The Consequences of Legislative Term Limits for Policy Diffusion

• DOI: 10.1177/1065912917749891
• Date: 01 September 2018
• Published date: 01 September 2018
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912917749891

Political Research Quarterly

2018, Vol. 71(3) 573 –585

© 2018 University of Utah

Reprints and permissions:

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/1065912917749891

journals.sagepub.com/home/prq

Article

Introduction

The ways in which policy makers use the policies in other

jurisdictions to inform their own adoption choices has

been a central feature of the diffusion literature for

decades. That work has concluded that the use of policy

information approximates a continuum, with simple imi-

tation of policy choices in other states at one end and

careful replication of only effective innovations at the

other. At the heart of this literature are assumptions about

the incentives that policy makers have to gather informa-

tion about potential innovations. For example, aspirations

to be more similar to wealthier or more prominent juris-

dictions may encourage states to simply imitate the poli-

cies that they have adopted, without paying much

attention to the consequences of those policies.

Alternatively, jurisdictions concerned with avoiding pol-

icy failure, and the political costs associated with such

failure, will search for an alternative that has proven

successful elsewhere (Berry and Baybeck 2005; Shipan

and Volden 2008).

In addition to developing relatively convincing ways

to distinguish simple imitation from more sophisticated

policy learning, the scholarship on diffusion has also

attempted to understand when lawmakers will be con-

cerned with policy failure and, thus, invest the time and

resources necessary for policy learning. One of the

answers they have offered is that less professionalized

legislatures have less capacity for learning (Shipan and

Volden 2006). Very recent work also demonstrates that

individual policy makers have less incentive to learn

about policies that they are ideologically predisposed

against (Butler et al. 2017).

We engage this body of work by examining the impact

of legislative term limits, a prominent institutional fea-

ture of state governments, on lawmakers’ incentives and

capacity for policy learning. Currently, fifteen states have

legislative term limits, which were implemented between

1996 and 2010. This institutional reform was a largely a

populist reaction to concerns over “career politicians”

and, as such, was explicitly designed to shorten the actual

and electoral time horizon of lawmakers. In addition,

research suggests that legislative term limits have reduced

legislative professionalism and the capacity of that insti-

tution relative to the executive in states where they have

been implemented (Carey et al. 2006; Kousser 2005).

Drawing on these and similar observations from the

literature, we develop the theoretical rationale that term

limits will reduce the incentive and capacity of state leg-

islatures to gather information about policies available

from previous adoptions in other states. We hypothesize

that this will decrease the importance of previous adopt-

ers when term-limited legislators consider policy innova-

tions. A multilevel analysis of the diffusion of eighty-seven

749891PRQXXX10.1177/1065912917749891Political Research QuarterlyMiller et al.

research-article2018

1University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA

2Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

Corresponding Author:

Susan M. Miller, Department of Political Science, University of South

Carolina, 349 Gambrell Hall, 817 Henderson Street, Columbia, SC

29208-4114, USA.

Email: susan.miller@sc.edu

The Consequences of Legislative Term

Limits for Policy Diffusion

Susan M. Miller1, Jill Nicholson-Crotty2, and Sean Nicholson-Crotty2

Abstract

Policy diffusion scholarship has long sought to understand when lawmakers will imitate innovations adopted by other

jurisdictions and when they actually invest the time and resources necessary to learn about potential policies. We

develop the theoretical rationale that term limits will reduce the incentive and capacity of state legislatures to gather

information about policies available from previous adoptions in other states. We hypothesize that this will decrease

the importance of previous adopters when term-limited legislators consider policy innovations. A multilevel analysis

of the diffusion of eighty-seven policies between 1960 and 2009 provides support for this expectation. Our findings

provide insight into the way in which institutional features shape policy diffusion.

Keywords

policy diffusion, term limits, state politics