Abstract
Across the country, support for legislative term limits appears to be widespread and deeply held. To date, voters in 14 states have voted to limit the number of terms that their members of Congress can serve. In addition, voters in four states have passed legislation to limit the terms of their state legislators.
We thank Gary Jacobson, Mathew McCubbins and Rebecca Morton for helpful comments.
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Endnotes
Petracca (1991a, b) uses this type of argument to conclude that term limits will produce legislators who are more responsive to their constituents’ preferences. Similarly, Will (1992) uses this type of argument to conclude that term limits will make legislators more responsive to (a paternalistic notion of) the public interest.
Theories that are suggestive of non-electoral means of increasing responsiveness include Shepsle and Weingast (1981) and McCubbins, Noll and Weingast (1987).
For example, incumbents may be responding to interest group or party leadership pressures, or other subsets of the electorate. See Lowi (1979) and Cox and McCubbins (1993) for contrasting perspectives on this matter.
See Lupia (1992) and Gerber and Lupia (1993).
See Spence (1973); Crawford and Sobel (1982); Gilligan and Krehbiel (1987, 1989); Grofman and Norrander (1990); Krehbiel (1991); Lupia (1992); Austen-Smith (1993) and Lupia and McCubbins (1994) for examples.
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© 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Gerber, E.R., Lupia, A. (1996). Term Limits, Responsiveness and the Failures of Increased Competition. 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_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1812-2_6
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