The Varying Impact of Legislative Term Limits

Abstract

In recent years, interest in and support for legislative term limits has grown dramatically. Three states—Oklahoma, California and Colorado—have passed term limitations for their legislators, and similar proposals for Congress have surfaced in over a dozen other states. Leaving aside the issue of whether congressional term limits are constitutional, the central question in this debate, quite simply, is whether term limitations are a good or bad idea. The arguments in this controversy fall along two dimensions. First, there is the normative dimension concerning the role of individual legislators and the functioning of the legislature as a whole, and second, there are the empirical issues about the likely incentives and effects of term limits upon legislative behavior. For the most part, the normative side of this debate drives the empirical in the sense that people routinely project their values onto their predictions—or, to put it another way, people tend to believe what they want to believe about term limits, making progress in this debate very hard.