How Do Electoral Incentives Affect Legislator Behavior? Evidence from U.S. State Legislatures

Abstract

A classic question about democratic elections is how much they are able to influence politician behavior by forcing them to anticipate future reelection attempts, especially in contexts where voters are not paying close attention and are not well informed. We compile a new dataset containing roughly 780,000 bills, combined with more than 16 million roll-call voting records for roughly 6,000 legislators serving in U.S. state legislatures with term limits. Using an individual-level difference-in-differences design, we find that legislators who can no longer seek reelection sponsor fewer bills, are less productive on committees, and are absent for more floor votes, on average. Building a new dataset of roll-call votes and interest-group ratings, we find little evidence that legislators who cannot run for reelection systematically shift their ideological platforms. In sum, elections appear to influence how legislators allocate their effort in important ways even in low-salience environments but may have less influence on ideological positioning.

How Does Party Discipline Affect Legislative Behavior? Evidence from Within-Session Variation in Lame Duck Status

“…Panel A of Table 2 provides 28 Fouirnaies and Hall (2022) also nd that termed-out legislators are about six percent less likely to sponsor bills. We nd no clear evidence that lame duck status impacts this bill sponsorship in our context (Appendix Figures A.12 -A.13 and Appendix Table A.5).…”

“…Several previous papers have used oor speech to measure legislator eort (e.g., Dal Bó and Rossi, 2011;Fouirnaies and Hall, 2022;Geys and Mause, 2016). Following this literature, we use a dummy variable equal to one if incumbent i speaks in parliament on a given day d in election period e to measure the extent to which politicians are engaged in the legislative process.…”

“…According to citizen-candidate models (Besley and Coate, 1997;Osborne and Slivinski, 1996), candidates have xed ideological positions that do not vary based on electoral incentives. If this is a reasonable description of the world, legislators will advocate for their preferred policies both before and after they have become lame ducks (Fouirnaies and Hall, 2022).…”

“…and thus face lower electoral incentives (i.e., cross-individual research designs). Fouirnaies and Hall (2022), however, compare the nal-term behavior of termed-out legislators to their behavior in previous terms, relative to counterfactual trends among other legislators in the same legislature (i.e. a within-individual across-terms research design).…”

“…The regression estimates of β 1 (Post) reects the small negative jump for uncontested incumbents, while the regression estimates of β 4 (PostXLoser)captures the additional eect for losers. We nd that the probability of attending roll-call votes falls with eleven percentage points for losers compared to uncontested incumbents.For comparison,Fouirnaies and Hall (2022) nds that termed-out US legislators become three percentage points more likely to be absent on oor votes in their nal term. 28 In the United Kingdom, where the role of parties is much more important than in the United States,Besley and Larcinese (2011) nd that retiring MPs are four percentage points less likely to vote in parliament.…”