I’ve never been a big fan of term limits. After all, isn’t that what elections are all about.
Now this article in the Washington Post today:
Jo Ann Davidson remembers feeling optimistic that term limits would land more women in Ohio’s legislature, where 32 of the 132 seats were held by women in the mid-1990s. Yet in the seven years since the law took effect, the figure has fallen to 23.
And now women elected after voters imposed eight-year term limits are surrendering seats because of the rules. Often, the posts are going to men.
“It’s been hard to keep the numbers up,” said Davidson, who was Ohio’s first female House speaker and now is co-chair of the Republican National Committee. “We pick them up by ones and twos and threes. When all of a sudden you have 40-some seats open, you don’t have as many women step up as men to replace them.”
Of women, she said: “They’re harder to recruit. They’re harder to convince to run.”
The phenomenon Davidson described holds true across the country, where term-limited legislatures with rising numbers of women are the exception. In fact, gains during the past 12 years have been slightly greater in states without term limits, according to political scientist Gary Moncrief.
“The evidence has shown that it has had absolutely no positive effect at all,” said Moncrief, a Boise State University professor who predicted 15 years ago that term limits would increase representation for women. “The logic was impeccable, the empirical evidence not at all. The problem is there aren’t as many women running as we expected.”
Also:
Term limits are in effect in 15 states, in every region of the country. Created in the belief that they would make statehouses less hidebound and more representative, the rules remain a topic of considerable controversy, much of it about what effect the turnover has on legislative effectiveness.
In six states, term limits have been repealed by the legislature or killed by the courts.
The idea behind term limits of eliminating entrenched, ineffectual politicians and replacing them with “new blood� is a good one, especially when there is a large pool of qualified replacements available (e.g. candidates for U.S. president). However, in my home state of California where state assembly office holders are limited to 3 2-year terms, it is a constant struggle to find well-qualified individuals every 6 years.
Adding to this struggle is the fact that these lower offices attract candidates with little or no political experience. Yet once these otherwise fine individuals do achieve some experience and become a real asset to their constituents, they are “termed-out�.
This just doesn’t make sense to me. If the public does want term limits, perhaps an increase in the amount of allowable terms is in order, particularly for lower offices.
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