Lynda W. Powell

Incumbency and the Probability of Reelection in State Legislative Elections

We build on work estimating and explaining the incumbency advantage in state legislative elections. Our work makes advances in three ways. First, our model measures the effect of incumbency on the probability of reelection, rather than on candidate vote share or margin of victory. Second, we accommodate both multimember district (MMD) elections that are excluded from most previous studies and uncontested and partially contested (MMD) races. Third, we use an improved method of controlling for the underlying partisan makeup of districts. We calculate incumbency advantage using data from elections in 96 legislative chambers across 49 states in the 1992-1994 electoral cycle. We then model relative incumbency advantage across the states as a function of institutional characteristics. We find that district type, term length, and electoral formula have substantial effects on incumbent safety; incumbents in multimember post and free-for-all districts are more vulnerable than those in traditional SMDs, as are those with four-year, rather than two-year, terms Professionalization also affects incumbency safety, and salary rather than other resources best accounts for incumbency advantage.

The Effects of Term Limits on State Legislatures

Legislative theory suggests that anticipatory effects of term limits would first affect the types of individuals elected to office and only later influence the legislature itself. Our results, based on a 1995 survey of nearly 3000 state legislators nationwide, indicate otherwise. There are no systematic differences between term limit and non-term limit states in the composition of the legislature (e.g., professional backgrounds). Yet with respect to legislative behavior, term limits decrease the time legislators devote to securing pork, and heighten the priority they place on the needs of the state and on the demands of conscience relative to district interests. At the

The Effects of Term Limits on State Legislatures: A New Survey of the 50 States

Term limits on legislators were adopted in 21 states during the early 1990s. Beginning in 1996, the limits legally barred incumbents from reelection in 11 states, and they will do so in four more by 2010. In 2002, we conducted the only survey of legislators in all 50 states aimed at assessing the impact of term limits on state legislative representation. We found that term limits have virtually no effect on the types of people elected to office�whether measured by a range of demographic characteristics or by ideological predisposition�but they do have measurable impact on certain behaviors and priorities reported by legislators in the survey, and on the balance of power among various institutional actors in the arena of state politics. We characterize the biggest impact on behavior and priorities as a �Burkean shift,� whereby term-limited legislators become less beholden to the constituents in their geographical districts and more attentive to other concerns. The reform also increases the power of the executive branch (governors and the bureaucracy) over legislative outcomes and weakens the influence of majority party leaders and committee chairs, albeit for different reasons.

Time, Term Limits, and Turnover: Trends in Membership Stability in U.S. State Legislatures

Increases in legislative professionalization along with the implementation of term limits in about one-third of the American states raise significant questions about the path of state house and senate turnover. We first update turnover figures for all states, by chamber, from the mid-1980s through 2002. We then compare turnover rates in states with and without term limits. We find that turnover rates, overall, continued to decline through the 1980s but that the long downward trend abated in the 1990s as a result of term limits. The effects of term limits vary depending on the length of the term limit and the opportunity structure in the state. There is also a strong relationship between the presence of term limits and interchamber movement. In addition to term limits, professionalization levels, redistricting, the presence of multi-member districts, and partisan swings explain differences in turnover rates between states.

Modes of Elite Political Participation: Contributors to the 1972 Presidential Candidates

Contributors of more than

The Effects of Congruity between Community and District on Salience of U. S. House Candidates

100 to presidential candidates offer unique opportunities for an investigation of elite behavior because they participate both extensively and intensively in political activities. Their activity can be structured around five modes of participation: Campaigning, Giving, Using Good Offices, Voting, and Mobilizing. There are basic similarities in structure between these elite participants and mass participants (as described by Verba and Nie, 1972), despite a wide difference in participation levels. The elite contributors can be aggregated, on the basis of their behavior patterns, into nine clusters that provide not only an empirical typology of campaign contributors, but also a meaningful basis for discrimination with respect to other, nonbehavioral, attribtutes. A predictive model of elite behavior is presented.

Full-Time, Part-Time, and Real Time: Explaining State Legislators' Perceptions of Time on the Job

Many political observers have argued that citizens in congressional districts coinciding with natural community boundaries will more often recall or recognize the names of the incumbent and challenger candidates. Despite the plausibility of this argument, there is surprisingly little evidence to support it, and none that estimates the magnitude of the effect controlling for possible confounding variables. We find a strong relationship between candidate familiarity and the congruence of community and district boundaries. Our results suggest differences in the context of elections in the different types of districts; challengers, in particular, are disadvantaged in noncongruent districts. The relationship between congruence and awareness occurs because of the effect of community-district congruence on the structure of the mass media markets. Our results also suggest that the preservation of community boundaries in redistricting merits more attention than the Supreme Court has heretofore given it, and they provide some of the factual evidence upon which future decisions may be based.

Sex and the Political Contributor: The Gender Gap among Contributors to Presidential Candidates in 1988

One of the oldest and most distinctive characteristics of American political culture is its anti-government, anti-politician bias. One manifestation of this attitude in state government today is the effort to maintain part-time “citizen” legislatures, whether through term limits, low salaries, or session length restrictions. But, realistically, how part-time is the job of a state legislator? We discuss findings from a national survey of state legislators in which they report spending more time on the job than one might anticipate given the presumably part-time nature of many state legislatures. As expected, we find that legislators serving in bodies characterized as full-time, professional legislatures spend more time on the job than those in part-time institutions, but we also see significant variation across states in both groups. We also find considerable variation among individual legislators, which is related to factors such as holding a leadership position and a legislators demographic characteristics. We also show how time on the job is allocated among specific components of representation.

State legislative elections, 1967-2003: Announcing the completion of a cleaned and updated dataset

We investigate the gender gap in policy preferences among political contributors. We find a bivariate gap in both parties, with Democratic women being more liberal than Democratic men, and Republican women more conservative than Republican men. This reverse gender gap among Republican contributors is explained by the greater appeal of Pat Robertson to women. After controls for religious variables, Republican women contributors are found to be more liberal than their male counterparts.

Male and Female Differences in Elite Political Participation: An Examination of the Effects of Socioeconomic and Familial Variables

More than 15 years nine election cycles have passed since a comprehensive set of state legislative election data was compiled and made available to researchers and practitioners: the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Researchs (ICPSR) State Legislative Election Returns in the United States dataset (Study #8907) collected by Malcolm Jewell (Jewell 1991) and containing observations from 1967 to 1988.1 With this hiatus in mind, we set out at various times initially in three independent efforts (Berry and Carsey; Niemi, and Powell; Snyder) to gather legislative election data for all states and elections since 1988. In addition, Berry and Carsey (2005) cleaned the original dataset to make it more accurate and usable; their corrections led to the release of a revised ICPSR dataset (Study #3938). The culmination of these efforts is a dataset containing information about general elections for state legislative seats from 1967 to 2003, now available through ICPSR (Study 21480).2 In announcing the availability of the newly cleaned and updated dataset, we thought it useful to present trends for three of the most prominent measures related to state legislative elections: incumbent reelection percentages, open seat percentages, and the percentage of competitive races. We present these trends largely without analysis. While some correlates and tentative explanations are obvious such as the apparent impact of legislative professionalism (Niemi et al. 2006) developing full explanatory models of each of