Florida

Florida’s executive branch is built around the Cabinet, a feature found in almost no other state. Voters elect the Governor plus three Cabinet officers independently: the Attorney General, the Chief Financial Officer (who oversees the state’s finances, accounting, and insurance regulation), and the Commissioner of Agriculture. These four officials do not just run their own departments, they sit together as a collegial board that governs several major agencies and makes certain decisions only by joint vote.

Florida also has a Lieutenant Governor, but unlike the Cabinet officers that office is not elected independently: candidates run as a ticket with the Governor, and the role’s duties are whatever the Governor assigns.

Because the Cabinet officers are elected in their own right, the Governor leads the executive branch but shares real authority with three colleagues who answer to the voters rather than to the Governor.

The Florida Legislature is bicameral: a 40-seat State Senate (four-year terms) and a 120-seat House of Representatives (two-year terms). It is a part-time, citizen legislature, members are paid $29,697 a year plus a per diem and generally keep careers outside the Capitol.

Lawmakers are limited to eight consecutive years in a single chamber. The defining constraint is the calendar: the Legislature meets in one regular session a year, convening in March in odd-numbered years and in January in even-numbered years and capped at 60 consecutive calendar days. The budget is the only bill the constitution actually requires it to pass, and everything has to be finished inside that two-month window unless the Governor or legislative leaders call a special session.

A bill is filed, referred to committees, and, if it clears them, scheduled for floor votes; after passing one chamber it repeats in the other, with differences reconciled before final passage. The 60-day clock makes the session a sprint, and bills that don’t finish in time die. The Governor can sign a bill, veto it, or let it become law without a signature, and holds a line-item veto over the budget. The Legislature can override a veto with a two-thirds vote of each chamber.

Florida gives voters a direct role, but a narrow one: citizens can propose amendments to the state constitution by initiative, not ordinary statutes, and a proposed amendment must win 60 percent of the vote to pass, a higher bar than the simple majority most states use. That 60 percent threshold is itself a relatively recent, distinctive feature.

The Governor appoints the heads of the agencies that aren’t run by the Cabinet, fills judicial vacancies from nominating-commission lists, proposes the budget, can call special sessions, and holds broad emergency powers along with a line-item veto. Within the executive branch, though, the Governor must work alongside the elected Cabinet rather than command it.

Clemency is the clearest example. Florida vests the pardon power not in the Governor alone but in the Board of Executive Clemency, the Governor sitting together with the three Cabinet officers. A grant of clemency requires the Governor plus the agreement of at least two Cabinet members, so the Governor can neither pardon unilaterally nor be overruled without their own vote. Few states make clemency a shared, board-based decision like this.

Florida uses merit selection and retention for its appellate courts. The Governor appoints Supreme Court justices and District Court of Appeal judges from a slate offered by a judicial nominating commission, and those judges later face periodic up-or-down "merit retention" votes rather than contested elections. Trial-level judges, on the Circuit and County courts, are chosen in nonpartisan elections. The Supreme Court sits at the top of the system.