Women and Term Limits

This report from the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) was commissioned by Close the Gap California to evaluate the campaign's major contributions toward achieving gender parity in the California Legislature, as well as their possible next steps. With prefaces authored by CTG staff, the report provides best practices and an outline of the campaign's targeted recruitment process that could be adopted elsewhere and at different levels of office. 

This report examines women’s political power within diverse state political ecosystems and illustrates that increasing women’s political power is a multi-site, multiracial, and bipartisan endeavor.

This paper examines the question of whether term limits lead to greater diversity among legislators in terms of their gender, race, and ethnicity. Their findings from an analysis of electoral outcomes in states where term limits were in effect in 1998 and 2000 suggest that the answer to the question of whether term limits lead to more diverse legislatures is not straightforward.

The authors' analysis suggests that term limits, unaccompanied by efforts to recruit women to run for term-limited seats, may be insufficient to increase the number of women state legislators. 

A general overview on the effect of term limits on the numbers of women in elective office.

This article finds that "contrary to the expectation of term-limit advocates and many scholars, the number of women serving in term-limited statehouse seats actually decreased following the 1998 and 2000 elections."

This monograph reports on a November, 1999 CAWP meeting to examine preliminary data on the impact of term limits on women’s representation and to explore how women might capitalize upon the political opportunities created by term limits.