chamber here; this whole process will have to be repeated in the other chamber eventually). It will then be placed on the “Calendar”, which basically means that it will be scheduled for a final debate and vote on the floor of the full House or Senate. This is another area where the leadership will have some influence (as I mentioned before, it’s not uncommon for a Speaker or Majority Leader to move a bill up on the Calendar to force a quick vote, or to keep moving it down to the end in order to stall final action).
Once that final floor debate takes place, it’s possible for the bill to be subject to something called “floor amendments”. These are changes that can be proposed or added that are in addition to, or in place of, the committee amendments. Some states don’t allow these; in others, they might only be allowed in one chamber (for example, the North Dakota Senate allows floor amendments, while the House doesn’t, but in Minnesota, they’re possible in both chambers), or the rules might limit floor amendments to certain topics (changing the amount of money appropriated to a program might be allowable, but not the policy language governing the program). Amendments have to be approved, usually by a simple majority (although there might be a rare situation where a super-majority is required), and then the bill is subject to a final floor vote. If it’s approved, then the bill goes to the other chamber, and starts all over again. Once a bill has been approved by both chambers in the same format (i.e. with the same amendments), then it’s sent to the Governor for his/her signature or veto (more on gubernatorial vetoes in a later unit, on the Executive branch).
Multiple Referral
This is a common practice in many states, but not necessarily on every bill. In Minnesota and Florida, for example, this happens on almost every piece of legislation which is proposed. In North Dakota, by contrast, this almost never occurs, except on bills which would cost a lot of money to implement.
Multiple Referral occurs when a bill is sent to more than one committee in the same chamber. In almost every case, these occur in an order, not simultaneously. For example, let’s say we have a bill to cap property taxes, raise the income tax, and then give the money to public school districts. In many states, where multiple referral is not common, the Speaker of the House or the Senate Majority Leader would pick a particular committee. They could choose the committee that deals primarily with tax laws (often called "Taxation" or "Finance"), the one that deals with actions of local governments (often called "Local Government" or "Political Subdivisions", because local government usually collect the property tax), or the Education committee (since schools are the intended beneficiary of this bill). As was discussed earlier, the leader will likely pick the committee which is most likely to give the Leader the result he/she is looking for). However, in states like Minnesota and Florida, the bill can be sent to all committees which have some jurisdiction over the issue. In this particular case, maybe the bill will go to Education first, then Tax and Finance, and then Local Governments. As I said above, in almost all cases where this occurs, these referrals will happen one at a time (think about it: if all three of those committees held hearings and wrote amendments on the bill during the same timeframe, what would you get? Three different bills, right?). In some states, this is used as a way of bottling up legislation, especially if the session is particular short, not leaving enough time for all three (or four, or even seven, to cite one extreme case that I saw in Florida once) committees to go through the process.
Companion Bills
This is a pretty common practice in about half of the states (including Minnesota). As your textbook mentions, most state Legislatures only meet part-time, so they operate under very tight timeframes. One way of alleviating that difficulty is to have the House and Senate (or at least their committees) consider the same issue at the same time. What will commonly happen is that a House member will introduce a bill, and a Senator will introduce the same exact language in his/her own bill. The House version will make its way through the committee hearing/amendment process, and the Senate version will do the same on the Senate side. Then, when one chamber passes its bill, it can send it over to the other chamber, where much of the committee work on the same issue has already been accomplished. The second chamber can then just add its own amendments (which it already has been working on), and then pass its version of the bill. This tends to speed the process up. As with Multiple Referral, this is really common in some states (in Minnesota, almost every bill has a companion in the other chamber), but in other states, it’s not even allowed by the rules. North Dakota, for example, prohibits this (North Dakota enforces very tight deadlines on when bills have to pass one chamber, or be reported from committee, so companion bills aren’t really necessary in that type of situation).
