Take (Her) to the Limit: Term Limits do Not Diminish Women's Overperformance in Legislative Office

• Published date: 01 August 2023
• Author: Mirya R. Holman,Anna Mitchell Mahoney
• Date: 01 August 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12406

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LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 48, 3, August 2023

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12406

MIRYA R. HOLMAN

University of Houston

ANNA MITCHELL MAHONEY

Dartmouth College

Take (Her) to the Limit: Term

Limits do Not Diminish Women’s

Overperformance in Legislative Office

Women in political office outperform men in legislative activity and con-

stituent services. Scholars have identified two potential explanations for this over-

performance: women are higher quality candidates when they run for office and

women face elevated voter expectations to win elections. We use the presence of

term limits to examine how these two justifications for women’s overperformance

produce downstream effects. While designed to strike a blow to entrenched sys-

tems of power, term limits reduce the time that legislators spend on constituent

service and legislative output, including bill sponsorship, votes, and committee

work. We use the effects of term limits as a tool for understanding the two paths

to women’s overperformance, using data on over 6000 legislators serving in term-

limited states. We find more evidence for the quality candidate hypothesis than

the voter expectations hypothesis. While term limits degrade men’s performance

in office, women officeholders continue to overperform even under this institu-

tional constraint. Our findings that women’s overperformance is more likely due

to their higher quality have implications for efforts to increase the representative-

ness of political bodies, the quality of representation in state legislatures, and the

gendered consequences of institutional reforms.

Women in legislative office outperform men in a wide

range of activities, including bill introductions or success, con-

stituent services, and committee work (Anzia and Berry 2011;

Holman, Mahoney, and Hurler 2021; Barnes2016; Eatough and

Preece 2022; Thomsen and Sanders 2020). Two potential expla-

nations for women’s overperformance are that women are of a

higher quality when they enter office (Fulton2012; Ondercin2022)

or because women face elevated voter expectations when seeking

reelection (Lazarus and Steigerwalt2018; Bauer2020b; Kaslovsky

and Rogowski 2020). While these two explanations overlap

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