Term Limits, Professionalization, and Partisan Control in U.S. State Legislatures

Abstract

As states across the country have adopted term limits provisions for their state legislatures, political scientists have analyzed how mass unseatings of incumbents are affecting legislative composition, capacity, and activity. Yet this reform may impact legislatures not only directly through forced retirements, but also indirectly by changing the incentives to prospective candidates. Following hypotheses suggested by Fiorina (1994Fiorina ( , 1996, we argue that term limits have changed the incentive structure for typical Democratic candidates in some legislatures. This change in incentives has, in turn, affected the partisan composition of statehouses just as the professionalization movement affected incentives and partisan composition a generation ago. We provide quantitative evidence that supports Fiorina's conjectures about term limits, suggesting that the presence of term limits provisions even before they take effect creates an environment that is less attractive to Democratic candidates.

Legislative term limits and state spending

“…Following previous studies (see e.g., Carey et al 2000b;Johnson and Crain 2004;Meinke and Hasecke 2003;Moncrief et al 2004), a dummy variable is used to indicate if a state has implemented term limits. This variable is coded 0 before a state implements term limits and 1 beginning with the legislative session before term limits are implemented.…”

Measuring Citizen and Government Ideology in the U.S. States: A Re-appraisal

“…These ideology indicators have proven useful in analyzing the impact of public opinion or the policy preferences of elected officials on a wide variety of state policy outputs, including welfare reform (Soss et al 2001), antismoking legislation (Shipan and Volden 2006), educational allocations to local school districts (Wood and Theobald 2003), penal legislation (Langer and Brace 2005), judicial decisions (Songer and Ginn 2002), and economic regulation (Kim and Gerber 2005). The BRFH indicators of state ideology have also been employed as independent variables in studies of partisan conflict in state legislatures (Fiorina 1999;Meinke and Hasecke 2003) and cooperation between federal and state agencies in grant programs (Nicholson-Crotty 2004). 2 Both BRFH measures rely on the ideological orientations of members of Congress, operationalized by interest-group ratings compiled by the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education (COPE).…”

Term limits and the tobacco industry

“…These include changes in the composition of the legislature, the behavior of officeholders, and the distribution of power within legislatures (Apollonio & La Raja, 2006; Bernstein & Chada, 2002; Carey, Niemi, & Powell, 2000, 2006; Meinke & Hasecke, 2003; Squire, 1998). Other studies suggest that term limits redistribute power away from the legislature and toward other actors such as interest groups, state executives, and the bureaucracy (Carey, Niemi, & Powell, 1998, 2000; Moncrief, Thompson, Haddon, & Hoyer, 2001; Peery & Little, 2002).…”