Be Careful what You Count: Updating Legislative Turnover in the 50 States

• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X221082319
• Date: 01 July 2022
• Published date: 01 July 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2022, Vol. 50(4) 503–510

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X221082319

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Be Careful what You Count: Updating

Legislative Turnover in the 50 States

Jordan Butcher

1



Abstract

Legislative turnover is indicative of political careerism, district competitiveness, and the strength of the incumbency advantage.

Although there are many examinations of legislative turnover in U.S. state legislatures, there has not been an update in nearly

2 decades. One limitation of the existing turnover measures is the inability to distinguish between naturally occurring turnover

and the artif‌icial turnover caused by term limits. In this research note, I present an update to legislative turnover from 2002 to

2018 and discuss the importance of using updated data, as well as avenues for future research.

Keywords

state politics, legislative politics, legislative turnover, data measurement, term limits

Turnover is inf‌luenced by a number of different factors in-

cluding institutional rules and electoral restrictions (François

& Grossman, 2015;Matland & Studlar, 2004;Maestas, 2000;

Rosenthal, 1974;Shin and Jackson III, 1979), and is used to

assess phenomena including electoral stability and legislative

capacity (Moncrief & Thompson, 2001;Uppal & Glazer,

2015;Woods & Baranowski, 2006). More recent research

utilizes turnover levels to help understand gender and mi-

nority representation within the legislature (Arceneaux, 2001;

Darcy & Choike, 1986;Reingold, 2012,2019). Turnover is

associated with legislative careerism (Habel, 2008;Moncrief

et al., 2004), legislative behavior (Kerby & Blidook, 2011;

Kirkland, 2014;Uppal & Glazer, 2015), and even has ties to

democratic legitimacy (François & Grossman, 2015). Mea-

sures of turnover are also routinely used as a control in studies

of the state legislature where turnover is not the primary

interest (Maestas, 2000;Makse, 2019;Melusky, 2018;

Stonecash, 1999;Shay, 2020).

Legislative turnover is typically a measure of the number

of seats vacated each year or session. The turnover measure

presented by Moncrief et al. (2004) is commonly used by

scholars to examine the causes and effects of turnover, but the

data end in 2002. Since the implementation of term limits in

15 states, this measure turnover is no longer representative of

what is occurring in the legislature. In this research note, I

update legislative turnover from 2002 through the 2018

election. I present two different measures of turnover, one

which takes into account the artif‌icial turnover caused by term

limits. In addition to presenting the average rate of turnover

for all 50 states, yearly data will be made publicly available. I

discuss the use of each measure of turnover and present a brief

replication analysis before discussing avenues for future

research.

Updating Turnover

Given the ever-changing dynamics in state politics, it is im-

portant to understandhow many long-held truths hold up over

time. It would be misleading to continue to fall in line with

early research on turnover from Rosenthal (1974),Shin and

Jackson III (1979),Niemi and Winsky (1987),Fett & Ponder

(1993) the f‌irst of which is nearly50 years out of date. Table 1

lists some of the key studies where turnover is of primary

interest, including studies where the motivation was to assess

legislative turnoverand the changes that have occurred. Many

of these studies buildfrom each other. For example, Niemi and

Winsky (1987) add data to what was originally compiled by

Shin and Jackson III (1979).Similarly,Krupnikov and Shipan

(2020) and Uppal and Glazer (2015) use data from Moncrief

et al. (2004) and Moncrief et al. (2008), respectively. Even

though there have been recent examinations of legislative

turnover, the data remain out of date.

In order to demonstrate the differences that have occurred

in legislative turnover across time, Table 2 compares the

2002–2018 update to the data from Moncrief et al. (2004).

1

Political Science, Arkansas State University, Arkansas, AR, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jordan Butcher, Political Science, Arkansas State University, P.O. Box 1750,

Arkansas, AR 72467, USA.

Email: jbutcher@astate.edu