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List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Contributors xiii
1. Presidential Term Limits 1 Alexander Baturo and Robert Elgie
SECTION I
2. Theorizing Presidential Rotation 19 Peter Stone
3. One Size Does Not Fit All: The Provision and Interpretation of Presidential Term Limits 37 Tom Ginsburg and Zachary Elkins
4. Term Limits and the Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendment Doctrine: Lessons from Latin America
David Landau, Yaniv Roznai, and Rosalind Dixon
5. Continuismo in Comparison: Avoidance, Extension, and Removal of Presidential Term Limits
Alexander Baturo
SECTION
II
6. Presidential Term Limits in Latin America: c.1820–1985 103 Leiv Marsteintredet
7. Presidential Term Limits as a Credible-Commitment Mechanism: The Case of Brazil’s Military Regime 123 Octavio Amorim Neto and Igor P. Acácio
8. The Politics of Presidential Term Limits in Mexico
Joseph L. Klesner
9. Presidential Term Limits in Nicaragua
David Close
10. The Politics of Presidential Term Limits in Tunisia
Alessandra Bonci and Francesco Cavatorta
11. Presidential Term Limits in Togo: Electoral Accountability Postponed
John R. Heilbrunn
12. Presidential Terms in Kazakhstan: Less is More?
Dmitry Nurumov and Vasil Vashchanka
13. China: Limiting and Regularizing Top Political Power
Zhengxu Wang and Anastas Vangeli
14. Term Limits and Succession in Dictatorships
Natasha Ezrow
SECTION III
15. The Politics of Presidential Term Limits in Malawi
Peter VonDoepp
16. Should I Stay or Should I Go? Term Limits, Elections, and Political Change in Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia
Nic Cheeseman
17. Senegal (1970–2016): Presidential Term Limit Reforms Never Come Alone
Charlotte Heyl
18. Presidential Term Limits in Burkina Faso
Sophia Moestrup
19. The Uses and Abuses of Presidential Term Limits in Russian Politics
Paul Chaisty
SECTION IV
20. The Politics of Presidential Term Limits in the United States
Michael J. Korzi
21.
Robert Elgie
22. Term Limits in South Korea: Promises and Perils
Fiona Yap
23. The Politics of Presidential Term Limits in Argentina
Mariana Llanos
24. The Politics of Presidential Term Limits in Central America: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras
Juan Muñoz-Portillo and Ilka Treminio
25. The Politics of Presidential Term Limits in Latin America: From Re-democratization to Today
José Antonio Cheibub and Alejandro Medina
26. Presidential Term Limits in Bolivia
David Doyle
SECTION V
27. Presidential Term Limits and the International Community 557 Christina Murray, Eric Alston, and Micha Wiebusch
28. Effects of Presidential Term Limits
Akisato Suzuki
29. What Have We Learned about Presidential Term Limits?
Alexander Baturo and Robert Elgie
5.3A
5.3B
,
List of Figures
, 1945–2017
6.1 Development of models for presidential term limits in Latin America c.1820–1985
7.1
7.2
7.3
regimes (1946–2010)
(1946–2010)
(1946–85)
7.4 Weighted total of tension events related to presidential succession vs. total score per year (1964–1985)
7.5 Brazil’s gross domestic product growth (1960–90)
19.1 Predicted probability that opponents/supporters of stricter term limits agreed with the statement: “The protest meetings in Moscow and other cities against the results of the December 2011 elections to the State Duma were justified.”
25.1 Classification of presidential term limit regimes in Latin America, 1946–2016
25.2 Proportion of Latin American countries by presidential reelection rules, 1946–2016 528
28.1 Conditional average marginal effects on the probability of the onset of repression
28.2 Predicted probability of the onset of repression 598
28.3 Conditional average marginal effects on the severity of repression
6.1
6.2
6.3
7.1
List of Tables
19.2 Percentage of respondents who agreed or disagreed with the statement: “The President of Russia
19.3 Percentage of party voters who agreed or disagreed with the statement: “The President of Russia
in total.”
