Congressional Careers: Contours of Life in the U.S. House of Representatives

According to a Gallup poll, 70 percent of Americans want elected officials to serve only a limited number of terms. Nevertheless, every two years American voters return, on average, more than 95 percent of incumbents to the U.S. House of Representatives. John Hibbing’s book provides unique evidence of the problems that would result from congressional term limitations.

The first scholar to analyze congressional careers using longitudinal data, Hibbing looks at how the career patterns of a typ...