Conference Committees
What happens if a bill passes in one form in the House, and the Senate amends it before passing it? We now have two different versions of the same bill. Well, the House could just accept the Senate’s amendments, and then pass it. Or, the House could refuse to accept them, and the Senate could decide to strip off their amendments before passing the House’s original version. If either of these two things happen, then the bill just goes on to the Governor for his or her signature. However, what usually happens is that the House refuses to accept the Senate’s amendments, and the Senate refuses to withdraw them (or, if the Senate passed the bill first, the House refuses to withdraw their amendments). In those cases, a “Conference Committee” would be appointed.
The Conference Committee’s job is to work out a compromise version of the bill, which will then become the final version. Usually, the members consist of equal numbers of House and Senate members (three each is a common number, although some states have larger conference committees, especially on big budget bills), most of whom usually come from the original committees that dealt with the bill in the first place. Almost all states have a requirement that at least one member of the Conference Committee from each chamber has to come from the minority party. Conference Committees aren’t permanent: in other words, each bill in dispute gets its’ own Committee, and once a compromise is worked out, that Committee is dissolved.
Interim Committees
In the states with year-round sessions (such as New York and California), the Legislature can take up business at any time: committees can hold hearings (even on issues for which there might not be an actual corresponding “bill”), amend budgets, or make changes to existing laws. However, only seven states have year-round sessions: in the other 43, the Legislature only meets for half the year or less (and in a handful of states, the sessions are as short as two or three months, or only every-other-year). There are two challenges presented by this situation. One, there might not just be enough time for long-term discussions (or for committees to investigate possibility solutions to problems WITHOUT an actual bill related to the issue). The second is the inability to react to immediate events. For example, when the I-35 bridge collapsed in St. Paul in 2007, that happened in August, when the Legislature wasn’t in session – however, some budget appropriations needed to be made in order to deal with the clean-up and planning the replacement: that wasn’t going to wait until January. So, many of these part-time Legislatures have formed what are called “Interim Committees”. Most members will be a member of at least one or two of these: some of them are quasi-permanent extensions of existing Standing Committees (for example, an “Interim Committee on Transportation”, or an “Interim Budget Committee”). Some are temporary, designed to deal with a specific issue (an “Interim Committee on Education Finance Reform” was formed in North Dakota a few years ago, for example). Others have some sort of administrative or oversight role (the “Administrative Rules Committees”, which review and approve regulations proposed by Executive Branch agencies [a topic we’ll talk about later in the course], don’t just meet during the session: they’ll meet regularly throughout the “off-season” as well). Most Interim Committees will meet regularly throughout the year, although usually only one or two days a month (or less). Some states with short sessions rely very heavily on Interim Committees: in Texas, for example, most of the major budget bills have already been reviewed by the Interim Budget Committee for several months BEFORE the actual Legislature starts it’s official business in January, so a lot of the preliminary work and discussion has already occurred beforehand.
Note that these are DIFFERENT from "Special Sessions" (also called "Extraordinary Sessions"), where the ENTIRE Legislature will come back into a short session to debate a specific issue (and possibly pass new laws related to that issue). Quite a few of those happened in 2020, during the COVID pandemic. Many legislators didn't want to leave decisions about how to allocate federal grant money, emergency powers, how to fund schools, or how to provide relief for small business, just to the Governors. Minnesota actually held seven Special Sessions in 2020 (in addition to their regular session that ran from February to May), mostly to debate the Governors' emergency powers, and how to spend federal relief funds.
Professionals, Citizens, and "Amateurs"
A distinction, discussed a little in your book, is the difference between what we called “Professionalized” Legislatures, as opposed to “Amateur”, or “Citizen”, Legislatures. In some states, members of the Legislature are well-paid, there’s a lot of support in terms of resources and staff, and the sessions (the amount of time in a year) that they meet to conduct business are quite long. In these states, serving in the Legislature isn’t all that different from serving in the U.S. Congress: it’s essentially a full-time job. If the members have another job, the expectation is that service in the Legislature is more important, and it wouldn’t be unusual for a member of the Legislature to use that office as a stepping-stone to higher office (such as Congress or the Governorship). In the Political Science literature, we call these “Professional” or “Professionalized” Legislatures.
