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Term limits on legislators were adopted in 21 states during the early 1990s. Beginning in 1996, the limits legally barred incumbents from reelection in 11 states, and they will do so in four more by 2010. In 2002, we conducted the only survey of legislators in all 50 states aimed at assessing the impact of term limits on state legislative representation. We found that term limits have virtually no effect on the types of people elected to office—whether measured by a range of demographic characteristics or by ideological predisposition—but they do have measurable impact on certain behaviors and priorities reported by legislators in the survey, and on the balance of power among various institutional actors in the arena of state politics. We characterize the biggest impact on behavior and priorities as a “Burkean shift,” whereby term-limited legislators become less beholden to the constituents in their geographical districts and more attentive to other concerns. The reform also increases the power of the executive branch (governors and the bureaucracy) over legislative outcomes and weakens the influence of majority party leaders and committee chairs, albeit for different reasons

We build on work estimating and explaining the incumbency advantage in state legislative elections. Our work makes advances in three ways. First, our model measures the effect of incumbency on the probability of reelection, rather than on candidate vote share or margin of victory. Second, we accommodate both multimember district (MMD) elections that are excluded from most previous studies and uncontested and partially contested (MMD) races. Third, we use an improved method of controlling for the underlying partisan makeup of districts. We calculate incumbency advantage using data from elections in 96 legislative chambers across 49 states in the 1992-1994 electoral cycle. We then model relative incumbency advantage across the states as a function of institutional characteristics. We find that district type, term length, and electoral formula have substantial effects on incumbent safety; incumbents in multimember post and free-for-all districts are more vulnerable than those in traditional SMDs, as are those with four-year, rather than two-year, terms. Professionalization also affects incumbency safety, and salary rather than other resources best accounts for incumbency advantage.How much does incumbency improve electoral prospects for state legislators, and why? In the last 10 years, following earlier work on U.S. congressional elections, students of state legislatures have made substantial progress in estimating and explaining the extent to which incumbency augments the vote shares of state legislators who run for reelection. In this paper, we build on these advances in three important ways. First, we offer a model to estimate and explain the effect of incumbency on the probability of reelection, rather than on

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Increases in legislative professionalization along with the implementation of term limits in about one-third of the American states raise significant questions about the path of state house and senate turnover. We first update turnover figures for all states, by chamber, from the mid-1980s through 2002. We then compare turnover rates in states with and without term limits. We find that turnover rates, overall, continued to decline through the 1980s but that the long downward trend abated in the 1990s as a result of term limits. The effects of term limits vary depending on the length of the term limit and the opportunity structure in the state. There is also a strong relationship between the presence of term limits and interchamber movement. In addition to term limits, professionalization levels, redistricting, the presence of multi-member districts, and partisan swings explain differences in turnover rates between states