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While these results are promising in their support for the claim that term limits
influence fiscal policy by altering key legislative institutions, they are far from
conclusive. As discussed above, the number of committees in a legislature gives us little
information about the powers of a committee. A better approach would be to examine
the procedural rules that committees have at their disposal to control the fate of
legislation in their jurisdiction. Such powers would include, but are not limited to, the
ability of a committee to propose and amend legislation and the degree of control that
party leaders have over a committee’s agenda.
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B. Legislative Leadership and Term Limits
This paper has also argued that the divergence in fiscal behavior between termed
and untermed states is due to how term limits constrain the actions of legislative leaders.
To evaluate this assertion, this paper examines the relationship between legislative
leadership and state fiscal policy. One way to approach this question is to see if termed
states with a history of strong legislative leaders see greater increases in spending and
decreases in tax rates after term limits than states which traditionally have had less
powerful leaders.
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A second strategy, employed here, is to examine the behavior of fiscal
policy in states with patterns of legislative leadership that resemble those currently found
in termed states. To do this, I examine fiscal policy in states where legislative leaders
serve no more than two terms in their leadership positions.
The average tenure for presiding officer in state legislatures has been steadily
increasing since the late 1960s. Prior to 1970, many state legislatures experienced
frequent rotation in their chambers’ top leadership positions. Nearly all of the presiding
Convention