The impact of term limits on the candidacy decisions of state legislators in US House elections

This study investigates the hypothesis that term limits at the state level increase electoral competition for seats in the U.S. House. With a greater number of ambitious state legislators being unwillingly turned out of office, we can expect that those individuals interested in legislative careers will increasingly turn their attention to Congress. In order to assess whether or not state legislators are more likely to run for Congress in states with legislative term limits, I specified and tested logistic regression models. The models were derived from our prior knowledge of the behavior of strategic politicians and included control variables for theoretically important national-and district-level factors. The results presented in this study provide support for the hypothesis that state legislators are more likely to run for the House in states with legislative term limits.