The wisdom of term limits and professional politics has been debated since the time of Aristotle, spurring "reforms" of legislatures in Athens, Rome, Venice, and the United States under the Articles of Confederation. This book examines recent trends in American states to investigate the age-old question of how the rules that govern a legislature affect the behavior of its members and the policies that it produces. The clear and consistent finding is that the two reforms have countervailing effects: Whatever professionalization has brought more of, term limits have reduced. This lesson comes from quantitative analyses of data from all fifty states and detailed examinations of legislative records from six states, informed by interviews with more than one hundred legislators, staff assistants, lobbyists, journalists, and executive officials. Thad Kousser joined the University of California at San Diego faculty in 2003 after receiving his Ph.D. in 2002 from the University of California at Berkeley. He has previously worked as a legislative aide and committee consultant in the California State Senate and more recently as an aide to Senator Ron Wyden through the APSA Congressional Fellowship. His publications include work on term limits, reapportionment, campaign finance laws, the blanket primary, health care policy, and European Parliament elections. This book is based on his dissertation, which won the APSA's William Anderson Prize in 2003.

This paper examines how the growth in vote-by-mail and changes in voting technologies led to changes in the residual vote rate in California from 1990 to 2010. We find that in California's presidential elections, counties that abandoned punch cards in favor of optical scanning enjoyed a significant improvement in the residual vote rate. However, these findings do not always translate to other races. For instance, find that the InkaVote system in Los Angeles has been a mixed success, performing very well in presidential and gubernatorial races, fairly well for ballot propositions, and poorly in Senate races. We also conduct the first analysis of the effects of the rise of vote-by-mail on residual votes. Regardless of the race, increased use of the mails to cast ballots is robustly associated with a rise in the residual vote rate. The effect is so strong that the rise of voting by mail in California has mostly wiped out all the reductions in residual votes that were due to improved voting technologies since the early 1990s. A decade ago, the nation became aware that voting machines are not simple ciphers through which voters cast their ballots. Palm Beach County, Florida provided the best illustration of how machine malfunction-exemplified by "hanging" and "pregnant" chad-and poor ballot design-exemplified by the "butterfly ballot"-could result in a vote being miscounted, if counted at all (e.g., Sinclair et al. 2000; Smith 2002; Wand et al. 2001). The Florida fiasco resulted in a strong public demand for improved voting technology, and led to a flurry of new research into the causes of "lost votes" due to voting technologies. 1 Within political science, this research has focused on explaining the residual vote rate in presidential elections as a function of the type of voting technology used by voters. (The residual vote rate is the percentage of ballots cast that either contain an over-or undervote for a particular race.) Making this research particularly important was the simultaneous emergence of public demand for improved voting technology to reduce the residual vote rate. This was made explicit by the Help America Vote Act which mandated retirement of older technologies and resulted in billions of state and federal dollars being spent to retire old voting machines.

With limited authority over state lawmaking, but ultimate responsibility for the performance of government, how effective are governors in moving their programs through the legislature? This book advances a new theory about what makes chief executives most successful and explores this theory through original data. Thad Kousser and Justin H. Phillips argue that negotiations over the budget, on the one hand, and policy bills on the other are driven by fundamentally different dynamics. They capture these dynamics in models informed by interviews with gubernatorial advisors, cabinet members, press secretaries and governors themselves. Through a series of novel empirical analyses and rich case studies, the authors demonstrate that governors can be powerful actors in the lawmaking process, but that what they're bargaining over – the budget or policy – shapes both how they play the game and how often they can win it.

Can voters stop state governments from spending at high rates through the enactment of tax and expenditure limits (TELs), or do these laws become dead letters? We draw upon the principal-agent literature to theorize that TELs -one of the most frequent uses of the initiative process across the country -may be circumvented by the sorts of elected officials who would inspire their passage.In order to investigate our claim, we conduct an event study. First, we test for the effectiveness of TELs across states using a differences-in-differences model. Second, we dissect our treatment variable using different legal provisions of the limits to test whether there is a uniform effect across different types of TELs. Finally, we compare state fiscal patterns before and after adoption on a state-by-state basis. Using this simple approach and other methods, we show that TELs are largely ineffective, and that state officials can circumvent them by raising money through fees or borrowing. Our finding is consistent with recent studies showing that policies passed through direct democracy can often be thwarted by the politicians charged with implementing them.

When do lawmakers craft broad policies, and when do they focus on narrow legislation tailored to a local interest? We investigate this question by exploring historical variation in the types of bills produced by American state legislatures. Drawing on a new database of 165,000 bills—covering sessions over 120 years in thirteen different states—we demonstrate the surprising prominence of particularistic bills affecting a specific legislator's district. We then develop and test a theory linking the goals of legislators to their propensity to introduce district bills rather than broad legislation. We find that, consistent with our predictions, politicians are more likely to craft policies targeted to a particular local interest when a legislature is dominated by one party or when it pays its members relatively high salaries. These findings provide empirical support for Key's (1949) thesis that one-party politics descends into factionalism and undermines the making of broad public policy.