IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/pubcho/v94y1998i1-2p85-104.html

The Relationship between Congressional Spending and Tenure with an Application to Term Limits

Author

Listed:
  • Reed, W Robert
  • Schansberg, D. Eric
  • Wilbanks, James
  • Zhu, Zhen

Abstract

Whether term limits would increase or decrease federal spending depends on the reason for the causal relationship between tenure and spending. The authors investigate this subject by empirically studying congressional spending and tenure for all United States House and Senate members who entered Congress between the 94th and 102nd Congresses (1975-92). As their measure of congressional spending the authors use the National Taxpayers Union's Congressional Spending Scores. Their study finds that a statistically significant relationship exists between congressional spending and tenure for some groups of congressmen. The authors then test three hypotheses relating tenure and spending. No single hypothesis is consistent with all of their empirical results. Nevertheless, the small sizes of the empirical effects estimated in this study suggest that term limits would have an inconsequential impact on the level of federal spending--at least via the 'moral hazard' mechanisms described in this paper. Copyright 1998 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Suggested Citation

  • Reed, W Robert & Schansberg, D. Eric & Wilbanks, James & Zhu, Zhen, 1998. "The Relationship between Congressional Spending and Tenure with an Application to Term Limits," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 94(1-2), pages 85-104, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:94:y:1998:i:1-2:p:85-104
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://journals.kluweronline.com/issn/0048-5829/contents
    File Function: link to full text
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or

    for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Timothy Besley & Anne Case, 2003. "Political Institutions and Policy Choices: Evidence from the United States," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 41(1), pages 7-73, March.
    2. Michael A. Ellis & D. Eric Schansberg, 1999. "The Determinants of State Government Debt Financing," Public Finance Review, , vol. 27(6), pages 571-587, November.
    3. Edward López & R. Jewell, 2007. "Strategic institutional choice: Voters, states, and congressional term limits," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 132(1), pages 137-157, July.
    4. Dalle Nogare, Chiara & Ricciuti, Roberto, 2011. "Do term limits affect fiscal policy choices?," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 27(4), pages 681-692.
    5. Linda Gonçalves Veiga & Francisco veiga, 2016. "Term limits at the local government level," NIPE Working Papers 7/2016, NIPE - Universidade do Minho.
    6. Edward López & Carlos Ramírez, 2008. "Mr. Smith and the economy: the influence of economic conditions on individual legislator voting," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 136(1), pages 1-17, July.
    7. Chiara Dalle Nogare & Roberto Ricciuti, 2008. "Term Limits: Do they really Affect Fiscal Policy Choices?," CESifo Working Paper Series 2199, CESifo.
    8. Yogesh Uppal, 2010. "Estimating Incumbency Effects In U.S. State Legislatures: A Quasi‐Experimental Study," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 22(2), pages 180-199, July.
    9. Stephanie Owings & Rainald Borck, 2000. "Legislative Professionalism and Government Spending: Do Citizen Legislators Really Spend Less?," Public Finance Review, , vol. 28(3), pages 210-225, May.
    10. Arsene Aka & W. Robert Reed & D. Eric Schansberg & Zhen Zhu, 1996. "Is There A “Culture Of Spending” In Congress?," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 8(3), pages 191-211, November.
    11. James C. Garand & Rebekah Myers & Renee Renegar, 2016. "Seniority, political experience, and support for government spending in the US House: a culture of spending?," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 168(3), pages 217-238, September.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:94:y:1998:i:1-2:p:85-104. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.