Indiana

Indiana has a moderate plural executive. Voters elect the Governor and Lieutenant Governor (who run together as a single ticket and share a party), plus three independently elected officers: the Attorney General, the Secretary of State, and the State Auditor (now styled the Auditor/Comptroller). The State Treasurer is also elected. Compared with states that elect eight or ten statewide officials, Indiana keeps the list relatively short.

The Lieutenant Governor is unusually busy by national standards: beyond presiding over the State Senate, the office runs major executive agencies, typically including agriculture and rural affairs, so the job carries real administrative weight. The Governor appoints the heads of the remaining executive departments and leads the rest of the bureaucracy.

The Indiana General Assembly is bicameral: a 50-seat State Senate (four-year terms) and a 100-seat House of Representatives (two-year terms). It is a part-time, citizen legislature, with a base salary of about $33,000 a year plus a daily session per diem (around $196), and there are no term limits.

The calendar follows a long-year/short-year rhythm: a "long session" in odd-numbered years, running into late April and used to write the two-year budget, and a "short session" in even years, ending in mid-March, for adjustments. Indiana writes its budget on a two-year basis and has a strong tradition of balancing it and maintaining reserves.

A bill is introduced, sent to committee, and — if it advances — voted on the floor of each chamber, with differences reconciled before final passage. Two features stand out about the Governor’s role. First, Indiana’s governor has no line-item veto: a bill, including the budget, must be signed or rejected as a whole. Second, the veto is weak — the General Assembly can override it with a simple majority of each chamber, the same margin needed to pass the bill in the first place, so a veto is more a delay than a true block.

Indiana has no statewide citizen initiative or referendum, so voters cannot place statutes or constitutional amendments on the ballot themselves. Constitutional amendments are referred to the voters only after passing two separately elected sessions of the General Assembly. The upshot is that, more than in many states, Indiana lawmaking flows through elected legislators rather than around them.

The Indiana governor holds the familiar tools — appointing agency heads, proposing the budget, calling special sessions, exercising emergency powers, and the clemency power — and a term limit that caps service at eight years in any twelve-year span. But the office is on the weaker side in two concrete ways: there is no line-item veto, and the regular veto can be overridden by a simple legislative majority.

That tilts the balance toward the General Assembly on contested questions. The main internal checks on the Governor are the independently elected Attorney General, Secretary of State, Auditor, and Treasurer, and the relatively easy veto override.

Indiana uses merit selection plus retention for its top courts. The Governor appoints Supreme Court justices and Court of Appeals judges from a slate sent up by a nominating commission, and those judges then face periodic up-or-down retention votes rather than contested races. Most trial-court judges are elected, with rules varying by county. The Supreme Court of Indiana sits at the top, above the Court of Appeals and the trial-level Circuit and Superior courts.