The consistent lesson in each of the investigations making up this book is that democracies can be effectively redesigned, that altering a legislature's membership rules or providing it with more resources will affect its form and its function. A legislature's ultimate product – policies – can be altered. While all of these changes will be consequential, they are not guaranteed to happen exactly as those who proposed them anticipated.

Still, there has been a predictable pattern in the impact of legislative design on America's states: Professionalization and term limits, the two conflicting answers to the question of “Whom do we want our leaders to be?” bring countervailing effects. Throughout these chapters, I have found that whatever a higher level of professionalism produces more of, term limits has reduced. The scales of these effects are often comparable. Limits appear to have the power to turn back the clock on some of the nation's most professional bodies, bringing changes that narrow the broad gap between citizen legislatures and houses with long sessions, high salaries, and large staff.

Several qualifications should be kept in mind when interpreting these findings. First, there are a few areas of stability. Some functions of state legislatures do not appear to shift with changes in legislative design, such as committee behavior and overall bill passage rates. Archival records show that the number of amendments made in committees declined in some states after term limits but rose in others (though survey evidence suggests that the complexity of amendments has dropped everywhere).