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The article focuses on the term limits of veterans on legislative positions in the U.S. It is stated that when term limits were disclosed, open seats in the upper chamber were often won by legislators who were expelled from lower chambers. Term-limited states in the U.S. include professional legislatures, such as California and Michigan, and part-time legislatures, such as Montana and Maine. Term limits were adopted by voters in Michigan in 1992, but their implementation was staggered.

How do legislators accumulate power and influence when their time in office is limited? Other scholars argue that politically ambitious legislators accumulate influence over time by building friendships or demonstrating their expertise. Legislative term limits truncate this pathway to power. So what makes someone influential in a term-limited legislature? Using network analysis, we explore how patterns of influence, friendship, and substantive expertise evolved over the implementation of term limits in the Michigan legislature. We gathered data for these analyses in 370 face-to-face interviews across 13 years of research. Our data include colleagues named as influential, those named as especially good friends, and those listed as sources of information on two specific substantive issues. These data allow us to portray the size and configuration of the influence, friendship and consulting networks within each of the chamber and to compare the structure of these relationships between chambers as well as before and after term limits. We find that term limits have profound effects on the structure of friendships, on the factors that contribute to influence, and on role of issue specific expertise on influence. Additionally, we find that some of term limits effects are more dramatic in the upper rather than the lower chamber. This underscores the extent to the effects of term limits extend beyond the changes in experience and permeate the institutional structure of legislative chambers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on municipal economic development is largely centered on the economic impacts of isolated approaches (e.g. tax abatements, business assistance centers, marketing, etc.). Few have looked at portfolios of incentives to gain a more holistic picture of municipal strategies (Eisenger, 1988; Reese, 1997; Reese and Fasenfest, 1997; Reese, 2006). Drawing on a survey of 170 municipal leaders and economic developers from within Southeast Michigan, we employ a negative binomial regression model to determine which municipal characteristics have an impact on the number of incentives that a municipality will adopt. Using this probabilistic model, we empirically demonstrate which factors influence a municipality to adopt a number of approaches, which has received little attention within the municipal economic development literature. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]