The Effect of Legislative Incumbency on Policy Innovativeness of U.S. States

ABSTRACT Scholars have widely recognized the impacts of the professional experiences of policymakers on policy innovations, but have paid little attention to how such impacts manifest in the composition change of legislative bodies. We hypothesize that electing freshman legislators into a state legislature is associated with higher probabilities of adopting policy innovations due to their stronger motivation to push for innovative policies. Through a panel study of U.S. state legislators from 1967 to 2010, along with a quasi‐experimental design, we examine how the election of incumbent legislators versus freshman legislators affects state‐level policy innovativeness. Our empirical results consistently show that the share of incumbent legislators winning against freshman candidates in state houses is negatively correlated with state policy innovativeness scores. This effect is larger for policies on civil rights and education than for other policy areas. This study adds to the policy innovation literature by estimating the effect of legislators' experiences and shows the negative impact of incumbency on a critical, non‐electoral policy outcome.