Thad Kousser is interested in both term limits and legislative professionalism because they effect fundamental changes in the environment in which lawmakers work. Drawing upon Richard Fenno's paradigm, the author assumes that legislators will behave rationally, seeking to maximize their ability to win elections, affect policy, and gain influence in their chambers. How, he asks, do legislative professionalism and term limits alter the ways in which legislators do “transformative” work: 1) change budgets and 2) innovate in pursuance of their goals? And how do the alterations in the “internal power dynamics” of legislatures resulting from these reforms—3) the stability of leadership, 4) the independence of committees, and 5) the capacity for individual achievement—shape members' goal-seeking behavior?

In addition to using comparative statistical analysis based upon existing and newly developed data drawn from all the states, Kousser seeks answers to these questions with detailed case studies of six jurisdictions in which he has done extensive interviewing and for which he has gathered additional data. They are California, Colorado, Oregon, Maine, Illinois, and New Mexico. On commonly used measures (level of staffing, session length, and salaries), the legislatures in these states cover the entire range of professionalism. For the first four of these states, those with term limits, comparisons are made of carefully selected legislative sessions before and after limits took effect. The remaining two states are employed as controls. For each of the five major areas under study, testable hypotheses are generated from a variety of theoretical models. To enhance accessibility of the text, details of models and supporting methodological and statistical materials are presented in appendices.

Some of the strengths and limits of Kousser's approach are illustrated in his chapter on legislative leadership stability. The author first employs an epidemiological model and finds that leaders who control committee appointments survive longer, though surprisingly, those who last the longest defer to minority leaders in naming out-party committee members. He then develops a series of hypotheses about leadership change from a theory that treats “each election cycle as a chance to overthrow a leader” (p. 76), and he regards leadership fights as turf wars between two teams. These are then tested through a multivariate analysis.

The author's model, which includes several measures of legislative professionalism (but not term limits, which, as expected, clearly shortens leadership tenure), works far better in predicting the easy cases—no change or change resulting from switch in party control—than the harder ones, change resulting form a leader leaving the legislature or being challenged and losing. This is probably because it leaves out a good number of factors that affect the likelihood of a leadership challenge. Some of these factors are extrinsic to the legislature, for example, the governor's support for or hostility toward an incumbent legislative leader of his party. Others are organizational, for example, the difficulty any potential challenger faces in forming an “out team,” or communicating with colleagues to gathering strength without leaks that forewarn the sitting leader and allow preemptive action.

Additionally, with the growth of campaign fund-raising and political organization centered in legislative houses, leaders develop individual relationships with members based on past and potential political support that likely make them harder to challenge. It may be that there is a sort of tipping point, a period of consecutive service after which leaders become so entrenched that successful challenge is highly unlikely (but not, of course, in states with term limits).

A similar concern about oversimplification arises from Kousser's assessment of the effects of tem limits and professionalism on executive/legislative budget bargaining, based upon a two-player bargaining game. With the singular exception of Nebraska's, American state legislatures are bicameral. Houses within states are likely to differ in feel, culture, and dynamics. More concretely, they differ substantially in size of membership; the constituencies of members of each body therefore differ as well. Divided partisan control is increasingly common. With all this true, it is likely that executive legislative bargaining is better treated as triadic than as dyadic. These reservations about the model notwithstanding—and perhaps because a number of the legislatures he considers in detail employ joint budget committees, partly overcoming the effects of bicameralism—Kousser's finding that professionalism increases and term limits diminishes legislative effectiveness in budgeting are quite sensible.

The concerns outlined here suggest a number of possible directions for additional research that arise from Kousser's work. Reservations aside, this is a methodologically sophisticated, meticulous effort to assess the effect of structural change upon the inner workings of legislatures and, overall, an important addition to the comparative literature on state government.