Illinois:

The governor of Illinois is elected for a term of four years. Jim Edgar, a Republican elected governor in 1990 and 1994, was succeeded by another Republican, George H. Ryan, elected in 1998. In 2002 a Democrat, Rod Blagojevich, was elected to the office; he was reelected in 2006. In 2009, however, he was impeached and removed from office because of accusations that he had sought to gain from his appointment of the U.S. senator who would succeed Barack Obama. (In 2011 he was convicted in federal courts on charges arising from the case.) Lt. Gov. Patrick J. Quinn, also a Democrat, replaced Blagojevich and won election to the office in 2010, but Quinn lost to Republican Bruce Rauner in 2014. In 2018, Democrat J. B. Pritzker was elected governor. The state legislature, called the general assembly, consists of a senate with 59 members and a house of representatives with 118 members. Illinois elects 18 representatives and 2 senators to the U.S. Congress and has 20 electoral votes.

Institutions of higher learning in Illinois include the Univ. of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign and Chicago; DePaul Univ., the Univ. of Chicago, and the Illinois Institute of Technology, at Chicago; Northwestern Univ., at Evanston; Illinois State Univ., at Normal; and Southern Illinois Univ., at Carbondale and Edwardsville.

Sections in this article:

• Introduction
• Facts and Figures
• Geography
• Economy
• Government, Politics, and Higher Education
• History
• Bibliography

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