By contrast, service in the Legislature in some states is considered, at best, a part-time occupation. Members aren’t particularly well paid, because the assumption is that their job is to come to the State Capitol for a couple of months, represent their neighbors in public policy debates, and then, when the session is over, return to their regular lives and jobs. We call these “Amateur”, or “Citizen”, Legislatures. Members in these types of Legislatures don’t get a lot of support in terms of staffing or other resources, because it’s not considered necessary for such a part-time endeavor.
If you look at that NCSL link on Full- and Part-Time Legislatures, you can see a short discussion of this distinction. The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), the host of this web article, uses colors, rather than the labels I’ve used above, to make these distinctions. The “Green” states on their map and chart are marked by a high level of “professionalism”; service in the Legislature is a full-time job (or very close to it), the pay for members is pretty high, and there’s a lot of staff support. Michigan, New York, California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are the seven states that hold “year-round” sessions (in other words: the Legislature either meets all year-round, or their State Constitution allows them to). You’ll notice that six of those seven states are either “Green”, or in the “Light Green” category (the “Light Green” means that, in the three categories at the bottom of the chart [pay, time, or staff], the state might be less extreme towards the “full-time”, or “professionalized”, end of the spectrum). You might notice that many of these “Green” (or “professionalized”) states tend to be the higher-population, more urbanized, states. However, that’s not always true. Look at Alaska, for example: it’s “Light Green” on NCSL’s chart. Alaska has fairly short sessions (about three months in the late winter/early spring). However, Alaska also has fairly high demands on its legislators in terms of the time OUTSIDE of session that they dedicate to legislative work, and the pay (about $80,000 a year) is relatively high. The reason for this is that Alaska, with only 20 State Senators and 40 House members, has some HUGE legislative districts (a couple of the rural districts are more than a million square miles). The members are given a relatively large amount of individual staff to provide constituent service in these districts, and the members themselves spend a lot of time (when the Legislature is NOT meeting in session) to travel their districts and meet with constituents. Thus, there’s not a perfect correlation between state population and the “professionalism” of its Legislature.
At the other end of the extreme, we have the “Amateur”/”Citizen” states, which are labeled as “Gold” and “Light Gold” on that NCSL map. North Dakota, you’ll notice, is a “Gold” state. Legislators in North Dakota make about $25,000 in a two-year session (they get a $500/month "salary", plus "daily pay" for the actual days they spend in Bismarck). However, the session is very short (about four months, but only in odd-numbered years), and the Interim Study committees meet in Bismarck for a day or two every month in the “off-season”. In terms of staff, only five people in the entire Legislature have staff who work directly for them: the four caucus leaders (Majority and Minority Leaders in both the House and Senate) have a Secretary/Administrative Assistant and a Speechwriter/Policy Researcher; the Speaker of the House only has a Secretary/Administrative Assistant. The other 136 members have no individual staff support: they write their own press releases and floor speeches, answer their own email and phones, and do most of their own research on bills and amendments. You’ll notice that, in the chart on that NCSL page, they list the average “Total Staff” in “Gold” states as 160. They’re counting not just individual member staff support, but everybody who works for the Legislature (so, the lawyers who draft bills for the non-partisan bill drafting service, the accountants and policy analysts who work for the Legislative Council or Fiscal Office, the temporary committee clerks, Sergeants-at-Arms, parking attendants, pages, copy-room attendants, etc.). So, 160 might seem like a lot of people, but they’re counting everybody, including a lot of part-time and temporary support employees who have very little to do with the business of actually writing and researching legislation. In these “Gold” and “Light Gold” states, then, the Legislature is very much a part-time and seasonal occupation.
