The Logic of Term Limits Pledges

This article offers a rationale for candidates who voluntarily pledge to term limits. My analysis is built on a standard political agency model to which I add an election campaign where candidates can commit not to seek a second term. Pledging to term limits allows candidates to signal their private type and insulate themselves from career concerns. By doing so, candidates leverage the fact that the representative voter endogenously prefers to elect a candidate who does not seek reelection because she either has on average more desirable attributes, distorts her decisions to a lesser extent, or both. As a result, candidates who pledge to term limits have a higher probability of being elected in the first place. I characterize the equilibria of a model specification in which politicians differ with respect to their policy preferences and uncover circumstances in which term limits pledges are informative and improve the voter's welfare.

(Un)Natural Disasters: Electoral Cycles in Disaster Relief

Emergency spending is often exempt from campaign period restrictions and procurement guidelines, making it attractive for opportunistic politicians, but natural disasters are seen as outside political business cycles. However, droughts are frequent but challenging to measure, so politicians can leverage discretion for electoral gain. This paper analyzes electoral cycles, term limits, and partisan targeting around municipal drought declaration in Northeast Brazil. Two sources of exogeneity (rainfall shocks, electoral calendar) isolate the effect of non-climatic factors on drought declarations. I find that drought declarations, which trigger relief, are more likely in mayoral election years. Incumbents are more likely to win re-election if they declare a drought in the election year, during below or even above average rainfall. The results are consistent with interviews suggesting voters reward competent mayors and mayors trade relief for votes. This study highlights the interaction between distributive and environmental politics, which has increasing consequences due to climate change.

Reproducing Populism

This chapter discusses the third mechanism populist presidents use to reproduce their power: the tilting of the electoral playing field. The chapter shows the centrality of free and fair elections in defining democracy. It then identifies and discusses the main characteristics of democratic elections. The remainder of the chapter shows how unconstrained populist presidents violate four central conditions of free and fair elections: the free formation of alternatives, the free formation of preferences, the freedom to express these preferences, and the neutral management of elections. The chapter argues that the illegal enabling of reelection and the elimination of term limits violate the free formation of alternatives; the restriction of political and civil liberties and unfair access to media undermine the free formation of preferences; voter intimidations and vote buying violate the freedom to express those preferences; and electoral fraud and institutional biases negate the neutral management of elections.

Exploring Municipal Mobilization across States

This chapter zooms out to examine the state-level features that are associated with differences in the intensity of local government lobbying. Several state characteristics correlate with municipal lobbying, such as local property tax limitations, but two of the most striking are the combination of term limits and the level of professionalization in the state legislature. Cities are also more likely to mobilize as state transfers comprise a greater share of municipal budgets. These findings suggest that lobbyists might be particularly useful at facilitating representation in complex legislative environments with high turnover among elected officials—especially when cities depend on the state for revenue.

The Democratic Cost of Consecutive Re-election and Presidential Term-Limit Evasion in Latin America

Despite theoretical arguments suggesting the strong effects of presidential term limits and re-election on democracy, there is surprisingly little empirical evidence to evaluate them. We test both the effect on democracy of the existence of a consecutive re-election rule and of reforms introducing it for incumbent presidents. Using evidence from Latin American countries between 1945 and 2018, we test their relationship to both vertical and horizontal accountability. A synthetic control method is employed to account for the effect of term-limit reforms, and time-series cross-section models for modelling the association with the re-election rule. Both vertical and horizontal accountability as well as the quality of democracy are eroded by term-limit evasion reforms in most countries and strengthened in none between 1990 and 2018. Allowing presidents to run for re-election – relative to term-limited ones – is consistently associated with weak democratic outcomes.

Render unto Caesar Just a Little Bit Longer: The Relationship between Constitutional Reforms and Executive Survival

Since the third wave of democracy, term limits have become a popular fixture of most constitutions intended to constrain the executive. Yet, recent constitutional reforms around the world show that presidents seeking re-election sometimes overturn the entire constitutional order to extend their power. What is the impact of these constitutional manipulations on the longevity of the executive in office? Using survival analysis of all political leaders and national constitutions from 1875 to 2015, this article demonstrates, for the first time, that when ‘authoritarian-aspiring’ presidents remove constitutional term limits, they increase their stay in office by more than 40%. Our findings contrast with a widely held position in the comparative authoritarian literature suggesting that dictators survive longer under institutional constraints. On the contrary, we argue that by removing constitutional barriers, rulers consolidate more power at the expense of their most ambitious allies and can stay in power longer.