Thirty states have four-year terms for state senators. In the remaining eight states, senators serve one two-year term and two four-year terms every ten years in the term system.
In the map below, the five blue states represent the lower chambers with four-year terms: Alabama , Louisiana , Maryland , Mississippi and North Dakota. The green states represent those with two-year terms. In 15 state legislatures , state legislators are subject to term limits. Voters in six additional states voted to have term limits, only to have those votes nullified.
In two cases, the state legislature voted to nullify the limits imposed by voters, while in four other states, courts nullified the voter-imposed limits, primarily for technical reasons. Legislative term limits can be either lifetime or consecutive. In the ten states where the limits are consecutive, once a state legislator has served the maximum number of terms in office, he or she, if eligible, can run for office for the state's other legislative chamber, or leave the legislature.
After a period of time no longer in office in a particular legislative chamber, however, the legislator is allowed to run again for office in that legislative chamber.
The period of time that a legislator must be out of office before being able to run again is usually two years. In five of the 15 states with limits on state legislators, the limit is a lifetime limit. In these states, once a legislator has served the maximum allowable number of terms in a particular legislative chamber, they may never again run for or hold office in that particular chamber. Ballotpedia features , encyclopedic articles written and curated by our professional staff of editors, writers, and researchers.
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Share this page Follow Ballotpedia. What's on your ballot? Jump to: navigation , search. Categories : Features of state legislatures Length of state legislative terms. Voter information What's on my ballot? Where do I vote? How do I register to vote? How do I request a ballot? When do I vote? When are polls open? Who Represents Me? Congress special elections Governors State executives State legislatures Ballot measures State judges Municipal officials School boards.
How do I update a page? Election results. Privacy policy About Ballotpedia Disclaimers Login. The fact that more than one quarter of all elections have been held after an interval greater than three years, suggests that if successive Prime Ministers were of a mind to do so, all parliamentary terms could be of three years or more.
Despite this, even if all parliaments were to run full term, the question still remains: is a 'three-year' term too short for a modern national lower house? Four-year maximum terms? Among those concerned about the operation of government in Australia, by far the preferred option is to introduce four-year maximum terms for the House of Representatives. The case for four-year terms Over the years a number of the points once made in favour of four-year maximum terms have fallen into disuse, as can be seen in the report of the Royal Commission into the Constitution.
At that time the Commissioners believed that the three-year period was inadequate for Australia in view of:. Modern critics of the status quo tend to focus on at least seven specific benefits they claim will flow from an extension of House of Representatives terms to four years.
A long-standing claim holds that longer terms would encourage governments to introduce policies that were long-term rather than merely politically expedient. There is a widespread view that increasing the term for the House would enable governments to enjoy the luxury of being able to take 'more responsible, long-term views' than is possible when the next election is quite likely to be less than two years away.
The commonly-heard view of the typical three-year term is that governments:. It has been said that under a three-year term, the first budget is devoted to paying off the promises made at the previous election and the third budget in anticipating the promises to be made at the forthcoming election.
Consequently, only one budget out of three, the second, it likely to address important, long term policies without the contamination of short-term political considerations. Quite clearly, there is 'little time to engage simply in good government'. This point is said to be strengthened by the distortion caused by the uncertainties of the electoral 'game'.
Too often, it is claimed, all the important players in the game find themselves distracted from the day-to-day slog of government. The electorate is too often in election mode:. There is The real business of government suffers.
Associated with this, it is argued that governments would have longer to weather the community response to the implementation of policies seen as necessary for the community good. It is said that this would be especially valuable in the area of economic management. Business confidence. It is claimed that longer terms would enhance business confidence. The private sector has long complained that national elections disrupt their long-term planning, with deleterious effects upon the national economy.
It has been noted, for instance, that retail sales drop in the period before a Commonwealth election. Calls for longer terms in New Zealand have also tended to come from business organisations. The Business Council of Australia has been a keen advocate of a longer term.
The uncertainties created by frequent elections and consequent shifts in Government policy in turn have an adverse effect on business confidence and business investment. Very few other democratic nations suffer this disadvantage as most have maximum parliamentary terms that are significantly longer than that of Australia. Ron Brunton of the Institute of Public Affairs is less certain of the importance of this argument. He suggests that business support for such a change might depend less on concerns about efficiency than 'the desire for a longer period of return on all the time and resources they spend in cultivating the party in power'.
Cost of elections. Elections cost money. Over time, a great deal would be saved by having fewer national elections. Since there have been four elections in South Australia for the four-year term House of Assembly; by comparison, there have been five Commonwealth elections for the three-year term House of Representatives.