19.4 Percentage of supporters/opponents of stricter term limits who agreed or disagreed with the statement: “The protest meetings in Moscow and other cities against the results of the December 2011 elections to the State Duma were justified.”
20.1 Summary of rules on presidential terms in the US
21.1 Summary of rules relating to presidential term limits and lengths in Europe
22.1 Summary of legislation regarding presidential term, South Korea
23.1 Presidential term limits in Argentina
23.2 Presidential terms in Argentina. Full and restricted democracies (1916–2015)
24.1 Presidential term limits in four Central American democracies 496
24.2 Description of presidential term limits in Central American constitutions, 1839–2015
25.1 Term limit regimes in Latin America, 1946–2016
25.2 Change in term limit regimes by regime type and regime events
26.1 Constitutions and term limits in Bolivia (1826–78)
26.2 Individual-level determinants of support for the extension of term limits 546
26.3 Democratic attitudes and support for the extension of term limits 548
28.1 Existing empirical findings and tentative hypotheses on effects of term limits 587
28.2 Analysis of change in the composition of expenditure
28.3 Analysis of the onset and the severity of repression
28.4 Analysis of MID reciprocation
List of Contributors
Alexander Baturo is Associate Professor of Government, Dublin City University, Ireland. His research is centered on comparative democratization, leadership, and the United Nations. His articles have appeared in such journals as the Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, British Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, and Public Choice. His book, Democracy, Dictatorship, and Term Limits, was published by the Michigan University Press in 2014, and won the 2015 Brian Farrell prize for the best book from the Political Science Association of Ireland. He also consults for the international organizations and NGOs; his research has been cited, inter alia, in the Washington Post, Bloomberg, and Tages Anzeiger.
Robert Elgie is Paddy Moriarty Professor of Government and International Studies at Dublin City University, Ireland and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA). He has published numerous books, including Semipresidentialism: Sub-types and Democratic Performance (2011) and Political Leadership: A Pragmatic Institutionalist Approach (2018). He has published in journals such as Comparative Political Studies, British Journal of Political Science, Political Research Quarterly, and Journal of Democracy. He is the editor of the journal French Politics, which is published by Palgrave Macmillan. He is the Review Editor for Government and Opposition. He is the founder and co-editor with Sona Golder and Shane Martin of the Politics of Institutions series with Oxford University Press.
Peter Stone is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Trinity College Dublin. He previously taught at Stanford University and held a Faculty Fellowship at Tulane University’s Center for Ethics and Public Affairs. He works in contemporary political theory, with particular interest in theories of justice, democratic theory, rational choice theory, and the philosophy of social science. He is the author of The Luck of the Draw: The Role of Lotteries in Decision Making (Oxford University Press, 2011) and the editor of Lotteries in Public Life: A Reader (Imprint Academic, 2011). His work has appeared in such journals as Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (CRISPP), Economics and Philosophy, the Journal of Political Philosophy, the Journal of Theoretical Politics, Political Theory, Rationality and Society, Social Theory and Practice, and Theory and Decision. He currently serves as Secretary of the Political Studies Association of Ireland (PSAI).
Zachary Elkins is Associate Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. He writes on issues of democracy, institutional
List of Contributors
reform, research methods, and national identity, with an emphasis on cases in Latin America. With Tom Ginsburg (University of Chicago), Elkins co-directs both the Comparative Constitutions Project, a NSF-funded initiative to understand the causes and consequences of constitutional choices, and the website constituteproject.org, which provides resources and analysis for constitutional drafters in new democracies. Elkins earned his BA from Yale University, an MA from the University of Texas at Austin, and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
Tom Ginsburg is the Leo Spitz Professor of International Law at the University of Chicago, where he also holds an appointment in the Political Science Department. He holds BA, JD, and PhD degrees from the University of California at Berkeley. His latest book is How to Save a Constitutional Democracy (2018, with Aziz Huq). With Zachary Elkins (University of Texas), he co-directs both the Comparative Constitutions Project, a NSF-funded initiative to understand the causes and consequences of constitutional choices, and the website constituteproject.org, which provides resources and analysis for constitutional drafters in new democracies. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and currently serves a senior advisor on Constitution Building to International IDEA.
