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The term of the US House of Representatives is two years, which is very short compared to parliaments in other countries (e.g. in Germany the Bundestag is elected for four years and state parliaments are shifting from four to five years).

Have there been (or are there) serious proposals in recent history (say after 1900) to extend the terms?

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Such a change would require a constitutional amendment, since the term length is established by article I, section 2, clause 1 of the constitution. According to a rather vague history of the matter on the House's site:

there have been efforts as late as the 1960s to change its length.

So presumably no more recent, serious attempts. (The page is pretty good at discussing how the term length came to be during the Convention: basically a compromise between the British practice of 3 years, back then, and the US states legislatures' standards of just one year, back then.)

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