Legislative term limits and state spending

Erler, H. Abbie

doi:10.1007/s11127-007-9209-2

Cited by 51 publications

(81 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…This coincides with other empirical evidence of varying effects from different types of term limits (Erler 2007). The adjusted measure in the model increased the coefficient for term-limitedness by more than two units.…”

supporting

confidence: 88%

Measuring “Term Limitedness” in U.S. Multi-State Research

Sarbaugh-Thompson¹

2010

State Politics Policy Q.

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By measuring U.S. term limits dichotomously, investigators ignore the vast differences among laws limiting state legislative service. Furthermore, this measurement problem increases the risk of false negatives and confounds the effects of term limits with those of the citizen initiative. To address this, I propose two sets of continuous measures of term-limitedness. The first set compares mandated turnover after term limits to turnover in the 1980s, the decade before term limits began sweeping elected officials from office. A second set adjusts the first set to reflect the potential for legislators to cycle repeatedly between legislative chambers when only their consecutive years of service are limited. These continuous measures outperformed a dichotomous designation of term limits in two tests, suggesting that the proposed measures can reduce the risk of false negatives about term limits in U.S. multi-state research and that they are more robust in the face of confounding effects from the citizen initiative.

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supporting

confidence: 88%

Measuring “Term Limitedness” in U.S. Multi-State Research

Sarbaugh-Thompson¹

2010

State Politics Policy Q.

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“…• relationships within the legislature (Sarbaugh- Thompson et al 2006), • roll-call voting (Wright 2007;Southwell, Lindgren, and Smith 2004), • legislative committees (Cain and Wright 2007) and leadership (Apollonio and LaRaja 2006;Peery and Little 2003;Kousser 2003), • bicameralism (Moen, Palmer, and Powell 2005;Sarbaugh-Thompson et al 2004;DePalo 2008), • public policy (Herron and Shotts 2006;Kousser 2005;Erler 2007;Bernhardt, Dubey, and Hughson 2004), and • a legislature's relationships with lobbyists (Mooney 2007a;Gordon and Unmack 2003;Garrett 1996), the executive branch (Moncrief and Thompson 2001;Kousser and Straayer 2007) and its constituents (Powell, Niemi, and Smith 2007).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Term Limits as a Boon to Legislative Scholarship: A Review

Mooney

2009

State Politics Policy Q.

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After an exceptionally swift reform movement in the 1990s, 15 states are now adjusting to the most significant institutional change to their governments in a generationlegislative term limits. Beyond the basic task of identifying and cataloguing their various substantive impacts, term limits have presented scholars with an exceptional opportunity to test legislative theory for two reasons. First, most legislative theory is based on behavioral assumptions that term limits appear to affect systematically, such as the reelection motivation. Second, the distribution of term limits across the states gives scholars exceptional methodological advantages for testing theory. In this article, I review the scholarly literature on the impacts of state legislative term limits, describe their theoretically relevant implications and methodological advantages, and advocate using the reform to develop an important research agenda.u.s. state legislative term limits are a once-in-a-generation endowment to scholars of American-style, bicameral, transformative legislatures. As "the most significant change to the legislative institution since the modernization movement of the 1960s and 1970s" (Moen, Palmer, and Powell 2005, 2), the evaluation of the reform's substantive effects has kept certain scholars busy for the past decade and a half. 1 Term limits have been shown or hypothesized to have an extraordinarily wide range of impacts, including effects on:• candidate decisionmaking (

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“…See the Appendix for data sources. 13 See also Erler (2007) for a summary on the relationship between tenure in office and public spending.…”

Section: Econometric Specification and Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The relationship between time in office and economic outcomes has been explored in a variety of articles such as Besley and Case (1995), Erler (2007), López (2003), and Reed et al (1998), among others, but always in a context of term limits. A few papers have documented the negative effect of a lack of political competitors on different economic indicators (Ashworth et al 2007; Bardhan and Yang 2004;Besley et al 2005).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%