The (In)stability of Presidential Term Limits in Africa and Latin America: Assessing the Impact of Tenure Rule Reforms on the Political Regime

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Presidential term limits are a constitutional restriction on the number of terms that the directly elected head of state may serve in presidential or semi-presidential systems of government. Many countries of the world adopted or reinstated term-limit provisions during the wave of democratization that swept the world in the 1980s and 1990s, demonstrating the widespread belief that limiting presidential stays in power strengthens democracy. However, term-limit rules were later challenged, and in some cases they were even modified recurrently. In fact, the subsequent contestation of the term-limit rule became a worldwide phenomenon that often led to deep politico-institutional crises. To what extent does the contestation of this rule affect the type and quality of political regimes? Through what mechanisms do term-limit reforms have such an impact? This project develops an overarching perspective to answer these questions. First, we propose the systematic analysis of all term-limit reform episodes in two regions that have been witnessing a similar trend. In Latin America, re-election bans and term limits were pioneered in the nineteenth century. In Africa, they are regarded as the most prominent institution introduced in the 1990s. In these two regions, which together comprise the majority of the presidential and semi-presidential regimes in the world, approximately 60 term-limit reform attempts have been undertaken in recent decades, most of them successful. Our goal is to conduct a systematic cross-regional comparative analysis of these reform episodes, using a mixed-methods research design. By bringing the two regions together in one study, we can draw upon a considerable number of cases for theory building while simultaneously remaining sensitive to the contexts of our expertise, thereby facilitating the systematic collection and analysis of data. Second, where the literature has tended to concentrate on certain cases, particularly the prolongation of presidential terms, our approach includes the variety of term-limit reforms that have been implemented, the different paths that reform processes have pursued, and the meaning that the changes to constitutional rules could have per se for newly established political regimes. We contribute to theory development by systematically analysing and clustering the cases according to the two major components of term-limit reforms, term-limit type and term-limit decision-making, and assessing their impact on the type and quality of the political regime.