David Landau is the Mason Ladd Professor and Associate Dean for International Programs at Florida State University College of Law. He holds a AB, JD, and PhD (in political science) from Harvard University. He works primarily in the field of comparative constitutional law, with a focus on Latin America. With Manuel Jose Cepeda Espinosa, he is the author of Colombian Constitutional Law: Leading Cases (Oxford University Press 2017). He has also published a number of articles on abusive forms of constitutional change and term limits, including “Abusive Constitutionalism” in the UC Davis Law Review, “Populist Constitutions” in the Chicago Law Review, “Transnational Constitutionalism and a Limited Doctrine of Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendment” in the International Journal of Constitutional Law (with Rosalind Dixon), and “Presidential Term Limits in Latin America: Transnational Constitutional Dialogue as a Double Edged Sword,” forthcoming in Law and Ethics of Human Rights.
Yaniv Roznai is a Senior Lecturer at the Radzyner School of Law, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya. He holds a PhD and LLM from The London School of Economics, and LLB and BA degrees in Law and Government from the IDC. Yaniv was a Post-Doc Fellow at the Minerva Center for the Rule of Law under Extreme Conditions, University of Haifa and at the Hauser Global Law School, New York University, as well as a visiting researcher at the Program in Law and Public Affair, Princeton University. He is the Co-Founding Chair of the Israeli Association of Legislation, and former
secretary general of the Israeli Association of Public Law. In 2015, he was awarded the 2014 Thesis Prize of the European Group of Public Law for his PhD dissertation. His book, Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendments: The Limits of Amendment Powers was published in 2017 by Oxford University Press.
Rosalind Dixon is Professor of Law at the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney), Faculty of Law, whose research focuses on comparative constitutional law and constitutional design, theories of constitutional dialogue and amendment, socio-economic rights, and constitutional law and gender. She is on the Council, and is Co-President Elect, of the International Society of Constitutional Law, and on the Editorial Board of its associated journal, the International Journal of Constitutional Law; a member of the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law; and deputy director of the Herbert Smith Freehills Initiative on Law and Economics at UNSW. She previously served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School, the University of Chicago Law School, and the National University Singapore.
Leiv Marsteintredet holds a PhD in Comparative Politics and is Assistant Professor at the Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen. His research focuses on Latin America, in particular topics related to political institutions, presidential crises, impeachments and falls, and Norwegian relations with Latin America. Marsteintredet has also done extensive research on the politics and political institutions of the Dominican Republic. Currently he is studying the development and history of succession rules and the vicepresidency in Latin America. He has published in journals such as Comparative Politics, International Political Science Review, Journal of Latin American Studies, and Journal of Democracy. He is the editor of Norge i LatinAmerika. Forbindelser og forestillinger (Norway in Latin America. Relations and conceptions) (CappelenDamm Akademisk 2017).
Octavio Amorim Neto is Professor of Political Science at the Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration (EBAPE) at the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV), Rio de Janeiro. His works have been published in several international journals. He is the author of Presidencialismo e Governabilidade nas Américas (2006), and De Dutra a Lula: A Condução e os Determinantes da Política Externa Brasileira (2011).
Igor P. Acácio is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. His research interests are civil-military relations, democratic consolidation, and defense policy. He holds a Master’s degree in political science from the Institute of Social and Political Studies at State University of Rio de Janeiro (IESP-UERJ). He is co-author of Atlas da Política Brasileira de Defesa (2017).