The longer the period between elections, the greater the saving for the taxpayers forced to foot the election bill. Voter dislike. It is often said that Australians dislike the frequency with which they are required to vote, something that is believed to be linked to a distaste for the tough nature of our party and electoral politics.
Fewer Commonwealth elections would reduce this to some extent. Former Professor of Politics at La Trobe University, Joan Rydon, has stated that any reduction in the number of elections should be seen as part of a process of 'reducing the adversary nature of our party politics'.
Bringing the House of Representatives into line. A change to four-year terms would bring the House of Representatives term into line with most State and Territory lower house terms. In both Queensland and the ACT there has been recent discussion about the possibility of changing from three to four year terms. If this occurs, the House of Representatives will be the only Australian lower house retaining the shorter term. The local Member.
He believes that three-year terms may make local members adept at campaigning, but they do not encourage them to work in a sustained way on long-term problems: 'Members are tempted to become show ponies rather than watch dogs'.
Political debate. A final, speculative assertion, is the possibility that longer periods between elections would raise the standard of political debate. It has been wondered if such a period might 'create more opportunity for genuinely bipartisan discussion of a wider range of issues [than is normally the case]'.
Such are the benefits that it is claimed would flow from the introduction of four-year maximum terms for the House of Representatives. It can be noted that four of these are essentially unprovable-the reduction of election costs would be certain, and the House term would be another reflection of a general move to four-year terms for Australian lower houses.
It is also important to note that recent suggestions have referred to four-year maximum terms for the House of Representatives, and that making this change is not to suggest that each term would always last for four years.
If the first century of our Parliament is any guide, most terms would be less than four years. If Prime Ministers followed previous practice, however, then the House usually would not be dissolved earlier than six months prior to its term expiring. The nett impact therefore would be that the usual length of a House term would have been extended by a year-and any term that did run for the full term would, obviously, be a bonus.
In order to guarantee a full four-year term, fixed terms would be necessary for fixed terms, see below. It goes without saying that it is difficult to amend the Australian Constitution. It seems that if an amendment on any topic is to be accepted by the voters, it needs to appear as non-controversial as is possible to be.
There certainly needs to be no division between the major parties. On the first, there would seem to be little that could be done to lessen any possible impact this might have in a society that is said to be endemically suspicious of politicians.
In regard to the second objection it would probably be prudent to have the amendment worded so that the change could not be waved away simply as a change being made solely to benefit the government of the day.
Perhaps the first extended term should not begin for the House of Representatives for which the election was being held, but for the next? Table 1 shows that more nations have five-year parliaments than any other term. Some Australians have argued for a five-year term for the national upper house. The time spent on electioneering made the performance of parliamentary duties, particularly in such a large country, extremely difficult.
Higgs called for an increase in House terms to five years and Senate terms to ten years, asserting that:. Trade, commerce, and industry would profit by the change, and members of Parliament would be able to give more time to the study of Commonwealth problems. Five-year terms have not been unknown in Australia. In the nineteenth century five of the colonies had five-year terms at some stage. Legislation passed in Tasmania in introduced such a term for the House of Assembly, and this remained in place until In South Australia also introduced five-year terms, though it reverted to the three-year term two years later, following public criticism.
Elaine Thompson of the University of New South Wales believes a move from three-to five-year terms would be too great a change for the electorate to accept, primarily because of concerns about a perceived reduction in the democratic elements of the political system. At the same time, she acknowledges that five-year terms might be expected to give greater stability and improved government 'efficiency'.
Five-year House terms would open up the question of what to do with Senate terms. Should they be ten years with half retiring every five years? Five-year terms in parallel with House terms? Equal to two House terms? Any of these would probably be seen as too long, creating a Senate that was said to be 'out of touch' with the electorate. If the present fixed Senate term of six years was retained, this would result in the holding of many more elections, something that would fly in the face of the aim of reducing the number of elections for more on Senate elections, see below.
On balance, it is unlikely that many MPs would support an increase from three to five-year terms. Even in the UK there has been a significant amount of sentiment expressed that the House of Commons term of a maximum five years is too long. Should the three-year maximum term be retained? In a dissenting note to the Royal Commission on the Constitution, three members refused to accept the need for the increase in the House of Representatives term that some Australians called for. They claimed that the three-year term 'is quite long enough', and noted that 'it is in the control of members' to alter their fixation with preparing themselves for the next Commonwealth election.
Their concern was with democracy:. The greater the control of Parliament by the electors the better for the people, and the lengthening of the term of Parliament tends to weaken this control. Former Prime Minister Keating ALP has also referred to the question of democracy, claiming that the Australian democratic system is 'very robust' because the voters have a chance to change the Parliament, and hence the Government, 'every three years or less'.
