Public servants worldwide face legal restrictions on their ability to leave the public sector and represent private interests before the government in which they served—a phenomenon known as the revolving door. Within the United States, many states have passed so-called revolving door laws over the past half century, most commonly by imposing a cooling-off period after a public official leaves office.

These laws have been presented as a partial solution to the revolving door problem, but these restrictions involve trade-offs. If a politician is required to wait one or two years before working as a lobbyist, it may have the benefit of depreciating the value of their connections, thus reducing a lobbyist’s ability to exploit ties with former colleagues in government. Much of the public discourse has focused on this aspect of revolving door restrictions, but these rules may also affect people’s choice to enter or leave the government. They may reduce the number of candidates and change the composition of candidates by lowering the benefits of holding office. They may also encourage incumbents to stay in office longer since these rules postpone the benefits of departure.

Our research studies the consequences of revolving door laws on entering and exiting state-level politics in the United States. As of March 2025, 39 states had passed revolving door restrictions at different times, while 11 states had no such restrictions. The timing and propensity of states to pass revolving door restrictions are, perhaps surprisingly, uncorrelated with state geography or income. For example, Massachusetts was the first to pass revolving door statutes in 1962, while Delaware, Vermont, and Oklahoma were the most recent. States without revolving door laws include Northern blue states, such as Minnesota and Illinois, as well as Southern red states, such as Arkansas and Texas.

Our analysis exploits the staggered adoption of revolving door laws among states over time to identify the effect of these restrictions. It compares the characteristics and behaviors of legislators from 1968 to 2022 running for or serving in office in states that adopted these laws with those of legislators in states that adopted them later or have not adopted them at all.

We found that revolving door laws reduced the number of candidates who ran for office. Specifically, these laws reduced the number of new candidates for state legislative districts by 0.12 on average, indicating that lobbying restrictions reduced the attractiveness of holding state office. This is a sizable effect, given that the average number of new candidates per district was 0.91. By contrast, the probability that incumbents sought reelection increased by 3.1 percentage points from the preexisting probability of 78 percent. The decline in new candidates may account at least partly for the increase in the incumbent win rate by 3.9 percentage points from 74 percent. The decline in new candidates also increased the likelihood that candidates stood unopposed by 8.5 percentage points from 31 percent, and the probability that an incumbent stood unopposed increased by 7.4 percentage points from 27 percent. Overall, our findings suggest that the collective effect of revolving door laws is to reduce the competitiveness of political races by reducing entry to and exit from office.

Furthermore, our analysis explores the types of people that revolving door laws discourage from running for office. People with higher abilities, who have more lucrative career options, may be more likely to opt out of holding office because of the reduced financial benefits of politics. We developed a dataset on state legislators’ educational credentials and found mixed evidence on the effect of revolving door laws on candidates’ credentials. However, these laws did affect candidates’ ideologies. The number of independent candidates declined more than Democratic and Republican candidates following the passage of revolving door laws. Moreover, there was a steeper decline in moderate candidates from all parties relative to the decline in more extreme candidates.

Revolving door laws likely affected candidates with more extreme ideologies less because their motives for holding office were not financial to begin with. The same reasoning likely explains why revolving door laws encouraged the exit of more moderate politicians. The decline in moderate candidates suggests a link between revolving door restrictions and increased polarization in state-level politics. Relatedly, our research finds that candidates who eventually registered as lobbyists tended to be more moderate regardless of their party affiliation. Politicians who became lobbyists were also more likely to have a higher-level degree and to have graduated from a higher-ranked college.

While our analysis focuses on how revolving door laws affect who enters and exits politics, there are other ways these laws might influence policy. They may also reduce the chances that policies are captured by private interests employing well-connected people as lobbyists who recently served as legislators. A comprehensive assessment of revolving door laws lies beyond the scope of this study. However, our findings on how these laws alter the candidate pool and the behavior of incumbents are one important element of such an assessment.

Note
This research brief is based on Raymond Fisman et al., “Revolving Door Laws and Political Selection,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 33626, March 2025.