Below is a map of the Los Angeles city council districts. There are 15 of them, and every couple of years, voters in each district get to vote on who sits in their district’s city council seat. The basic duty of the city council is, naturally, to create and vote on legislation for the city of Los Angeles.
Let’s say that we think this is a bad way to design a legislature. It’s too inefficient, or not representative enough, or too unchecked, or any of the normal critiques of government, really. So let’s try to improve it. We’ll keep the city council, for good measure, but try to make it just a little bit better.
First, let’s take these city council districts and put them together in groups of three, and we’ll call those “district groups.” So we’ll have five district groups, which will look like the following:
Now, let’s give the people in each of these district groups a “district group representative” that will be elected at the same time as city council members. So, in an election period, people in council districts 3, 7, and 12 (don’t ask me why they’re numbered like that) will get to vote for city council members in council districts 3, 7, and 12, respectively, and they will also vote for a district group representative for district group 1. People in council districts 2, 4, and 6 will get to vote for city council members in council districts 2, 4, and 6, respectively, and they will all vote for a district group representative for district group 2. And so on.
As far as duties go, we will give these district group representatives the same exact duties as the city council members — to make and vote on legislation for the whole of the city of Los Angeles. But here’s the catch: they are going to conduct their meetings wholly separately from the city council members, in a room down the hall from where the city council meets.
Now, once a law has been passed by one of these legislative bodies, the second body can decide to also pass it, reject it outright, or add some extra stuff onto it. If they decide to add some extra stuff but the first body doesn’t approve of the extra stuff, then there will be a meeting between some members of each body, and they’ll try to compromise and create a new bill. If they come up with a compromise, then each legislative body will vote separately on the compromise bill. If this new bill fails in either house, then they can try to come up with a new compromise, and they can repeat this process again, and again, and again until they either both pass the bill or just give up.
Effectively, we have just created a bicameral Los Angeles City Legislature where the district group representatives act as the Los Angeles City Senate. Let’s ask ourselves, what problems have we solved? In my view, here’s what we’ve done:
We’ve made effective and responsive governance harder. The lawmaking process is now more needlessly complicated and prone to gridlock.
We’ve made it easier for lobbyists to exert their influence. Lobbyists are usually better at making bills fail than they are at passing them, and we’ve just made it easier for bills to fail.
We’ve made it harder for most people to follow what is going on in the legislature and hold their representatives accountable. The more complicated the legislative process, the harder it is to assign blame or give credit to parties and individual lawmakers.
Here’s what we have not done:
We have not added a meaningful check on the city council. Since both bodies are elected by the same people to perform the same tasks, they have similar interests. The city council was already very appropriately checked by the mayor and courts.
We have not made the legislature substantially more representative. If we wanted to do that, we could have done so by just cutting each council district in half and doubling the size of the city council, having each district elect multiple city council members, or enacting some other form of proportional representation. We haven’t given people more representation so much as we have given them more incompetent representation.
If you were trying to design a responsive, democratic legislature from scratch, you surely would not come up with this.
And yet…
Out of 50 U.S. states, 49 have bicameral state legislatures that roughly look like the one we have just created. The upper and lower houses of these state legislatures are essentially the same. The representatives who occupy both houses have the same jobs and they are elected by the same people. In 17 states, even their term lengths and election periods are the same. So if districting is done at all fairly, we should expect that the two houses would look similar, unless we expect that voters actually think there is some utility in having one party control one house and another control the other.
And for the most part, both houses do look the same. There are currently only three divided state legislatures: Arizona, Minnesota, and Virginia. However, these states don’t make a good case for voters wanting divided state legislatures. In Arizona in 2020, Republican candidates received more votes than Democratic candidates for both houses of the state legislature, but Republicans only have a majority of seats in the state’s House of Representatives due to unrepresentative districting. The same is true for Democrats in Minnesota. In Virginia, Democrats won the popular vote in the House and Republicans won in the state Senate, but the most recent Virginia House elections were in 2021 while the most recent state Senate elections were in 2019. The results just echo the great American pastime of voting out the party of the president. There is no reason to think people benefit from or broadly desire divided state legislatures.
So why do we have bicameral state legislatures?
All state legislatures were modeled after Congress, which is bicameral. It’s that simple.
In the early 20th century and the interwar period, there were movements in some states to make their legislatures unicameral, but many bicameral systems gave outsize influence to rural voters. These rural voters didn’t want to give up their power and thus didn’t support unicameralism.
Eventually, rural interests would lose some grip over state legislatures — just not through the fall of bicameralism. In the 1964 landmark case Reynolds v. Sims, the Supreme Court held that, under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment, states are required to ensure that voting districts for both houses were drawn on the basis of population — meaning that each representative in a given house must represent a similar number of people to other representatives in their house. Before this ruling, many states had severely unequal representation. In Alabama, the state whose maps were at issue in Reynolds, the state senator for the district with the highest population represented 41 times more people than the state senator for the lowest populated district.
If seats in both houses are now apportioned on the same basis, and both houses are expected to do basically the same job, why still have two houses?
