Term Limits and Legislative Productivity

Term Limits and Legislative Capacity

One concern with term limits is that they may reduce legislative capacity - the ability of elected officials to identify voters’ needs, draft proposals to address them, and oversee bureaucratic implementation of a bill once enacted. On the other hand, proponents of term limits often argue that term limits will increase productivity, as legislators have a shorter time to achieve their legislative goals, among other factors.

In making this specific comparison, it is important to also account for what scholars label legislative professionalism: the length of state legislative sessions, whether serving in the legislature is a full-time or part-time job, and the number of staff available to assist legislators in their work. Some states, like California, have fully professionalized legislatures similar to Congress. Others, like Vermont, have Nonprofessional legislatures that meet for short sessions with low salaries and few staff. The distinction matters because professionalized legislators are generally expected to be more productive than nonprofessionalized chambers.

The table below uses data from the National Conference of State Legislatures to divide America’s 50 state legislatures on two dimensions: whether they have term limits, and how professional they are (professional, hybrid, or nonprofessional).

One important finding from this table is that there is a mix of cases: some professionalized legislatures have term limits, while others do not.

To examine the impact of term limits on legislative productivity, we use data from the Center for Legislative Effectiveness on two dimensions: the number of substantive bills sponsored by each legislator each year and the number ultimately enacted into law.

Sponsoring a bill is a low-cost means for a legislator to signal constituents what topics the legislator supports. Sponsoring is particularly useful for someone seeking reelection who can point to sponsored bills as part of their track record. Because a term-limited legislator cannot run indefinitely, there is less incentive for them to sponsor a slew of bills.

The table above confirms one of these observations — across legislative types and chambers, legislators in term-limited states sponsor significantly fewer bills per legislator-term than those in states without term limits. Although sponsoring a large list of bills signals to a legislature's constituents what initiatives, causes and policies they care about and support, until a law is enacted, there is often little material impact from such efforts (outside of bringing awareness).  Next, we consider whether term-limited states are more productive in passing substantive legislation than non-term-limited states.

The table shows that term limits increase productivity in Professional and Hybrid legislatures, but decrease productivity in Nonprofessional legislatures. Professional and Hybrid legislatures usually have more significant staff and resources to support legislators, which becomes a bigger factor in a term-limited state, where the Nonprofessional legislator may have greater difficulty navigating the political landscape without the additional years of experience and time in office. Nonprofessional legislatures also typically lack the resources to support less experienced legislators, which ultimately impacts effectiveness in both chambers when term limits are in place.

Another explanation for the difference above is that legislative staff is more important in term-limited legislatures to the extent that the staff in many cases actually ‘runs the show’ rather than the elected legislators. Without term limits, however, that same staff isn’t able to influence legislators with extensive experience, leading to fewer bills passing.

So far, we have only looked across states. To look at  the impact of term limits on productivity from a different lens, we next examine those states that have enacted term limits and compare their productivity before and after implementation.

Although the data is somewhat limited, legislatures that implement term limits appear to have become less productive in terms of bills being passed after term limits were enacted than they were before, regardless of professionalization.

The Take-Away

Almost half of the states have implemented term limits in their legislatures over the past 35 years.

Implementing term limits increases productivity in Professional and Hybrid legislatures but decreases productivity in Nonprofessional legislatures.

Scholarly evidence points to term limits increasing the influence of professional staff and interest groups, but also to increasingly competitive elections.