Does Stringency of Gubernatorial Term Limits Matter?

Political institutions within a society often serve to establish the rules governing the economic actions of members, help establish norms of appropriate economic behavior between the members, and ultimately help to explain the relative economic performance of the society. Institutional details like the role of budgetary constraints, party ideology, term limits, and voting methods have been analyzed with particular emphasis on the interplay of political and economic variables. Within this field, we believe that the study of term limits is of particular importance. Hence, this paper empirically investigates the link between the level of stringency of term limits and state expenditures after controlling for other characteristics of political institutions. Using panel data from 37 states in the U.S. between 1971 and 2000, the empirical results indicate that the stringency of term limits is an important factor in determining state expenditures.