Research
Articles
CHRISTOPHER Z. MOONEY,
University of Illinois at Springfield
Term Limits as a Boon to
Legislative Scholarship: A Review
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 generation—
legislative 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.
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