Voter Behavior, Term Limits, and Seniority Advantage in Pork-Barrel Politics

This paper explores electoral accountability in a legislative system favoring seniority, using laboratory experiments. Voters face a trade-off between pork-barrel transfers and policy representation. The experiment tests term limits as a mechanism to reduce the cost of searching for a candidate who better represents voters on policy. I use subjects' preferences on abortion to capture incumbents' policy choices where subjects vote to determine whether a donation is allocated to a prochoice or to a pro-life nonprofit to create tension between visceral and monetary incentives. I find term limits to be effective, but not infallible, for avoiding the seniority trap.