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Out with the Old, In with the Republicans? The Partisan Push of Legislative Term Limits
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2025
Abstract
Legislative term limits garnered public support because they promised to drain the swamp, removing entrenched incumbents from office. There is often a partisan dimension to this appeal since “the swamp” that is to be “drained” has often been controlled by one party for a lengthy period. However, it remains unclear to what extent term limits realign partisanship within US state legislatures. Using newly available turnover data, this research evaluates how legislative partisanship shifted after the implementation of term limits in state legislatures and continued over 20 years. The initial surge effects of term limits did appear to level the playing field between parties. The passage of term limits reversed party majorities in state legislatures, primarily benefiting newfound Republican majorities. These findings have important implications for current understandings of legislative term limits, as more states revisit these proposals, and provide insight into party trends at the state legislative level.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with Donald Critchlow
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65 The other nine points touched on areas other than term limits.
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70 North Dakota is excluded from the term-limit group given that they just passed term limits in 2022. California and Arkansas present unique difficulties when it comes to evaluating the long-term effects of term limits because both states have had multiple versions of term limits implemented in their legislature. The state of California was one of the very first to pass term limits, but after having them for just over a decade voters passed a new form of limit in 2012. So, just as California had reached a point where trends could be evaluated they started all over with an entirely new type of limit. Arkansas has a similar background, but as of the 2020 election is now on its third version of term limits. The changes made to these term limit laws not only altered the number of years that a member could serve but also the restrictions on a member’s ability to return to the legislature.
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73 Recall, each state has its own “impact” date and therefore moves through the stages of term limits separately, there were either little or no observations for those states missing in the equilibrium stage.
74 The impact date is the year that term limits remove lawmakers, even though they have been in effect for six years or more.
75 Setting an artificial impact date for states without term limits allows the term limit trends to be parsed from national party trends. 2002 is the ideal point, given that is the average time of implementation for states with term limits.
76 The Holbrook and Van Dunk index (HVD) is a nonpartisan measure of the average percentage of votes received by the winner, the average margin of victory, the percentage of uncontested seats, and the percentage of safe seats. A higher number indicates greater competition and a lower number indicates less competition. This updated measure is from Jordan Butcher, “Parties and Professionals: An Exploration of Turnover in US state legislatures,” The Journal of Legislative Studies (2023), https://doi.org/10.1080/13572334.2023.2225255.
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79 Career opportunities are measured using the “Lower House Advancement Prospect Scores” from (Squire & Moncrief, 2010). This measure ranges from 0 (less opportunity) to 1 (greater opportunity)
80 Although I acknowledge the importance of distinguishing between the four different types of term limits, the theoretical question here is about the existence of term limits on partisanship, not how different term limits alter partisanship.
81 Although the data is time series panel data, given that time is the variable of interest it is not accounted for in the model selection. Including year-fixed effects in the model would lead to multicollinearity issues with the main independent variables. An alternative model of a time series regression was tested, the Hausman test revealed that the random effects model was a poor fit but a fixed effects model dropped out three control variables. Thus, the OLS regression with the time indicators is the model of best fit.
82 One alternative explanation for the shift in seat share would be redistricting, which is tested using a variable to indicate new electoral maps using data from Justin Levitt’s All About Redistricting. The redistricting data only goes back to 2000; however, the electoral map variable was insignificant in both models. See the Appendix, Table A2. A secondary explanation is that party polarization drives part of this relationship, whereas polarization is important it is endogenous to party and presents issues of multicollinearity with a number of the other explanatory variables. For those interested, such a model is presented in the Appendix, Table A3
83 Carey, Niemi, and Powell, Term limits in State Legislatures.
84 Butcher, Navigating Term Limits: The Careers of State Legislators.
85 Butcher, Navigating Term Limits: The Careers of State Legislators.
86 Given that so few states have met equilibrium, this analysis is limited to the 12 states that have had their term limits in place the longest, this excludes Arkansas, California, and Nevada. The five states without term limits are New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, Texas, and Wyoming. These five states are similar to the term-limited states in professionalization, career opportunities, term length, and size.
87 For this analysis, I focus on these three components because they are all decisions that a lawmaker is able to make for herself but can be influenced by the support of the institution and the party. Terming out of office is intentionally excluded from this examination because it is not a choice of a member and can only occur in those states with term limits.
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89 The logit models that the probabilities are based on can be found in the Appendix, Table A4.
90 Professionalization is .22 and career opportunities are .28. Each of the values selected for this particular examination are representative of the average member serving in this sample of states.
91 C-SPAN, “National Civic League Panel on Congressional Term Limits.”