I’m glad you asked. The Court anticipated this question, but it gave a fairly unconvincing response. The Justices gave legislators a few suggestions for how they might make the houses somewhat different — different term lengths, number of seats, size of districts represented — and that was basically it. It is difficult to see how any of their suggestions would really create such a significant difference in the two houses as to justify there being two in the first place.
Nowadays, it is difficult to find people who actually argue for having bicameralism at the state level despite both houses being practically the same. Presumably, this is mostly because people don’t really care, which is fair enough. Frankly, I’m impressed you made it this far. However, in 1999, Jesse Ventura campaigned to make Minnesota’s legislature unicameral, and there was some interesting pushback against him. Ventura’s main argument was that bicameralism encouraged government gridlock, both through its convoluted design and its susceptibility to lobbyists. Commentator George Will denounced Ventura’s proposal, called it ridiculous, and made a principled argument for bicameralism.
The argument was that gridlock is good.
So don’t take it from me, but from a prominent modern-day defender of bicameralism: get rid of bicameralism and you’ll greatly reduce government gridlock.
Bicameralism at the federal level
Most of what has been said about why bicameralism is bad at the state level and unicameralism is good still applies to the federal level. If Congress were unicameral, it would likely experience less gridlock, lobbyists would have less influence, it would be easier to hold legislators accountable, all that good stuff.
But there is also a more actively malicious part of Congress that keeps up the worst traditions of bicameralism at the state level. That, of course, is the Senate, which gives an equal number of representatives to the highly unequal populations of each state. This method of apportionment has the natural effect giving more weight to the votes of people in less populous places, much like states used to do before the Supreme Court said they couldn’t.
The argument for how bad the Senate is can be taken directly from the majority opinion in Reynolds. As Chief Justice Earl Warren famously wrote, “Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests,” (562). Warren goes on to say in the majority opinion that
“it is inconceivable that a state law to the effect that, in counting votes for legislators, the votes of citizens in one part of the State would be multiplied by two, five, or 10, while the votes of persons in another area would be counted only at face value, could be constitutionally sustainable. Of course, the effect of state legislative districting schemes which give the same number of representatives to unequal numbers of constituents is identical… Weighting the votes of citizens differently, by any method or means, merely because of where they happen to reside, hardly seems justifiable,” (562-3).
Warren’s critique of malapportionment applies to the U.S. Senate just as much as it does to state legislatures, but the ruling itself could only ever apply to state legislatures. The two-senators-per-state rule is enshrined in Article 1, Section 3 of the Constitution, so the Court can’t exactly say that it is unconstitutional. Rules concerning the apportionment of state legislatures are not explicitly divulged in the Constitution, and so the Justices could rule that adherence to the “one person, one vote” principle was required of state legislatures by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment.
Of course, even if the Senate did somehow manage to adopt proportional representation, its existence would still be bad for effective governance, as all the rest of the problems associated with bicameralism would still be present.
Plenty of places have plenty of unicameralism, and those places work plenty fine
We started by creating a Senate where one does not exist because it helps us to ask a simple question — if all legislatures in the country were currently unicameral, would anyone advocate for making them bicameral? Would such a change improve legislative outcomes?
In 2014, Everett, Massachusetts became the last city in the country to abolish its bicameral city council and establish a unicameral one, which means that, yes, you live under the rule of a unicameral legislature, your municipal government. There are plenty of problems with municipal governments, to be sure, but would bicameralism solve any of them? As a resident of Los Angeles, I’d have a hard time getting behind our earlier proposal.
All the way back in 1936, Nebraska voted by referendum to make its legislature unicameral. As far as I know, it hasn’t yet experienced much tyranny of the majority, at least no more than has been experienced under bicameral legislatures. I also don’t think you’d find that Nebraskans think their legislature experiences too little gridlock.
In the UK, the lower house of parliament, the House of Commons, has slowly stripped away almost all power from the upper house, the House of Lords, essentially making the House of Commons a unicameral legislature with an advisory board.
It is quite difficult to turn a bicameral legislature into a unicameral one because it necessarily involves some people giving up some amount of power. Still, the adoption of unicameralism in the UK, Nebraska, and city councils across the country might give us some hope.
Here’s what the U.S. should do:
At the local level, we’re good. There are plenty of places that probably need some more proportional representation, but the actual design of legislatures is good and efficient.
At the state level, let’s follow Nebraska and Jesse Ventura’s lead. As the Supreme Court is slated to make state legislatures a lot worse, I propose that we instead make state legislatures a lot better by making them unicameral. That would require an amendment to states’ constitutions, which in most cases require a majority in both houses to vote to put it on the ballot, and then a majority of voters to approve it. More proportionality in state legislatures would be a highly positive change that would likely encourage the adoption of unicameralism by making sure no party is incentivized to protect some unfair advantage they have in a given house.
At the federal level, I endorse the following proposal for a constitutional amendment from commentator Ryan Cooper:
These changes are significant, and they would need coordinated and sustained effort from legislators who are willing to put aside their personal interests in order to pursue positive change on an issue that won’t score them many points with voters. In other words, these changes probably won’t happen.