An Economist's View of Research on Term Limits.

The article presents an economic perspective of an article on the consequences of imposing a three or six-term restriction on service in the US House of Representatives, published in the December 1995 issue of "Social Science Quarterly." The only real area of concern, from this economic perspective, is that the focus of the paper is not as tight as it could be. The authors specify and employ a mathematical model, but the assumptions underlying the model are not sufficiently justified. Then, the authors discuss a number of implications of their model, but for the most part these implications are beyond the scope of the model. The model assumes without explicit justification that future party-specific election rates will be the same as those which prevailed in the period 1973-94, despite the potentially historic political realignment which occurred in the most recent election, and despite their own observation that the rate at which Republican candidates win open seats has been increasing. This is of particular concern when evaluating the relative impact of term limits on the political parties, since according to their own analysis the conclusions are largely driven by the assumptions made regarding party-specific election rates.