Harradine's solution would be to create a climate in which parliaments are allowed to run their full three-year term. The current Clerk of the Senate, Harry Evans, has said that if Prime Ministers could restrain themselves, at a stroke we would have longer, and therefore, more stable parliaments.
Nearly twenty years ago, three political scientists felt able to assert that it had 'never' been the case that Australians were bothered by elections every three years.
The problem, they claimed, lay with Prime Ministers who did not allow the parliament to last the full term: 'It is the constant possibility of premature parliamentary elections that is so destructive of good government'. Surprisingly, there appears to have been no research undertaken on the consequences of the change to four-year terms that occurred in four of the States in the s and s.
There is, in fact, a lack of international evidence in regard to this aspect of legislative behaviour, no doubt because political scientists have regarded it as a settled question in most countries. Even were research to be done, however, the findings could only be speculative. Claims are made about the deleterious impact of three-year terms upon the Australian economy, but as far as can be ascertained there is no methodologically sound study that establishes, without doubt, that economic performance has been materially affected by a legislative term.
A second problem relates to the contention that the existing term has a deleterious impact upon the legislative performance. Critics point to the rush to legislate before the end of a parliament, but seem not to consider the possibility that the shorter term acts as a strong motivating instrument to get planning under way and legislation passed promptly. In addition, extending the House term to four years will not necessarily see the improved pursuit of medium- and long-term planning strategies.
In many cases lengthy periods may be required after the passage of legislation before policies are seen to be producing results. The required lead-time may be far longer than four years and the difference between three and four year terms may therefore be quite marginal.
In summary, although there is a lot of sentiment in favour of the four-year term, it is all based on speculation rather than hard evidence. Some, at the least, might prefer to stick with what is known rather than take the punt on longer terms. Conversely, four-year terms seem to work satisfactorily in the five States that have them. Some argue that the power to choose the election date gives a substantial advantage to the Prime Minister, allowing 'arbitrary, partisan and capricious early elections'.
Three University of New South Wales academics have described a four-year non-fixed term as:. The worst of all possible worlds. It gives an extra year to a government without accountability to the people and yet the opportunity for a prime minister to call an early election at will still remains.
The claim is therefore made that the only way to eradicate this is to introduce fixed terms. Even in Britain there have been occasional proposals to introduce fixed term parliaments to remove this Prime Ministerial prerogative. Most Australian debate of this type has focussed on four-year fixed terms, though three-year fixed terms would be quite possible.
In her study of the length of lower house terms, Thompson saw merit in three-year fixed terms, primarily on the grounds of their retaining 'more accountability', with governments being 'sensitive to the need for re-election throughout their term, rather than just at the end'. There has, though, been more interest in four-year fixed terms.
His claims are summarised here:. The insertion into the Constitution of a fixed House term, that could only be shortened by a motion constitutionally identified as a motion of no confidence, would withdraw the usefulness of blocking or rejecting Supply as a parliamentary tactic.
The ALP developed an interest in fixed terms in the late s and the New South Wales Labor Opposition supported the change to fixed terms in the referendum held in that State. He wonders if creating fixed terms of parliaments would lessen the possible danger. One Labor proposal for fixed terms was in fact passed by the Senate in November This particular model involved simultaneous House and half-Senate elections on the third Saturday in November every third year.
The only exceptions to this would be a when a government was defeated in the House on a formal vote of no confidence, and b when a double dissolution was called following a deadlock between the houses.
If an extraordinary election were forced by either a or b , the incoming government would be able only to see out the term of its predecessor to the normal date for a general election.
By contrast, some Coalition politicians, such as Malcolm Fraser and Peter Durack LP , have been determined opponents of fixed terms, seeing it as 'inappropriate, ineffective and dangerous':. Former Chief Justice Dixon has pointed out that in our system of government, we 'insist on the dependence of Cabinet upon Parliament'. Furthermore, our governmental arrangements provide that 'if a difficulty arises between the executive government and Parliament, it shall be resolved by an appeal to the people'.
He has particularly wondered what such a change would do to the office of the Prime Minister. At present the Prime Minister can go to the people if circumstances warrant it, and Tate believes this power ought not be thrown away lightly. For example, if a Prime Minister is being frustrated by the Opposition, 'he ought to be able to go to the people and renew his mandate'-it is what Professor Don Aitkin of the University of Canberra has described as the 'flexibility' that exists in the Westminster model.
He maintains that if fixed terms are introduced then the Vice-Regal reserve powers have to be excluded, or else their existence must be acknowledged in the relevant legislation and constitutional amendment. The New South Wales Parliament took the latter option when fixed terms were introduced in that State, arousing strong opposition.
Clune also notes that under a fixed term 'a government could be fixed to an election in inauspicious or unfortunate circumstances that militate unfairly against its chances of re-election'. Not all on the Coalition side of politics are opposed to fixed terms. In New South Wales the change to fixed terms seems to have been accepted by the major parties, with no pressures to repeal the legislation.
