Coping with Term Limits

by Karl Kurtz

The release of our study on the effects of term limits, Coping with Term Limits, two weeks ago has drawn considerable press, including an editorial in today's USA Today, Let Voters Decide.  Most of the coverage has been straightforward and fair, largely based on our press release and occasionally including an opposing point of view or a comment by a term limits expert in the state where the story appeared.

Two of the reports on the study--the opposing point of view in USA Today by Paul Farago, spokesman for Restoring Oregon's Term Limits, and by Tennessee blogger billhobbs.com--though, have accused NCSL of being "a trade association for incumbents" (Farago) and therefore unreliable on this subject and of overstating our case that term limits have not resulted in greater representation for minorities and women.  I want to clarify the record on both of these points.

Our purpose in conducting the study was not to argue for or against term limits but rather to assess their impact on legislatures more than a decade after they first appeared on the scene.  Our bias, shared by our partner organizations on the Joint Project on Term Limits--the Council of State Governments and the State Legislative Leaders Foundation--is in favor of strong legislatures and an effective system of representative democracy.  If we had found that term limits strengthened legislatures or made them more effective, we would have reported such facts.  Moreover, an unbiased group of a dozen academic political scientists helped us design and conduct the project.

On the subject of the representation of women and minorities it is important to note that  Coping with Term Limits is a 33-page summary of a much longer book, Institutional Change in American Politics: The Case of Term Limits, to be published in 2007 by the University of Michigan Press, and our press release was a 2-page summary of the summary.  As we condensed this information, it was sometimes difficult to impart the subtlety, nuance and appropriate qualifications of our findings that are contained in the full-length manuscript.

The original chapter on the composition of legislatures covering the subject of women and minorities was written by political scientists Gary Moncrief of Boise State University, Lynda Powell of the University of Rochester, and Tim Storey of NCSL.  In an effort to clarify our findings and to provide other source material that readers can go to, excerpts from their chapter, "Composition of Legislatures," in the full-length book are included below the jump.

On women:

Based on analysis of the national survey, Carey, Niemi, Powell, and Moncrief (2006, 115) found that the number of women elected had increased slightly in both term-limited and non-term-limited states during the time period under study.  However, after controlling for systemic variables, they conclude that “while the overall prospects for women candidates have improved over time, we are unable to attribute any part of this change to the extraordinary opening up of legislative seats that occurred as term limits took effect.”  In other words, there is no evidence that term limits have actually led to an increase in the number of women serving.

On minorities:

There were a few early analyses...predicting little change in racial/ethnic diversity due to the imposition of term limits.  The premise was that since most minorities are elected in relatively safe majority-minority districts, term limits would not open up many new seats except those in which white incumbents had held the seat for a long time in districts that had changed demographically over time.  Where this condition held, there were some significant gains in a few specific states.  For example, the number of Latino legislators in California and African-American legislators in Michigan did increase after term limits went into effect (Caress et al. 2003).  The same is true, to a lesser extent, in Arizona (Latinos) and Arkansas (African-Americans).  But on the whole, these are isolated events, and in some cases may be more due to redistricting than to term limits (Berman 2004, 2; Caress et al. 2003).

As Cain and Kousser (2004, 10) note in their analysis of California, “minorities have been elected to office more frequently, resulting in an increasingly diverse Legislature.  Some of this transformation can be attributed to term limits, yet we also find that much of the diversification resulted from other trends that term limits merely accelerated.”   The key word here is “accelerated.”  In a few states, like California, term limits provided the accelerating impetus for trends that were already at work, like the demographic shifts in the population in the Golden State.  As incumbents (often Anglo incumbents) were no longer able to run for office, statewide demographic trends could now be reflected through open-seat legislative elections.  But for most states, such demographic representation was not significantly lagging behind prior to the imposition of term limits, and thus term limits did not appreciably alter the demographic mix in the legislature.  A typical case is Colorado.  As John Straayer (2004, 11), notes “Ethnic diversity in Colorado’s General Assembly was minimal before term limits, and it is minimal today.  So in this respect, term limits appear to be irrelevant.”  Overall, therefore, Carey et al. (2006, 115), find “no systematic differences between legislators from term-limited and non-term-limited states” in terms of the increase in racial or ethnic minorities.  This is a conclusion supported by almost all the cases studies conducted by the JPTL.

 

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