The U.S. Congress is a stubborn institution, beholden to its specification in the U.S. Constitution. Voters having no influence over its structure or procedures. This is, perhaps, partially responsible for the near-universal frustration with our national legislature. State legislatures, in stark relief, have been repeatedly refined by voter-approved institutional reforms in pursuit of better governance. Reforming Legislatures investigates the origins of state legislature design, something that most citizens take for granted (save for the political scientists who are eager to harness this cross-state variation for their studies). Author Peverill Squire analyzes each of the 1,500 ballot measures from the nation's founding to present (2020) addressing the form and function of state legislatures. This monograph straddles legislative studies and public opinion studies because the vast majority of ballot measures were conceived by legislators themselves based on their first-hand experiences in state capitols while the electoral returns reflect public attitudes toward current and potential institutional configurations.

The data collection for just the ballot measure language and election returns is astounding (all fifty states since the inception of our nation!), but what places this investigation into a league of its own is the extensive newspaper docume