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MI to Repeal Right-to-Work Law Michigan is poised to become the first state in almost 60 years to repeal a right-to-work law, after the state’s Democrat-led Legislature approved a bill ( HB 4005...
MS Gov Nixes Health Insurance Reform Bills Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) vetoed two health insurance reform measures that were passed by the Legislature with bipartisan support. One of the bills...
ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence-driven computer program designed to facilitate interaction between users and their digital devices, has drawn a great deal of public attention since being introduced...
MT Senate Passes Sweeping TikTok Ban The Montana Senate approved a TikTok ban ( SB 419 ) that goes much further than the executive actions of several Republican governors prohibiting the use of the Chinese...
Walgreens Caught in Red-State, Blue-State Battle over Abortion Pills California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said last week that his state was cutting ties with Walgreens, including a $54 million contract to...
STATE NET® THOUGHT LEADERSHIP SERIES
The nation’s 50 state legislatures differ in numerous ways, some of which are formally dictated, while others are unwritten behavioral norms and traditions. These formal and informal variations can pose significant challenges for government affairs professionals. State Net legislative analytics have been designed to help manage them.
New Hampshire’s legislature, the General Court, has 424 members. Nebraska’s Unicameral has only 49. A few states convene for less than 60 days a year, while others meet for virtually the entirety of each biennium. The Illinois House uses 54 committees to evaluate legislation. Maryland’s Senate uses just four. Over a dozen states limit the terms of their legislators, while the rest do not. All of those dissimilarities—and plenty of others—are the product of formal codes: constitutional provisions, statutes and chamber rules.
Differences among state legislatures aren’t just the product of formal dictates. They’re also the result of what State Net data scientist W. Mark Crain describes as “unwritten behavioral norms long baked into a jurisdiction’s culture and traditions.”
For instance, only seven of the 99 state legislative chambers impose any limits on how many bills their members can introduce, and none place any controls on how many measures they can pass. Yet each legislature still introduces and passes roughly the same number of bills session after session. Those 99 different—but highly consistent—bill introduction and passage volumes are powerful norms passed along from one generation of lawmakers to the next.
Crain cites a Winston Churchill quote that he says accurately conveys the way unwritten norms and adopted institutional behaviors seem to perpetuate state legislative passage activity over time: “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
The multitude of formal dictates and unwritten norms can come together in ways that impose significant challenges for legal and government affairs professionals. For example, the legislatures in Utah, Virginia and Wyoming meet for just 60 days or less a year and tend to move bills quickly. Those legislatures also pass most of the bills they introduce. So when they’re in session, they must be monitored particularly closely.
New York lawmakers, meanwhile, typically introduce about 20,000 bills each biennium but only pass around 6% of them. The Minnesota Legislature’s passage rate is even more meager: about two bills out of every 100. So in those states, where the vast majority of bills fail, there’s a lot of chaff that has to be sifted through to find the wheat.
Key takeaway: There’s a unique set of formal rules and informal practices in each state that government affairs professionals must be aware of to be truly effective.
State Net legislative analytics encompass the full range of formal dictates and informal practices that shape each state’s legislative process, weighted according to their relative influence through the application of machine learning. State Net analytics tools provide users with the information they need to manage the various logistical challenges presented by the nation’s 50 statehouses, such as short, high-passage-rate sessions and high-volume, low passage-rate ones. At the same time, these analytics tools normalize all of the statehouse variances, so users can work across multiple states without having to review the idiosyncrasies of each chamber. With State Net, government affairs professionals have access to a robust analytics solution that is unmatched in the industry.
Learn how State Net can help you stay on top of this issue.