Maine traded one bunch of problems for another when it approved term limits for state legislators in 1993. The effects of inexperience in leadership have been noticed since the limits took effect in 1996. But two UMaine professors have now looked further down to the committee level and have found a legislature struggling with an added workload while also trying to adapt to changed circumstances.

The reasons Maine strongly supported the eight-year term limits were obvious enough a decade ago: legislative arrogance, a seemingly permanent leadership with an agenda that may not have been in the state’s best interest, a sense that Augusta had lost touch with the public’s concerns. A lack of lawmaker turnover, often cited as an inspiration for limiting terms, generally was not a problem in Maine – it existed only in specific instances, among leadership – Maine otherwise ranked among the top states for bringing in new lawmakers. Finally, a ballot-tampering scandal in House Speaker John Martin’s offices further irritated an electorate already unhappy about the ways the state budget was mishandled in the early ’90s.

Matthew C. Moen and Kenneth T. Palmer, both political-science professors, examine some of the results of voters trying to solve these problems through term limits. Writing in the latest Maine Policy Review from the Margaret Chase Smith Center for Public Policy at UMaine, they find the cure of ’93 had serious side effects.

For instance, in the early ’90s, the average House chairman had served eight years on the committee he or she headed; by 2000, the average tenure was less than four years. And most committees are processing more bills than before term limits, although an effort by leadership in the last session helped dampen the increase. The same is true of the number of bills carried over into the next session. Further, the committees are recommending against a greater percentage of bills than before, which may be due to the increased number of repeat bills that inexperienced lawmakers introduce unaware that similar legislation was rejected just a few years earlier.

Professors Moen and Palmer may have spotted a more important trend – an increase in divided committee reports. “As novices stream into the institution, they may be less willing to accept traditional political norms of compromise and conciliation,” they write, “as the experienced members leave the institution, the norms may not be as easily transmitted. … It is plausible that heavily burdened committees are more fractured.” One result of this is the increased number of bills that receive only one committee vote – with the single vote being enough to keep a bill alive and receiving all the attention that a bill with an actual chance of passing the full Legislature would receive.

The trick with term limits since the beginning has been to address the problems evident in the early ’90s without removing so much experience that the Legislature fails to operate effectively. There are several ways to fix the situation from capping the number of bills a lawmaker could introduce to removing the limits on rank-and-file lawmakers while keeping limits on leadership positions to raising the number of years all legislators may serve. The value of the work by Professors Moen and Palmer is that by showing some of the negative effects of term limits, they provide ample reason for lawmakers to act.