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Countermajoritarian Legislatures

Miriam Seifter 02.10.21 Last Updated 04.12.23

This Article explains how state legislatures are almost always a state’s least majoritarian branch. The combination of districting itself, geographic clustering, and extreme gerrymandering mean that state legislatures are recurrently controlled by the state’s minority party. Indeed, the article finds that minority-party rule has afflicted state legislative chambers hundreds of times in the modern era. In contrast, state governors and state courts are overwhelmingly chosen via simple statewide elections, with no electoral college or lifetime appointment. This reframing destabilizes conventional narratives about state government and opens a host of broader inquiries.

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