I looked up Michigan's term limits which is 12 years, which is honestly very long, so it led me to searching about corruption correlations and here's what I found:
- The penultimate effect of term limits increases corruption frequency by about 28 %.
- The magnitude effect, stemming from shorter tenures, reduces the average cost of corruption.
- Stricter term limits are associated with lower overall corruption.
- Term limits thus serve as an institutional safeguard against political corruption.
It is well established that lame-duck incumbents tend to be less accountable (Besley and Case, 1995, 2003), hence more prone to corruption, and Tsur (2022) showed that penultimate terms reinforce this effect. [...] Corrupt activities typically require close and trusted relationships between the public officials involved in the malfeasance and the private actors offering bribes. This intimacy and trust do not develop overnight, but require time to cultivate. [...] Consequently, such corrupt networks are often built gradually through repeated interactions, shared secrets, and a history of successful illicit transactions.