Missourian interviews Powell for article on term limits
The Columbia Missourian spoke with Richard Powell, a political science professor at the University of Maine, for an article about term limits for elected officials. Term limits have a lot of measurable consequences that are often unintended by term limit supporters, according to Powell. The biggest effect is that term limits lessen institutional knowledge, the article states. Elected officials aren’t around for as long, Powell said, which means lobbyists and bureaucrats often know more about certain pieces of legislation than elected officials. “In that way, term limits decrease democratic accountability because it’s not the elected officials that have the expertise to be able to exercise effective oversight over the bureaucracy, but rather the expertise is within the bureaucracy itself,” he said.