Discussions of term limits are happening in the United States and abroad. In July 2024, President Biden announced his support for limiting the number of years that federal judges may serve. Surveys suggest that limits for judges are popular with Americans.1 Relatedly, voters have historically supported term limits for members of Congress, with the most recent survey (from July 2023) finding support among 87%.2 For now, limits are unlikely to be imposed on federal judges or members of Congress, but there are recent changes in the states. Voters in North Dakota imposed limits on their state legislators in 2022, and those limits will take effect in 2028. In Michigan, also in 2022, voters shortened the long-standing lifetime limits for their legislators from 14 to 12 years. Discussions or reforms, including the elimination of limits, have also occurred outside of the United States. In Russia, voters seemingly reset the term limits that applied previously to President Vladimir Putin, thereby allowing him to serve in office until 2036. In China, where limits for various leaders including the president were first added to the country’s constitution in 1982, limits were abolished in 2018. Although these are prominent examples of limits being lifted, a remarkable number of new limits have been enacted elsewhere, with limits on executives being imposed in 17 countries within the past decade alone. To date, only a handful of countries, most of which are in the Americas, have legislative limits.3 Conversely, nearly every country limits the service of judges.4

This article uses the case of the economist John Malcolm Blair as a vehicle for examining the durability of the institutional tradition in US economic policy making. Over a multidecade federal government career, Blair played an important role in focusing policy debate on institutionalist concerns like economic structure and corporate power even through the heyday of the Keynesian Revolution. Indeed, Blair stood as representative of an overlooked postwar policy-intellectual current that strove to anchor the study of macroeconomic issues like inflation and unemployment upon solid microfoundations: what I call Institutional Keynesianism. A primary influence behind such policy developments as the Celler-Kefauver Anti-Merger Act of 1950 and the wage–price guideposts implemented by the Kennedy administration, Blair’s work sheds light on the meaningful yet often neglected links between different schools of economic thought and policy domains.

Prior to the Civil War, the US and state governments required the modern licensing of only three occupations, doctors, lawyers, and ship pilots. Most other references to licensing in the 15,000 surveyed antebellum statutes referred to licensing in general terms. Those that referred to the “licensing” of occupations clearly referenced a type of tax or regulation of occupations thought sinful or diplomatically sensitive, like Indian trading and privateering. In other words, the presumption of occupational freedom that developed in medieval and early modern Britain transferred to the colonies and the United States. Only with the rise of Progressivism did modern occupational licensing become common, thus adding weight to economic critiques of the current system.

This article seeks to compare the policy histories of the legislative term limits in France and the United States. Both nations debated, initially adopted, and then ultimately rejected imposing term limits during the foundational moments of their democracies. Reemerging in the 1990s in America, proposals to refresh government through such limits have been successful in the states and have failed at the national level. The idea regained prominence in France when Emmanuel Macron supported it during his 2017 presidential election. Although Macron eventually abandoned the proposal, the revival of this debate is an opportunity to draw broad parallels but identify critical differences between the two nations in the philosophical debates over term limits and the ways that leaders have embraced or abandoned them to fulfill their political goals. We show how the idea circulated between the two nations, without a parallel exchange of evidence about its effects.

This article examines a 40-year policy history of efforts to redress survivors of egregious violations, such as torture, massacres, and genocides. Using oral history interviews and document analysis, it first focused on the ideas and creative advocacy that undergirded a burgeoning redress movement. By juxtaposing classic ideas with a relatively obscure statute (the Alien Tort Statute or ATS) and modern strategies, advocates won an improbable court case. Their case inspired Congress to introduce, debate, and pass the Torture Victim Protection Act, explicitly to support, affirm, and expand the ATS and the idea of universal jurisdiction, locally and globally. After advocates further developed these ideas with new court cases and NGOs, the Supreme Court began whittling the policies away, despite congressional intent, prioritizing the ideas that Congress had rejected, until the Court stripped the ATS of its universal jurisdiction power. This human rights retrenchment in the United States drove the advocates to seek new bases for human rights justice and to develop their ideas abroad where legal actions have succeeded in advancing some redress. In expounding this history, the article sheds light on four phenomena: the power and limitations of aspirational and practical ideas in constructing new pathways to justice; the role of creative advocacy to frame and amalgamate ideas toward developing paradigm-shifting policy and law; the flow and interactions between government branches and civil society with the ideas and policies, including how the courts initially led in advancing human rights redress then later reversed and truncated the pathway counter to Congressional intent.

Legislative term limits garnered public support because they promised to drain the swamp, removing entrenched incumbents from office. There is often a partisan dimension to this appeal since “the swamp” that is to be “drained” has often been controlled by one party for a lengthy period. However, it remains unclear to what extent term limits realign partisanship within US state legislatures. Using newly available turnover data, this research evaluates how legislative partisanship shifted after the implementation of term limits in state legislatures and continued over 20 years. The initial surge effects of term limits did appear to level the playing field between parties. The passage of term limits reversed party majorities in state legislatures, primarily benefiting newfound Republican majorities. These findings have important implications for current understandings of legislative term limits, as more states revisit these proposals, and provide insight into party trends at the state legislative level.

There has been limited research on African policy instruments’ historical and institutional nature in health policy literature. However, in the field of health systems research, there are many examples that show the permanent use of financing instruments inspired by liberal (pro-market) ideas such as user fees, performance bonuses, or private practice of medicine in Africa. Through an analysis of archives (1840–1960), this article shows the presence of these instruments in the health system during the French colonial period in Senegal. Thus, this study shows that these financing policy instruments’ institutional presence and longevity are part of a liberal approach that predates international organizations’ contemporary (and liberal) promotion. This study uses a historical and institutionalist approach to understand the context, actors, and underlying factors that allowed for this historical continuity, resulting in the permanence of these instruments.

How do term limits affect dyadic ideological representation? Despite reformers’ claims that term limits should improve legislators’ connections to their constituents, much empirical political science research suggests that term limits actually break that electoral connection. In this study, I use a regression discontinuity design to measure the ideological gap in how Democrats and Republicans represent evenly matched districts and then explore how this gap varies across settings with and without state legislative term limits in effect. Across a number of specifications, my results are consistent with term limits exacerbating rather than improving dyadic representation. This study contributes to a growing scholarly consensus that term limits do not improve, and may worsen, state legislative representation.

A vast body of work investigates the consequences of legislative term limits for public policy. However, considerably less research has delved into their effects in noneconomic policy domains. In this article, we develop the argument that implemented term limits increase the effect that a state government’s ideology has on the state’s incarceration rate. When analyzing incarceration rates among all states between 1979 and 2017, we find evidence to support our theoretical expectation. Specifically, for states with term limits, we find that an increase in state government conservatism is associated with a higher incarceration rate. Conversely, for non-term-limited states, we find that the policy preferences of the state government have little influence on the incarceration rate. These findings deepen our insight into how institutional design can affect public policy.