The (In)stability of Presidential Term Limits in Africa and Latin America: Assessing the Impact of Tenure Rule Reforms on the Political Regime
Final Report Abstract
Presidential term limits are a constitutional restriction on the number of fixed terms – consecutive or not - that the directly elected head of state may serve. Many presidential or semi-presidential systems of government adopted or reinstated term-limit provisions during the third wave of democratisation that swept the world in the 1980s and 1990s. The global adoption of term limits demonstrated the widespread belief that limiting presidential stays in power strengthens democracy. However, as much as the impressive adoption of presidential term limits was extensive in nature, so was the challenge that this institution began to face as early as the mid-1990s. Sooner or later, tensions between rule and rulers became frequent across time and continents, with strong leaders refusing to accept constraints and engaging in practices of continuismo to satisfy their personal interest in remaining in power. This project focused on two world regions, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, which hosted a considerable number of cases of term-limit-rule relaxation, circumvention, frequent alteration and removal since democratization in the 1980s and 1990s. In our research design, the countries were the unit of analysis (58 in total, 39 in sub-Saharan Africa and 19 in Latin America), each one characterised by a particular path of term-limit reforms and a singular constellation of presidential term-limit and term-length rules. These individual country features, however, had resemblance with rule types and reform paths in other countries, which invited us to compare. We collected data on 117 attempts to change the term-limit rule in these two regions. We found out that most term-limit reforms occurred in a small number of countries, where presidential term limits were modified recurrently. (A share of 34 % of the total countries studied comprised 64 % of the reform attempts.) Our analysis allowed us to disentangle different paths of rule instability, thus finetuning existing notions of institutional weakness. We showed, for example, that the institutional conditions in countries where the rule is threatened and challenged, but not changed, are different from those where it is changed several times, usually as part of a “tug of war” among political forces, in which the president may eventually prevail. We also found that rule stability is more prevalent than initially thought and that term limits coexist today with different types of political regimes. This questioned established ideas linking rule stability to institutionalization and democratization: we rather found that rule stability often masks the ineffectiveness of institutions. This is far away from the democratic aspirations that initially accompanied the adoption or resumption of term limits at the beginning of the third wave of democratization. The burst of the Covid-19 pandemic in February 2020 obliged us to redefine our work program. Unable to hold in-presence meetings and to travel for fieldwork, we devoted more time to exploring general sources of information, mostly available in digital form, which we deemed useful for the sequence analysis of term-limit reforms. We also organize a virtual seminar in with scholars working on political institutions in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa were invited to present papers with a strong empirical and original approach on the topic. The articles that resulted from this workshop and subsequent conversations were published as a special issue in Democratization, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2022. They study term limits from regional, cross-regional and global perspectives, contribute to deepening our knowledge of institutionalization, the power of precedence, incumbents’ preferences and strategies, and of the measures that democracies should implement and are in fact implementing to protect term limits under attack. By bringing together two regions in which term-limit reforms featured so prominently, and where autocratization processes have been rampantly underway, we have made apparent that the democratic case for term limits needs strengthening. We have also provided a rounder view on the kinds of approaches that have been (and could be) applied to enhance the protection of term-limit rules, i.e., constitutional mechanisms, citizen engagement and external support.
Publications
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(2017): „Trotz aller Widrigkeiten: Demokratie in Afrika.“ GIGA Focus Afrika 07/2017
Grauvogel, Julia /Charlotte Heyl
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(2019) “Presidential Pathways and Profiles.” In The Oxford Handbook of Political Executives. Edited by Rudy B. Andeweg, Robert Elgie, Ludger Helms, Juliet Kaarbo, and Ferdinand Müller-Rommel
Inácio, Magna and Mariana Llanos
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(2019): “Senegal (1970-2016): Presidential Term Limit Reforms Never Come Alone”, in Alexander Baturo/Robert Elgie (eds.): The Politics of Presidential Term Limits, Oxford University Press, 339–361
Heyl, Charlotte
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(2019): “The Judiciary and the Rule of Law in Africa”, in Nic Cheeseman (Hrsg.): Oxford Encyclopedia of African Politics, Oxford University Press
Heyl, Charlotte
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(2019): “The politics of presidential term limits in Argentina”, in Alexander Baturo/Robert Elgie (eds.): The Politics of Presidential Term Limits. Oxford University Press, Chapter 23, p. 473-494
Llanos, Mariana
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(2020): “Presidential Term Limits in Africa and Latin America: Contested but Resilient.” GIGA Focus Global 01/2020
Heyl, Charlotte /Mariana Llanos
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(2021): “The Study of Term Limits in Sub- Saharan Africa: Lessons on Democratisation and Autocratisation”, Introduction to the Special Issue “The Struggle of Presidential Term Limits in Africa”, Africa Spectrum, Vol. 55, No. 3, 215-227
Grauvogel, Julia /Charlotte Heyl
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(2022): “Sequences of Presidential-term-limit Reforms: Latin America and Sub- Saharan Africa”, Democratization, Vol. 29, No. 1, 18-37
Heyl, Charlotte /Mariana Llanos
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Special Issue “Contested, Violated but Persistent: Presidential Term Limits in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa”, in Democratization, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2022
Heyl, Charlotte /Mariana Llanos (eds.)
