Kevin Smith is professor and chair of the department of political science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Watching Tuesday night’s State of the Union Address, a tired ritual where lawmakers from the opposing party invariably sits on their hands half the night while the president’s supporters stand and cheer their man, it was hard not to feel a little superior. You see, I’m from Nebraska, where this kind of rank partisan politics is as uncommon as a warm winter’s day.

Consider this: Late last fall, Nebraska State Sen. Bill Avery stood before one of my undergraduate political science classes and told them something astonishing.


“I am the chairman of the Government, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee,” he said.

What’s so astonishing about a veteran state senator chairing a standing committee? This: Avery is a Democrat. True, it’s not particularly unusual for Democrats to hold such positions of leadership and influence in the Nebraska statehouse. The legislature has 14 standing committees and eight of them are chaired by Democrats.

If you view that fact peering out of a partisan porthole from the listing ship of the U.S. Congress, though, it might indeed seem fantastical, truly astonishing. Why? Democrats are a minority in the Nebraska legislature. Republicans hold 60 percent of the seats, about the same percentage Mitt Romney garnered in the 2012 presidential election. How did Democrats mange to outwit Republicans to gain these committee chairs and with them critical keys to governance? They didn’t. Republicans voted for them.

To get the general gist of just how unusual this is, imagine a majority of House Republicans cheerfully voting to put Nancy Pelosi in charge of, oh, say, the powerful Armed Services Committee, while a majority of Democrats just as cheerfully back John Boehner for speaker. On second thought, don’t. Such fanciful flights of imagination typically require the aid of serious hallucinogens and we want to stay more or less in the realm of reality here.

And the reality is that most people think Congress is dangerously dysfunctional, a sorry sandbox of partisan finger-pointers who collectively would rather drive the country off a cliff rather than forge compromise and share credit with each other. In contrast, Nebraska is a sort of anti-Congress. The Nebraska legislature is not perfect by any means (and we’ll get to that in a minute), but it scores better than Congress it at least two areas: Its members rarely draw battle lines on the basis of party affiliation, and it never grinds the people’s business into oblivion by dropping it between the gears of two legislative houses that sometimes simply don’t mesh.

Given this, our Little House on the Prairie may be able to teach its much bigger brethren a powerful lesson on how to function with a minimum of partisan drama and inter-institutional feuding. What’s Nebraska’s secret? Simple: Dump one of the institutions and get rid of political parties.

For the first seven decades of its existence, Nebraska had what Americans generally consider a standard-issue legislature, in other words a mini-Congress. An upper and lower house, both internally organized on partisan lines, with the majority party getting all the plums and having the whip hand in determining the fate of legislation. This changed in 1934, mostly because of the efforts of George Norris.

At the time, Norris was a progressive Republican (he later became an independent) who had served in the U.S. House and then moved on to the U.S. Senate. He knew from experience how partisan politics and institutional divisions could lead Congress to sclerotic malfunction. Similar complaints about the institutional defects of legislature were kicking around at the state level in Nebraska, and Norris, apparently much impressed with the unicameral parliament in the Australian state of Queensland, decided in the early 1930s to do something about it.

Norris became the driving force behind a ballot initiative to create a non-partisan, single-house legislature. He argued that one house would be cheaper and more efficient than two, and it would avoid the machinations of conference committees, which Norris saw as legislatures unto themselves with little regard for the wishes of either chamber. Eliminating political parties would allow legislators to concentrate on issues rather than carrying water for partisan agendas. The initiative passed with 60 percent of the vote in 1934, and the new non-partisan unicameral came into effect in 1936. So we’ve been doing this for about 80 years now.

More or less, Nebraska’s legislature, the only one like it in the United States, has delivered on Norris’s promises. It is cheaper, it is more efficient and it is definitely less partisan. There are no party caucuses, and no one bothers to keep score of political points scored by Democrats or Republicans because no one seems to care that much, and because legislators can’t formally identify themselves as members of one party or another. Instead, the Nebraska legislature tends to divide by issue. On at least some issues the sides tend to be semi-permanent, most notably when urban and rural interests collide. Generally, though, coalitions are fluid, forming and reforming on the basis of constituency concerns and the analysis and preferences of individual legislators. Successful legislation almost always requires real bipartisan majorities, because partisanship simply doesn’t count as much in the Nebraska legislature. There are no party caucuses, and the speaker of the legislature and committee leaders are elected by the entire body, rather than as rewards for seniority or party majority, rank or loyalty.

Could Congress use the Nebraska model to cure, or at least severely mitigate, its chronic case of partisan gridlock? Maybe, maybe not. Putting the House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate out of business would require a serious, and probably unreachable, revision of the U.S. Constitution. Getting rid of parties, though, wouldn’t require climbing such legal mountains. The first Congresses operated without them, the Constitution never mentions them, and the Founders explicitly didn’t want them (though, it must be said, that didn’t stop them from playing key roles in creating them). Congress, in other words, made itself partisan, and it has the power to make itself less so. Going one step further and removing party affiliation from congressional candidates on ballots in all 50 states is, no doubt, a tough legal hurdle. State as well as national political party organizations are unlikely to be thrilled about this prospect and would fight to keep the status quo. Still, such opposition might be lessened considerably if there were strong public support; Nebraska’s experience suggests that wouldn’t be a problem. Give voters a chance to get rid of political parties and I’m guessing they’d be happy to oblige.

Nebraska, though, also demonstrates that there is a cost to be paid for the legislative comity that comes with getting rid of parties. While it works in the sense of severely limiting, if not totally eliminating, toxic, partisan finger pointing, it also robs voters of an important democratic commodity: information. One of the big reasons Nebraska legislators can so easily forge real working relationships is that they have fewer worries of being electorally punished for doing so. If you are a voter in Nebraska and you are not happy with the legislature, it’s not like you can blame the Democrats or the Republicans who are in charge. In the voting booth, there is no partisan label to rapidly and with a high degree of accuracy orient a voter to the policy leanings and legislative records of the candidates. As generations of scholars have argued, one of the primary functions of political parties is to make it easier for voters to sort out who is doing what and who should be punished or rewarded at the polls. Get rid of party labels and you get less partisanship, but you also make it harder to hold individual legislators and the legislature as a whole to account.

That lack of accountability works out well in Nebraska; it clearly gives legislators the freedom to put pragmatism above party. But would it work anywhere else? In theory, that lack of accountability gives legislators more freedom to work for their own selfish interests, not just for good governance and bipartisan compromise. Still, as most Americans seem to believe members of Congress are already doing plenty of the former and not nearly enough of the latter, maybe imbuing Washington with a bit of the Cornhusker spirit is worth a try.