The Effects of U.S State Legislative Term Limits on Political Representation and Professionalization

International audienceIn 1990, more than two centuries after Jefferson’s proposal of limiting re-election in the U.S. Congress, Oklahoma and California held the first term limits referenda in the U.S. The issue is familiar to U.S. institutional history: the American rotation in office has applied not only to the U.S. presidency since 1951, but also to members of State Legislatures in fifteen states and to mayors in more than 3 000 municipalities since the late 1990s. Of the 1 957 local Senate seats, 562 have term limits, and of the 5 411 deputy seats, 1 368 have re-election limits. This article uses the Californian case to shed light on the effects of such term limit recodification measures. The paper first seeks to show the effects of term limits on the composition of legislatures: do term limits measures deliver on their promise of making the legislature a more diverse arena subject to a higher turnover? A second aspect, mobilizing the quantitative analysis method, proposes a better understanding of the impact of term limits on political careers