Term Limits Didn't Reduce Spending? Here's What the Data Says

Insights from the Field

Causal Inference

State Institutions

Treatment Effect Heterogeneity

Differences-in-Differences

Do Term Limits Restrain State Fiscal Policy? Approaches for Causal Inference in Assessing the Effects of Legislative Institutions was authored by Luke Keele, Neil Malhotra and Colin McCubbins. It was published by Wiley in LSQ in 2013.

This paper examines whether state term limits affect government spending.

Researchers often face challenges in assessing institutional impacts on policy outcomes. Using data from 1990s legislative reforms, this study addresses key research design issues: treatment effect heterogeneity and counterfactual validity for comparing states with term limits to those without.

Two identification strategies are compared:

• Differences-in-Differences estimation

• Synthetic case control methods

The findings suggest little evidence that term limits constrain state fiscal policy. This analysis offers valuable insights for scholars studying causal effects of political institutions at the state level.