PHOENIX – When Arizona lawmakers sponsored a 2016 house bill banning the sale of ivory and rhinoceros horn products, the bill matched almost exactly to language in legislation proposed outside Arizona.

But House Bill 2176, which never got a committee hearing, was not the only bill in the state’s 52nd legislative session that borrowed ideas, either in concept or verbatim, from bills in other states.

At least a handful of the 1,361 bills introduced in Arizona this year match bills introduced in other state legislatures, according to an AZCIR analysis comparing Arizona legislation to more than 500,000 bills, proposed in other states over the past eight years.

Nearly identical legislation introduced in multiple states, or “model legislation,” comes from national or regional industry associations, individual companies, or policy think-tanks and advocacy groups.

Some seek to create legal uniformity on technical topics that were passed successfully in different states, while others propose changes on a range of issues, from partisan pet projects to regulations that advantage certain companies or industries.

Emily Shaw, deputy policy director at the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates for transparency in government, said model legislation isn’t new, and that its target can range from dramatic to subtle.

When model legislation is not aimed at a lightning-rod issue, Shaw said model bills frequently make slight tweaks to state law that can have a big impact on a business or an industry’s bottom line.

“It’s not just the exceptional cases like on abortion restrictions or gun sale regulations,” she said. “It’s more about where money goes.”

Groups that push model legislation such as the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) or the State Innovation Exchange (SiX), among others, defend the practice. They argue there’s no need to reinvent the wheel in each state, and that if something is effective in one, it should be replicated elsewhere.