Government of West Virginia
government of the U.S. state of West Virginia
The Government of West Virginia is modeled after the Government of the United States, with three branches: the executive, consisting of the Governor of West Virginia and the other elected constitutional officers; the legislative, consisting of the West Virginia Legislature which includes the Senate and the House of Delegates; and the judicial, consisting of the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals and lower courts.
The capital and seat of government in West Virginia is the city of Charleston, located in the southwest of the state.
Legislative branch
Like all states except Nebraska, West Virginia has a bicameral state legislature, the West Virginia Legislature. The lower house is the West Virginia House of Delegates and the upper house is the Senate. The West Virginia Legislature is a citizen's legislature or part-time legislature.
The West Virginia Constitution imposes a limit of 60 calendar days the length of the regular session. Regular sessions of the Legislature commence on the second Wednesday of January of each year; following the election of a new governor, the session starts in January with the governor's address but then adjourns until February. The session may be extended by concurrent resolution adopted by a two-thirds vote of each house. The governor may also call legislators to convene in special sessions whenever the governor deems one or more issues of state government in need of timely action by the Legislature. The final day of the regular session usually includes last-minute legislation in order to meet a constitutionally-imposed deadline of midnight.
The public source identifies “Government of West Virginia” as government of the U.S. state of West Virginia. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Government, West and Virginia.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5589342. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Government of West Virginia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.