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

总统任期限制是宪法对在总统制或半总统制政府中直接选举产生的国家元首任期的限制。在20世纪80年代和90年代席卷世界的民主化浪潮中，世界上许多国家都采用或恢复了任期限制条款，这表明人们普遍认为限制总统的任期可以加强民主主义。但是，任期限制规则后来受到挑战，在某些情况下，这些规则甚至经常被修改。事实上，随后对任期限制规则的争论成为一种全球现象，经常导致深刻的政治制度危机。对这一规则的争论在多大程度上影响了政治体制的类型和质量？任期限制改革通过什么机制产生这样的影响？这个项目开发了一个总体的视角来回答这些问题。首先，我们建议对两个地区的任期限制改革事件进行系统分析，这两个地区已经见证了类似的趋势。在拉丁美洲，连任禁令和任期限制是在19世纪开创的。在非洲，它们被认为是20世纪90年代引入的最重要的制度。这两个区域占世界上总统制和半总统制的大多数，在这两个区域，近几十年来进行了大约60次任期限制改革尝试，其中大多数都取得了成功。我们的目标是对这些改革事件进行系统的跨区域比较分析，采用混合方法的研究设计。通过将这两个领域结合在一起进行一项研究，我们可以利用大量的案例来建立理论，同时对我们的专业知识背景保持敏感，从而促进数据的系统收集和分析。其次，在文献倾向于集中于某些案例的地方，特别是总统任期的延长，我们的方法包括已经实施的各种任期限制改革，改革进程所追求的不同路径，以及宪法规则的变化本身对新建立的政治制度的意义。我们根据任期限制改革的两个主要组成部分，任期限制类型和任期限制决策，系统地分析和聚类案例，并评估它们对政治制度类型和质量的影响，从而为理论发展做出贡献。

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.