Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Impact Of State Legislative Term Limits On Descriptive Representation, Matt Baldwin

Honors Theses

Do term limits make state legislatures more descriptively representative of their population? If the composition of a state legislature is a function of its ruleset and design, then term limits—a major shift in the rules—would change who is running for office and who is getting elected. In order to explore this question, a dataset was created by contacting a number of states to solicit responses on the demographics of their state legislatures from 1990-2018. In addition, information regarding some control variables (partisanship, time, economy) was gathered. A gap variable was created to see what difference existed between the proportion of …