Abstract
Though legislative term limits have been adopted in several states, in no state have they yet caused turnover. Data are therefore not available to evaluate the effects of term limits. What we can now do is to present informed speculation, supported where possible by data from other areas, about the effects of term limits. One purpose of such speculation is to give some guidance to voters. Another, scientific purpose, is to suggest hypotheses that can be tested in later years. Though for expository purposes we speak of the advantages of term limits, our primary purpose is the second—to provide testable propositions about the effects of term limits. Other papers in this volume also offer predictions about the effect of term limits; thus, for example, Cohen and Spitzer inquire into the intertemporal policy preferences of legislators subject to term limits, Gerber and Lupia examine the responsiveness of legislators to their constituents, and Reed and Schansberg explore the possible effects of term limits on partisan balance. Our focus in this paper is quite different—how will term limits affect the incentives of legislators to legislate.
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Endnotes
Olson (1965) argues that small benefits distributed across large groups will do little to induce beneficiaries to organize on behalf of such benefits (i.e., to support the politician who produced the benefits). It is not strictly necessary to assume that politicians reap no benefits from expending effort on public interest legislation—only that the benefits do not exceed the effort costs.
The model extends the one in Glazer and McMillan (1992).
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© 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Glazer, A., Wattenberg, M.P. (1996). How Will Term Limits Affect Legislative Work?. In: Grofman, B. (eds) Legislative Term Limits: Public Choice Perspectives. Studies in Public Choice, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1812-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1812-2_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-7307-3
Online ISBN: 978-94-009-1812-2
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