In-between these two extremes we find this large group of states which Political Scientists call the “Hybrid” states (and which the NCSL has labeled, in its system, the “Gray” states – their current list puts 26 of the 50 states in that category). This group is somewhere in-between the two extremes. You’ll notice that Minnesota, for example, is listed in this category. The pay for Minnesota legislators is about $42,000 per year (plus a "daily pay" for session days, as well as travel and housing expenses for going back and forth to St. Paul). Most members, except for the leaders, share an assistant with another member, or a pool of assistants amongst a larger group of members, to help them with research, answering constituent email and phone calls, writing press releases, etc. Minnesota’s Legislature meets every year (the even-year session is a little shorter [about three months] than the odd-year session [about five months]), but members also spend a lot of time going back-and-forth from St. Paul, even in the “off-season”, for Interim Committee meetings (sometimes two or three times a month, depending on the committee that they’re on). This pattern (average pay, low staff support, and high expectations/demands for time) is pretty common for states in this “Gray”/”Hybrid” category. That Minnesota Post article from 2017 talks about how the state is trying to figure out how to balance the expectations for a relatively high level of service, with what has been traditionally a fairly low salary (that $42,000 is a recent increase; it was $30,000 prior to 2017). Many states in this "Gray"/"Hybrid" group deal with similar issues.
I mention this distinction between “professional”, “amateur”, and “hybrid” legislatures for two reasons. First, in your case studies, one of the questions is going to ask you to evaluate the NCSL classification for your state, and you’re going to have to be able to explain why you think that classification is accurate (or not), based on what you learn about your state’s legislative pay, staffing, session length, etc. You'll want to look up your state's numbers in these areas, and compare them to the averages on that NCSL table. The other reason is that as you think about the Short Response questions for this unit, you might want to consider this distinction. Term limits in California (a highly “professionalized” state), for example, might have a very different effect than term limits in South Dakota (one of the NCSL “Gold”, or Amateur, states). When you think about term limits, or the session length question, keep in mind that not every state gives its legislators the same role, expectations, and benefits as those found in other states, and very few of them resemble the professionalized, full-time pattern that we see in the U.S. Congress.
Political "Polarization" in the Legislatures
As we learned in a previous unit (Political Parties), American parties are not rigid, ideologically-consistent groups (despite popular belief in the media and on comment boards on the Internet). In that unit, we talked about “conservative Democrats” and “moderate Republicans”; in a couple of the outside resources that I posted, we can see this phenomenon in practice.
First, we need to understand a concept called “polarization”. A highly-polarized legislative body (or a highly-polarized country) is one in which the members of one group refuse to compromise or cooperate with the members of another group. We could find examples of polarization in many contexts: in the Jim Crow South (in the pre-Civil Rights Era), for example, it probably wouldn’t surprise us that members of different racial groups lived in completely different neighborhoods, went to different schools, rode different modes of public transportation, ate in different restaurants, attended separate churches, and so on. In a completely “polarized” racial society, members of one group might even face scorn and criticism from their fellow group members for even daring to try and socialize with members of other groups. Note that race is just one example that we could use to illustrate this concept: history is full of examples where people from different ethnic groups, religions, and professional statuses (labor v management, for example, in union environments) refused to engage with members of other groups.
In legislative behavior, we use this idea of “polarization” to describe legislative bodies where members of the two major political parties refuse to support legislation or ideas sponsored or promoted by members of the other party. In a completely polarized Legislature (which doesn't exist, at least not 100% of the time), it would be akin to ALL of the Democrats always voting in agreement with each other on EVERY bill, but the opposite of ALL Republicans on EACH AND EVERY bill (and vice-versa). So, let’s say we had a hypothetical Legislature of 37 Democrats and 23 Republicans. On every single bill, the vote would be 37-23 (if the Democrats wanted it to pass) or 23-37 (if the Democrats didn’t want it to pass). Of course, such a perfectly polarized Legislature doesn’t actually exist in reality. However, studies by a couple of Political Scientists (Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal) have found that, at various times in American History, the U.S. Congress has gone through periods of relatively higher and lower polarization (since 1972, we are in a period of relatively high polarization, according to Poole and Rosenthal, and it’s gotten appreciably MORE polarized since the late 1990s). One of the things that concerns political scientists about this phenomenon is the potential for gridlock: if members of one party are under increasing pressure to NOT compromise with members of the other party (or even members of their own party who might come from different areas of the state, or who represent a different type of constituency), then there’s a possibility that legislation will be more and more difficult to pass. The other fear is that as societies become polarized, if the minority NEVER gets its way on ANY issue, then they might become disaffected, and either withdraw from public participation, or start talking about secession (not to sound too alarmist, but Poole and Rosenthal's study of this in Congress found that, prior to the current high level of polarization, the other most extreme example could be found in the 1850s, right on the eve of the Civil War).
