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How the Financial Crisis is Reshaping Democratic Politics: Term Limits Reconsidered (written with Elizabeth Garrett)

By Jack M. Balkin

The financial crisis is already reshaping electoral politics even in the short term. The crisis appears to have transformed the presidential race, with Sen. Obama apparently moving ahead substantially during the last two weeks, at least for now, directly as a result. Now, we are seeing another consequence: the crisis appears to be the final catalyst in the decision of New York?s Mayor Bloomberg to attempt to seek a third term in office and to get the city to modify the term-limits law that would otherwise prohibit him from doing so. Although Mayor Bloomberg has been contemplating this action for some time, the crisis is suddenly providing enough support from those who had been principal proponents of the term-limit law (such as Ronald Lauder) to conclude that the times require modifying the law. The seriousness of the current economic situation is thus prompting a re-assessment of thought about how to organize government. Mayor Bloomberg is betting that voters will now prefer the values of stability and experience over the desire for fresh blood, turnover, and change that characterized the term limit movements of the 1990s.

With respect to the specific issue of term limits, then, this is a good time to take stock of what we have learned from the last decade?s experience. A term-limits movement swept the country in the early 1990s, when 21 states adopted term limits for state legislators. Some local governments, including New York City, rode this wave. In a 1993 referendum, voters changed the New York City Charter to bar officials, including the mayor, from serving more than eight consecutive years. One of the primary goals, according to the new Charter, was the return of ?citizen representatives? who would be responsive to the ?needs of the people and not career politicians.?

One conclusion is clear: term limits have not ushered in the era of the citizen-politician, the romantic figure who would serve in government briefly, then return to private life. Instead, politics is now a game of musical chairs played by political careerists, not amateurs, who move from office to office. These careerists are more likely to be women or under-represented minorities than before, but term limits only accelerated changes that were inevitable in light of demographic shifts. Regardless of their gender or background, term-limited officials are still ambitious politicians who hope to move from local to state to federal government over the course of a long career.

Knowing that they will have to move to different jobs in just a few years affects the way term-limited politicians approach their current jobs. Term-limited officials are particularly eager to single themselves out immediately to ensure they have a brand name when they have to run as a newcomer for a different office. Thus, term-limited legislators push to enact laws quickly; they are unwilling to spend their early years learning the ropes; and they are impatient with time-consuming negotiation and compromise necessary to craft comprehensive and considered reform. As political scientists Thad Kousser and Bruce Cain found in their study of the California legislature under term limits, ?[n]ew legislators must learn faster, take more responsibility sooner, and operate with fewer personal relationships than legislators in the past.?

One area profoundly affected by legislative term limits has been the budget process. Constructing the budget of a large city or a state is a complicated matter of both substance and political give-and-take. Success requires compromise within the legislature and between the legislative and executive branches. Term-limited officials lack the time to develop either the expertise or the connections to other political actors that budgeting demands. Moreover, a shortened time horizon feeds the tendency of politicians to cope with fiscal challenges with short-term fixes rather than structural change.

On the other hand, one potentially beneficial change in legislative behavior is that term-limited legislators may spend less time working to secure pork for their constituents, particularly toward the end of their terms in a particular office. Instead, legislators spend that time in ?position-taking and legislative showboating? designed to position them for their next political office, according to a study by Professors Carey, Niemi and Powell. It?s not clear that voters are more enthusiastic about this legislative behavior than they were about pork-barrel politics.

In short, the consensus view is that while the disasters some opponents of term limits predicted have not occurred, there is little evidence of improved policymaking. Term limits exacerbate some of the pathologies of the political process, such as overly quick policy responses and insufficient deliberation on difficult problems, as well as discourage politicians from considering long time horizons when evaluating policy. There may be new faces and renewed energy in institutions with term limits, but that seems to come at the cost of effectiveness and a transfer of power to more experienced lobbyists and staffers. In the 2000s, two states repealed the term-limit laws they had adopted a decade earlier. Four state supreme courts held their states? term limits unconstitutional. No new state term limits have been adopted since 2000.

The studies have focused on term limits for legislators. But it seems fair to conclude that executives limited to one or two terms will also have less time to develop policy and procedural expertise. New executives must quickly develop the relationships that enable compromise; the risk exists that they will focus on their next political race to the detriment of their constituents in the office they hold. The question is whether these losses in institutional memory and skill are counterbalanced by some advantage unique to term limits for executives.
Although 37 states limit gubernatorial terms, many large cities do not impose term limits on mayors: Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Seattle, Cleveland, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Miami and others. But some large cities were caught up in the general term-limits wave of the early 1990s and adopted these mayoral limits. In addition to New York, these large cities include Los Angeles, San Diego, Dallas, Phoenix, and Denver (some cities, like San Francisco and Kansas City, had imposed term limits for mayor before the 1990s). Arguably, distinct reasons exist to favor term limits for executives, even if not for legislators. Executives often have the power to make decisions unilaterally, unlike a single lawmaker, and term limits may operate in this context to combat the corruption that can go hand-in-hand with that kind of power. If the power of incumbency is strong, term limitations may be the only way to ensure periodic turnover in the jurisdiction?s chief executive.

One final surprising lesson can be drawn from experience with state term limits. Politicians who break a promise to serve limited terms or who vote to repeal term limits tend not to face electoral backlash. Many federal legislators who reneged on their promises to return to private life were reelected to Congress. And few state lawmakers in Idaho who voted to eliminate legislative term limits felt the ire of voters, who had adopted the reform through the initiative. Thus, while experience suggests less enthusiasm for term limits now than in the early 1990s, and debate continues about the costs and benefits of limited terms for different offices, the most realistic effect of term limits may be to raise the bar for officials seeking to serve beyond a pre-set number of terms: they must be well-regarded enough to overcome the partial hit they take for changing a term-limits law, but if they are, voters are unlikely to punish them on Election Day.

Mayor Bloomberg is calculating that serious times will lead voters to value experience more today than they did in the early 1990s. Even in just two weeks, the financial crisis is already having ramifications for how voters think about democracy. This is surely just the beginning.

Full post as published by Balkinization on September 30, 2008 (boomark / email).