Term Length and The E¤ort of Politicians

We evaluate the e¤ects of a fundamental lever of constitutional design: the duration of public o¢ ce terms. We present a simple model grounded in interviews with legislators and highlight three forces shaping incentives to exert legislative e¤ort. We exploit two natural experiments in the Argentine Congress (where term lengths were assigned randomly) to ascertain which forces are empirically dominant. Results for separate measures as well as an aggregate index of legislative e¤ort show that longer terms increase e¤ort. Shorter terms appear to discourage e¤ort not due to campaign distractions but due to an investment payback logic: when e¤ort yields returns over multiple periods, longer terms yield a higher chance of capturing those returns. A broader implication is that job stability may promote e¤ort despite making individuals less accountable. Rossi acknowledges …nancial support from grant PICT 2007-787. We thank the editor Marco Ottaviani, three anonymous referees, Marta Cappuccio, David Card, Alberto Dal Bó, Pedro Dal Bó, Erik Eyster, Claudio Ferraz, Je¤ry Frieden, Nicolás Gadano, Sebastián Galiani, Martín GonzalezEiras, Neil Malhotra, Ted Miguel, Ernesto Schargrodsky, Ken Shepsle, Marko Terviö, Mariano Tommasi, Noam Yuchtman, and participants at various seminars and conferences for valuable comments and suggestions. We are deeply grateful to legislators Patricia Bullrich, Héctor Maya, Mario Negri, Aldo Neri, Jesús Rodríguez, and Jorge Young who provided expert advice on the functioning of the Argentine Congress. Juan Escobar, Esteban Petruzzello, Orie Shelef, and Gabriel Zourak provided excellent research assistance.