Do One-Term Politicians Exist?
Recently at a Cicero team lunch on Google Hangouts, somebody tossed out the question: “Is there such a thing as a one-term politician?” How often do politicians serve just one term in an elected office and then never hold office again, either by choice or the consequence of failing to win another election?
Most people view serving in elected office as more a pursuit inspired by a moment in time rather than a set career path. In stump speeches and TV ads, candidates often claim they do not want to be a “career politician”, but want to address an immediate agenda. Does it happen that politicians accomplish (or abandon) their goals after one term in office, and do not return to public office?
We struggled to come up with examples. So to learn more we decided to dig into Cicero, our database holding tens of tens of thousands of records of information about political representation and geographic political districts. In this blog, we look at our records going back 10 years on officials at the federal, state, and local levels to see if we can find politicians who served one term and did not return to elected office.
Exploring tenure in elected office
We decided to limit our inquiry to the United States. Over the past decade, Cicero has grown to maintain data in multiple counties (Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Mexico), including provincial data in several of those countries and all the way down to local data for localities with populations over 100,000 in Canada. However, our largest footprint going back the most number of years (roughly a decade) is in the United States.
Querying United States officials, and filtering out a few edge cases, we found:
25,791 tenure records, for 20,088 unique officials
Because we track officials over time, many officials have served multiple offices in their political careers over the life of the Cicero database.
20,088 officials have served 21,167 offices
Officials serving now may end up serving multiple terms in elected office, so we removed these officials from our analysis.
11,005 officials currently serving in office
Next, using the term length for each office, we partitioned out tenures equal to a single term. We did not include tenures less than one term, because these usually represent an official appointed temporarily to fill a vacancy.
3,443 served in an office for one term
However, we found that frequently officials who serve a single term tenure in an office also served another office earlier or later in their career. In fact, our analysis showed that over the past decade, U.S. elected officials served an average of 2.12 terms in elected office. After removing these officials, we were left with the following.
1,560 served in an office for one term and did not serve another office
Before we further break down the where and how often politicians serve just a single term, we should share some caveats to these statistics we have compiled:
- Cicero does not include records for elected officials who served over 10 years ago.
- Some local chambers in the United States have been tracked for less than 10 years.
- Finally, Cicero does not track many federal, state, and local appointed positions. So it may be unfair to claim an individual left politics merely because they stopped serving elected office. Appointed positions also play important roles in political processes and the operations of government.
One-term politicians by chamber
Recent one-term members of U.S. Congress
We take a closer look at both houses of the United States Congress. Serving one term in Congress is not rare. But many candidates elected to the U.S. House and Senate do so based on a record of successful prior service in state or local public office.
We found a small number of rare cases where an individual was elected to Congress for their first time serving public office, and then left after one term, making them fit our definition of a one-term politician. Again, one caveat here is that some of these individuals may serve in Congress again, as it is especially common for districts in the U.S. House to change hands between political parties as the political tides ebb and flow.
One-term politicians are real, but rare
It turns out, one-term politicians do exist! Roughly 5-10% of U.S. politicians in the past decade only served one term and have not yet returned to elected office. They are most common in the lower houses of state legislatures in a few states as shown above. We’ll continue tracking this into the next decade of Cicero data coverage. As we continue to expand our data coverage, further inquiries could include researching one-term politicians in more localities and other countries. If you have materials or datasets that would be helpful to this data exploration, please reach out and share them with us. And if you want to run your own analysis of politicians in office, check out our API.
