Carey John M. - Term Limits in the State Legislatures

Legislative term limits, the grassroots electoral reform that swept across much of the United States in the early 1990s, began to kick in during the latter half of the decade. Entire cohorts of lawmakers were removed from office, first in California and Maine; then in Arkansas, Colorado, Michigan, Montana, and Oregon; and subsequently in eleven other states. The onset of limits raises a number of questions about their effects. Among the most pressing: Do term limits produce a new breed of state legislator? Do they alter legislators' behavior and priorities? Do they affect the balance of power among the various actors in the legislative process? Do they affect competition in the broader political system beyond state legislatures? Our summary answers to these questions are as follows: (1) less than one might expect; (2) in some ways yes, in others no; (3) yes, indeed; and (4) yes, under specific conditions. Of course, such summaries inevitably raise more questionsof the who, how, when, and why varietythan they answer. Our purpose in this book is to take the broader questions apart, articulate their logic and their implications, and provide answers to the resulting specific questions about how term limits do (and do not) affect the composition of state legislatures, legislator behavior, various institutional actors' influence on policy, and the broader system of elections.

Debate on how term limits affect state legislatures was heated from the outset, as the reform was endorsed by voters in almost half of the states and, more recently, as legislatures and individual legislators confronted the reality of mandatory termination. The movement's high-water mark was 199294, when, in the course of just two years, seventeen states passed legislation or constitutional amendments limiting the length of time that state legislators could serve, and most of these states imposed limits on their congressional representatives as well. The first major setback came in 1995, when the Supreme Court declared limits on members of Congress to be unconstitutional.because most term-limit laws exempted service prior to the date when the legislation or amendment passed. Until 1996, therefore, no one was actually prohibited from reelection.

At the decade's end, interest in term limits, if not the reform movement itself, rebounded. California's state legislative term limits were upheld by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal.

Despite sustained controversy over limits in the press, the courts, Congress and the state legislatures, and reform groups since the first ballot initiatives almost a decade ago, political scientists have only recently begun to weigh in with empirical studies that directly address the effects of term limits in the states. Most analyses of limits were, of necessity until 1996, based on extrapolations from preterm limit electoral data or from data from quite different electoral contexts. Immediately after 1996, the first studies of elections and legislative performance in the term-limits era naturally focused only on California and Maine, the first two states in which incumbents were legally proscribed from office (see, e.g., Daniel and Lott 1997; Chi 1997). This book is the first study to assess the effects of term limits on state legislatures using survey data and election results from all fifty states as well as extensive interview data with legislators in four states. We present data from a 1995 nationwide survey of more than 3,000 current and former legislators. Given that by then nearly half of the states had adopted term limits, legislators and potential legislative candidates had begun anticipating limits' effects and adapting behavior accordingly.such interviews with representative samples of legislators in all states. Instead, we drew on initial analysis of the survey data to guide follow-up interviews in 1997 with legislative party and committee leaders in four statesCalifornia, Maine, Massachusetts, and Washingtonwhere term limits either had already taken effect or were pending.

The rest of this chapter consists of four sections. The first discusses the logic of reelection-based theories of legislative behavior and organization, extending them to establish some general expectations about the effects of term limits. The second briefly reviews and critiques the academic literature on term limits, establishing the relevance and contribution of our study. The third discusses our methodology for gathering survey and interview data on term limits and provides an introduction to the terminology we employ in discussing these data, focusing on the specific units of comparison we believe are relevant in analyzing the effects of term limits. The fourth section provides an overview of the chapters that follow.