Naturally Occurring Quasi-Experiment in the States: Research on Term Limits in Michigan

Term limits provide a rare opportunity to employ pre- and post-intervention research designs to investigate the effects of turnover in legislatures. This article describes a study of term limits in Michigan that takes advantage of this opportunity. With eight states implementing term limits in 2002 or soon thereafter, there are opportunities for other scholars to replicate all or parts of the study described here. The payoffs for such projects in terms of generating systematic answers to the impacts of legislative turnover and term limits are considerable

Effect of Term Limits on the Election of Minority State Legislators

The number of minorities increased in the lower houses of the state legislatures of California, Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania during the 1990s. California and Michigan have legislative term limits; Georgia and Pennsylvania do not. Compared with California, where the number of minorities elected grew dramatically, Michigan had a much smaller increase. The increase in minority representatives in Georgia was similar to that of Michigan, but the increase in Pennsylvania was only marginal. The disparate election outcomes between term-limited California and Michigan, in conjunction with similar results in Michigan and non-term-limited Georgia, suggest that term limits help minority candidates only under certain circumstances