Stanley Malcolm Caress - Term Limits and Their Consequences: The Aftermath of Legislative Reform

On the surface term limits may seem like only a small change in the way legislators gain and retain office. Term limits, technically, only restrict the number of times an incumbent can be reelected and place no further regulations on how legislators seek office. However, while term limits appear to affect only a limited number of incumbent politicians, their impact on the political system has been far-reaching. Restricting incumbent legislator tenure has completely reshaped governmental power in the states that have adopted term limits. Term limits, by changing election rules, have altered the selection of the people who make laws, and thus they have had a major influence on public policy. They have dramatically changed the composition of legislative bodies and impacted the authority of the individuals who lead them. They have altered the way legislatures function, and even, in some cases, changed the balance of power between the legislative chambers and the executive branch. Term limits, therefore, need to be studied because their impact has been so significant.

Additionally, in a more academic sense, studying term limits helps further an understanding of the role of popular political movements in the governmental process. Examining term limits and the politics that surround them helps answer the question of why a seemingly innocuous electoral modification provided the impetus for so much grassroots activism. It also helps explain why they generated such contentious debate between advocates and opponents. Several questions with major ramifications that need to be examined include: Why did restricting the years that elected lawmakers can serve in office become such a major concern for so many political activists? Why did term limits prove to be so popular with the voting public? How could this seemingly minor electoral technicality generate so much passion both inside and outside government? The answers to these questions are far from simple, and are themselves a subject for debate.

The final most important goal of a study of term limits is to discover their real impact on American government so that scholars and citizens in the future can render judgment on their effectiveness and desirability. This book discusses the early predictions about term limits and explores the evidence to see which ones turned out to be true. Only after a comprehensive examination will it become clearer whether the claims of term limit supporters were more valid than the rival contentions of their opponents.

In the decade and a half since the beginning of their adoption, the methods used to examine term limits and their consequences have gone through a complete evolution. The original debate surrounding term limits contained more political rhetoric than academic study. Term limit advocates and opponents could only conjecture about the ramifications of changing the rules of legislative elections because of the absence of any systematic scholarly inquiry. To compensate for the lack of credible scholarship on the impact of term limits, some preliminary academic studies conducted in the early 1990s attempted to project the impact of term limits by using data from non-term-limited legislative bodies. These early projections, however, were limited by a lack of substantive evidence necessary for valid analysis. The type of evidence needed could only be collected after term limits were fully implemented and their impact felt. Such data only started becoming available in 1996, when the first forced retirements began to occur. From this point on academic interest in the subject expanded rapidly, and numerous studies that used a variety of approaches were conducted. Definitive conclusions about the consequences of term limits, however, remain elusive because their full impact has not been completely realized even after nearly two decades, especially in states that have more generous limits ().