Term Limits and (The Absence of) Legislative Shirking: Experimental Evidence from the Arkansas State Senate

We study whether lame-duck status affects legislative behavior. Empirical research on this question has produced a large body of evidence suggesting legislators engage in both participatory and ideological shirking. The main problem with these analyses lies in their inability to deal with nonrandom assignment to lame-duck or term-limited status. We obviate these problems by relying on the random assignment of term length that occurred in the Arkansas state senate, which in turn induced the random assignment of term limits in 1997 and 2007. Across five measures of legislative behavior— bills introduced, co-sponsorship, bills passed, W-NOMINATE scores and abstention rates—we find no evidence that term-limited senators engage in either participatory or ideological shirking. We do not observe all senators in our original experimental sample, a challenge we address using bounds. Our results have important implications for the initiative process broadly and the effects of term limits more specifically. We thank Steve Cook, the Chief Council of the Arkansas State Senate, for providing details regarding the drawing of lots following censuses; Blake Potts at the Arkansas Legislative Digest for providing the roll-call data; the Roy Pierce Fellowship at the Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan, for financial support; Jeremy Gelman and Chuck Shipan for thoughtful comments on an earlier draft. ∗Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan afeher@umich.edu †Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Michigan titiunik@umich.edu 1 How do changes in legislative institutions that sever the electoral connection affect legislative behavior? And more specifically, how does the imposition of term limits affect the behavioral incentives of legislators? In the first Constitution of the United States, the Articles of Confederation, legislators were limited to no more than three out of every six years in office. And during the Continental Congress, Thomas Jefferson famously advocated for term limits to “prevent every danger which might arise to American freedom by continuing too long in office” (Jefferson, 1893, 61). When the subject resurfaced in the 1990s, as nearly half of the states passed term limits initiatives, conventional wisdom proved to be decidedly less sanguine on the grounds that such institutional arrangements are tailor-made for shirking. The intuition is straightforward: if the representative is certain not to have a next period due to a term limitation, nothing is lost in terms of reelection prospects by reducing one’s effort or altering one’s ideological disposition. Across different chambers, different branches and different levels of government, empirical research on the behavior of lame-ducks has consistently confirmed the aforementioned intuition, raising a host of normatively troubling questions about the prospects for accountability in representative government. Studies of governors (Besley and Case, 1995; Alt, de Mesquita and Rose, 2011), members of Congress (Rothenberg and Sanders, 2000; Herrick, Moore and Hibbing, 1994) and state legislators (Carey et al., 2006; Powell, Niemi and Smith, 2007) have all found evidence of shirking, sometimes in non-trivial ways; SarbaughThompson et al. (2004), for example, report that term-limited legislators turn their attention away from constituents and toward interest groups, currying favor by registering higher attendance at interest group-sponsored events than non-term-limited members, and Besley and Case (1995) find that term-limited governors are less proactive in responding to natural disasters. In a rare stars-aligning moment, then, there is near-unanimity among scholars concerning the hypothesized nexus between lame-duck status and shirking. And to be sure, the aforementioned studies have contributed greatly to efforts to empirically test the theoretical