Presidential Term Limits as a Credible-Commitment Mechanism
Contra the conventional wisdom that term limits are meaningless in dictatorships, Brazil’s military regime developed term-limits for its chief executives and managed a durable political order. This chapter argue that term limits moderated intra-elite conflicts, thus contributing to regime stability. Term limits were key to reconcile two warring factions within the armed forces. The authors see term limits as a credible-commitment mechanism. Three elements are jointly sufficient to explain the adoption of term limits: (1) the armed forces’ decision in 1964 to part ways with the decades-old pattern of episodic, short political interventions and stay in office for the long haul; (2) a legalist tradition that led the new regime to keep a façade of constitutionalism through a myriad of political institutions; and (3) the ideological and political cleavages within the armed forces. We corroborate our arguments using a new dataset of tension events between the military and the government in 1946–85.