Former Liberal Senator David Hamer has suggested that the idea of a fixed three-year term-with the unchanged fixed Senate term of six years-would be a way of avoiding the criticism that would be heard if the Senate term were increased to eight years. An interesting point made by the English doyen of election studies, David Butler, that is usually not referred to in the Australian context, relates to the issue of the cost of elections.
In an article in the Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Science , Butler notes that flexible election dates-as in Australia-tend to produce shorter, and therefore cheaper, campaigns. Uncertainty over the date of an election means that there is usually little to be gained by an Opposition beginning to campaign well before the Prime Minister's announcement. By contrast, a well-known feature of US national elections-all of which are fixed term-is just how long the campaigning can take.
Representatives and Senators must be qualified voters of the state, be 21 years of age, and must have resided one year in the state. In addition, legislators must have lived the six months immediately preceding the election in the district from which they are elected.
Candidates for the Senate or House of Representatives must file during the designated time period, usually in May and June of the election year, and pay a fee. The Office of the Secretary of State has information on candidate qualifications , election laws, election calendars, voter lists, and more on their Elections and Voting page of their website.
Yes, they do have some special rights, mostly having to do with employment issues. In Minnesota, members of the Legislature are "citizen legislators" and many have jobs outside the Legislature.
For example, a member of the Legislature who is employed in the private sector must be allowed to resume his or her old job or a position of similar seniority, pay, and status if he or she reapplies within 30 days after the end of the session. A member cannot be discharged because of time spent in legislative service, nor can they be denied their seniority or benefits. In addition, no employer can discharge a member of the Legislature in retaliation for statements made or beliefs held in his or her capacity as a legislator.
If the legislator is employed by a public entity, such as a city or a school district, he or she must be restored to his or her original position or a position of similar status.
In addition, that person is entitled to an unpaid leave of absence during any or all of his or her term of office. The state constitution provides that members cannot be arrested while the Legislature is in session or when they are on their way to or from session, except in cases of felony, treason, or breach of the peace see Sec. Privilege from arrest. This privilege applies to misdemeanors or gross misdemeanors, excluding what the courts consider a breach of the peace.
Examples: assault or threatened assault, breaking and entering, driving while intoxicated, speeding, violent verbal attacks, or other acts that cause serious harm to people in the vicinity. The privilege only prevents detaining a member during session; it does not provide immunity from prosecution after session ends.
The protection is not automatic. A member can either assert the privilege in court or choose to waive it. The Minnesota statute regarding gifts and officials is 10A.
Each biennium the leaders in the House and the Senate set the number and scope of the standing committees and establish committee chairs according to which party is in the majority. Whichever party holds the most seats in either the House or the Senate is considered the Majority Caucus.
The majority caucus in the Senate elects a majority leader, who is also chair of the Rules and Administration Committee. Two other chairs are elected by the entire caucus, the chair of the Tax Committee and the Chair of the Finance Committee.
Other chairs are selected by an organizational committee of the majority caucus. Membership on the committees is according to the proportion of each caucus.
The minority caucus may offer suggestions of individual members for the minority representation on each committee. The minority caucus also names a "minority lead" on each committee.
The Rules and Administration Subcommittee on Conference Committees selects members for conference ommittees. In addition, no Senator may serve as the chair of a specific committee or one under its jurisdiction for more than three Senate terms. In the House, the Speaker chooses the committee chairs and appoints members of each committee. Each member is allowed to state his or her preference.
In deciding on a committee chair, the speaker usually chooses a senior member with some expertise in the committee's work, but not always. A member cannot serve as the chair of the same standing committee or division during more than three consecutive regular biennial sessions. This Rule does not apply to service as chair of the Committee on Rules and Legislative Administration. Each committee, therefore, would be a representative sample of the whole body. Conference committee members are also appointed by the Speaker.
Find out who represents you or if you know who represents you, use the House Member Information and Senate Member Information pages to see their contact information. You can call, email, or write a letter to your legislator. To speak to your representative or senator in person, contact their office to make an appointment.
Email is most effective if it is not a blanket mailing to all members. When sending an email, remember to include your name, postal address, and phone number. Martin Luther King Jr. Paul, MN The permanent journal for each session has an index of bills by author.
Also, you can click on the Web page for your Senator or Representative to find the recent bills he or she has authored. There are no official compilations of voting records. To find all votes by a particular Senator or Representative, you must look up the final vote on each individual bill. The votes that Senators and Representatives cast are a matter of public record and are recorded in the official journals of each body.
You can find the votes on the Legislature's website for the years to present: House Journal and Senate Journal.
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