Fired? Or Firing Up? How Term Limits Affect Career Politicians
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15763/issn.2374-7781.2007.28.0.57-77Abstract
Customarily professional legislators are thought to behave more strategically than other legislators in their quest for higher office (Canon 1990; Jacobson and Kernell 1983). The implementation of term limits upsets all the traditional career parameters by restructuring the incentives to remain in political office. For this reason, we posit the following questions: how much difference does a legislature’s level of professionalism make in how members respond to term limits? How do term limits affect legislators’ responsiveness to available opportunities and willingness to take risks to continue their careers? We use a comparative case study approach and pooled cross-sectional data to analyze individual career decisions of legislators in seven states with varying levels of professionalism and term limit laws from 1992-2002. Using multinomial logit, we find that decisions to seek other offices in response to term limits are highly contingent on a state’s level of professionalization.References
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