Go to next abstractrichard j. powell
The Impact of Term
Limits on the Candidacy Decisions
of State Legislators in U.S. House Elections
Legislative Studies Quarterly
XXV:645-61
This study investigates the hypothesis that term limits at the state
level increase electoral competition for seats in the U.S. House. With a
greater number of ambitious state legislators being unwillingly turned out of
office, we can expect that those individuals interested in legislative careers
will increasingly turn their attention to Congress. In order to assess whether or not state legislators are more likely to
run for Congress in states with legislative term limits, I specified and tested
logistic regression models. The models were derived from our prior knowledge
of the behavior of strategic politicians and included control variables for
theoretically important national- and district-level factors. The
results presented in this study provide support for the hypothesis that state
legislators are more likely to run for the House in states with legislative term
limits.