Going it Alone: The Adverse Effect of Executive Term Limits on Bargaining

It is widely accepted that executive term limits provide a check on executive power. I challenge this assumption by arguing that executive term limits pose an obstacle to inter-branch bargaining because they both limit tenure potential and force an executive from office precisely when she is most prone to bargain. While previous research has assumed that an executive’s tenure potential remains constant throughout his time in office, I argue that the tenure potential of a term-limited executive varies with time left in office. The perfect correlation between time served (experience) and maximum remaining time in office (tenure potential) among U.S. presidents precludes empirical analysis about the effects of tenure potential and experience. Accordingly, I turn to the American states for analysis, and find strong empirical support for my theory.

Law-abiders, lame ducks, and over-stayers: the Africa Executive Term Limits (AETL) dataset

Besides elections, the sub-Saharan wave of political reforms of the 1990s led several countries to introduce limits to the number of terms that a chief executive can serve, even though several leaders managed to bypass them. While Africa’s executive term limits (ETLs) politics has gained scholarly attention, the literature mostly consists of in-depth small-N analyses. Systematic comparative research is rare. To contribute filling this gap, this article presents a new Africa Executive Term Limits (AETL) dataset. Covering 49 sub-Saharan polities throughout the 1990–2019 period, AETL represents the most complete and updated collection of data on Africa’s ETLs politics, and a versatile research tool to address several questions on the present and future of this continent. A preliminary assessment of the new data finds ETLs to be increasingly respected, and to have positive returns for government alternation and development. These findings point to new research avenues that AETL may help travel.

Term Limits and Succession in Dictatorships

This chapter explores executive term limits in authoritarian regimes. Though it may seem counter-intuitive, authoritarian regimes often willingly implement term limits. This chapter explains why this is the case and how term limits might help to maintain autocratic stability. The chapter also explains how term limits are enforced and what type of authoritarian regime is most likely to have term limits, looking at personalist regimes, single-party regimes, and military regimes. As the chapter will argue, many single-party regimes implement executive term limits because they ensure leadership turnover and prolong the tenure of the regime. Nevertheless, term limits do not always lead to stability. This chapter also explores the cases where term limits may lead to the downfall of a regime or at least have a liberalizing effect on the regime.

One Size Does Not Fit All

Our chapter elaborates the distribution of term limit provisions across time and space. We draw on the Comparative Constitutions Project, which records data from written constitutions for independent states since 1789. We show that term limits have become more common in presidential systems, and that there are regional variations to the patterns. We also examine internal variations in the design of executive term limits. There is relatively little variation across written constitutions in length of executive term, even though the time required to develop, implement, and evaluate policies would probably depend on a number of variables that differ across time and space. We also note the role of both courts and constitutional amendments in modifying the provisions.