The central argument of this chapter is familiar by now: legislators not bound to their current constituents through a reelection constraint will systematically alter their behavior to appeal to those who control their post-assembly prospects. The empirical focus of the analysis shifts in this chapter, however, away from the Costa Rican and Venezuelan cases that have been studied up to now, and toward the U.S. House of Representatives.

This book begins with an argument that the lack of U.S. experience with term limits mandates that any thorough empirical analysis of their effect on legislative representation should be comparative. Part II of the book engages this task. Of course, comparative analysis, too, has limitations. In the first place, the differences between the electoral systems of Costa Rica and Venezuela on the one hand, and the United States on the other, complicates the process of applying conclusions from the Latin American cases to the U.S. debate (Chapter 7). Second, difficult access to – or the outright nonexistence of – data on political careers, particularism, and legislative voting patterns presents a formidable barrier to any analysis of the Latin American cases. Preceding chapters attempt to scale or skirt this barrier and press on with the comparative project. This chapter attempts to complement the comparative work with analysis of the U.S. Congress, for which there is easy access to abundant data on political careers and legislative behavior, but which has never employed de jure term limits.