Benjamin Kay writes:
I wonder if you saw Bruce Reed’s article The Year of Running Dangerously — In a tough economy, incumbency is the one job nobody wants. about the recent flurry of retirement announcements in the Senate but also less well publicized ones in the House. My understanding is that there is a known effect on retirement from census driven redistricting. We also happen to be in a census year but I haven’t read any journalists discussing that as as a factor. Do you have any insight into the relative explanatory decomposition of partisan politics, redistricting related concerns, and simple economy driven unpopularity in these retirement decision?
My reply: Retirement rates definitely go up in redistricting years (see, for example, figure 3 here), but that would be 2012, not 2010, I believe. The census is this year, but I don’t think they’re planning to redraw the district lines in time for the 2010 elections.
In any case, I imagine that somebody has studied retirement rates, to see if they tend to go up in marginal seats in bad economies. Overall, retirement rates are about the same in marginal seats as any other (at least, that’s what Gary and I found when we looked at it in the late 1980s), but I could imagine that things vary by year. The data are out there, so I imagine somebody has studied this.
P.S. I’ve never understood why anybody would want to retire from a comfortable white-collar job. But now, spending a year on sabbatical and relaxing most of the time, I can really understand the appeal of retirement.