Similar studies have been more recently undertaken of State Legislatures: a 2011 study by Boris Shor and Nolan McCarty finds that in the majority of states, the Legislature has been gradually becoming more polarized since around 2000. However, there’s a lot of variety as to HOW strong that polarization is. In California, for example (the most polarized state), there is virtually NO cross-voting at all (especially in the State Assembly); however, because the Democrats have more than a two-thirds majority in that body, legislative business still gets done (albeit with virtually no influence from the Republican minority). By contrast, in states like Rhode Island, Delaware, and Louisiana, there’s very little polarization, and party identification plays very little role in determining how members vote on bills and issues (some of this is probably due to the fact that the Republican parties in Rhode Island and Delaware tend to attract more socially-liberal and fiscally-moderate candidates and voters than does the Republican Party nationally; likewise, Democratic parties in southern states, like Louisiana, still attract a fair number of socially-conservative candidates and voters).
Minnesota, according to Shor and McCarty, was the 7th-MOST polarized state Legislature in 2016 (the last year for which they’ve calculated data). North Dakota, by contrast, was the 7th-LEAST polarized state Legislature during that same year. Now, there are probably lots of reasons for that. Minnesota’s political parties, for one, are a lot more competitive in broad areas of the state. I didn't post these, but if you look at the election maps from the Secretary of State's office (https://www.sos.state.mn.us/election-administration-campaigns/data-maps/) , you'll notice that the Democrats dominate the Twin Cities metro and inner suburbs, as well as the Iron Range, while Republicans dominate southwestern rural Minnesota, the St. Cloud area, and the outer-ring suburbs of the Twin Cities. Even though the Democrats have an advantage statewide, there are enough Republicans spread out over multiple areas of the state that control of the Legislature is at least competitive in most years (right now, the Democrats control the State House, and Republicans the State Senate, but just within the last 15 years, the State Senate has flipped control three times, and the House four times). So, in Minnesota, there’s a chance that, at any given time, the majority party only has a temporary hold on either chamber, and the minority might have a chance to take over if it only can grab control of a dozen or so seats in the next election. Because the voters are so polarized, that ends up being reflected in the Legislature.
By contrast, in North Dakota, there are very few areas outside of the downtowns and college-student-heavy areas of Fargo and Grand Forks that support Democrats (except for three counties with large Native American populations). The Democrats held a small majority of seats in the Senate in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and they held the majority in the House only one (in 1983; in 1985, there was a tie between the two parties, so power was shared); other than that brief episode (30 years ago), the Republicans have had a lock on power in the Legislature. More recently, whether we look at the votes in statewide races, or in legislative races, the Republicans dominate, and there’s very few areas where Democrats are really competitive. However, in areas where they ARE competitive (and competitive doesn’t just mean that they win; it can also mean that they lose, but by small margins), think about how Republican legislators (State Senators and State Representatives) might behave when it comes to voting on bills and issues. Might they be less likely to take staunch party-line stances in alliance with more conservative Republicans, or might they be more willing to compromise? I didn't post any of this (because it gets into some material that's a lot more in-depth than what we want to get into in an intro course), but my own research (posted at www.ndpoliprof.com, if you REALLY want some boring reading) shows that Republican House members from urban and suburban districts in North Dakota are a little more likely to vote in agreement with Democrats (at least on some issues), and that Democrats from rural districts are a little more likely to vote in line with Republicans on some issues. This aligns with what Shor and McCarty found, in terms of North Dakota being one of the LEAST polarized states.