List of Contributors
Joseph L. Klesner is Provost of Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio. He has taught political science there since 1985, focusing on comparative politics, especially of Mexico and Latin America. His research first centered on Mexican electoral politics, political reform, and opposition party development as key elements of that nation’s political liberalization. He later turned to comparative analysis of political participation and public opinion in Latin America. Supported by Fulbright grants to Mexico, South America, and Ireland, and by the American Political Science Association and the National Science Foundation, his articles and book chapters have appeared in journals such as Comparative Political Studies, Latin American Research Review, Latin American Politics and Society, and Electoral Studies, among several others, as well as many edited volumes. His textbook, Comparative Politics: An Introduction, appeared in 2014.
David Close is Professor of Political Science in the Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. His specialty is Nicaraguan politics, which he has studied for four decades. He has written, edited, or co-edited several books on that subject. The most recent of these is Nicaragua: Navigating the Politics of Democracy, published in 2016.
Francesco Cavatorta is Full Professor in the Department of Political Science at Laval University in Quebec, Canada. His research focuses on the political situation of the Middle East and he is currently working on a project examining the role of political parties in the post-uprisings period. He recently published the co-edited volume (with Lise Storm) Political Parties in the Arab World (Edinburgh University Press, 2018).
Alessandra Bonci is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Laval University. Her research focuses on Islamist movements and parties in the Middle East and North Africa. Her dissertation project deals with the rise of Salafism in the region.
John R. Heilbrunn teaches international studies at the Colorado School of Mines. He is also a Research Fellow at Les Afriques dans le Monde (LAM), a research unit of the Institut d’Études Politiques, Bordeaux. He is a trained Political Scientist (PhD UCLA 1994) who has worked on a variety of topics related to development in Africa and the global south. Heilbrunn is the author of numerous publications on Africa including Oil, Development and Democracy in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2014). His current research addresses Africa’s emerging middle classes and democracy, corruption and development, and the political economy of the extractive industries in Africa. In addition to his academic research, Heilbrunn has served as a consultant to a variety of donors including the World Bank, the OECD, the African Development Bank, the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development, and the United States Agency for International Development.
Dmitry Nurumov is currently an independent legal expert. He served as Legal Adviser and Senior Adviser to the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities in the Hague. Prior to that, he worked as the Rule of Law Coordinator in Central Asia for the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. Dmitry also worked for the OSCE Centre in Almaty and other international organizations. He holds a PhD degree in International Public Law from Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO).
Vasil Vashchanka (LLM) is an independent researcher and consultant. He previously worked for the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (Stockholm, Sweden), as well as the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (Warsaw, Poland). He has extensive professional experience in Central Asia through rule of law assistance projects and election observation.
Zhengxu Wang is Shanghai City’s 1000-Talent Distinguished Professor and Oriental Scholar Distinguished Professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs Fudan University, China. He obtained his PhD in political Science from University of Michigan, and subsequently obtained academic experiences in the National University of Singapore and the UK’s University of Nottingham, where he served as Associate Professor at its School of Contemporary Chinese Studies and Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of its China Policy Institute. He researches on national party and state institutions and politics in China, especially the politics among top political elites, citizen values, and political behaviors in China and East Asia, and institutional changes and political reforms in China, among other topics. His publications have appeared in Governance, International Review of Sociology, Political Research Quarterly, Japanese Journal of Political Science, Contemporary Politics, Asian Journal of Public Opinion Research, The China Quarterly, The China Journal, Journal of Contemporary China, and others.
Anastas Vangeli is a Doctoral Researcher at the Graduate School for Social Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. His research combines his long-standing interest and knowledge of China, Eastern Europe, and trajectories of (post)socialist politics in an evolving global context. His latest publications focus on the normative aspects and cognitive impact of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the development and impact of China’s “16 + 1” cooperation, and other aspects of China-Europe relations, as well as the dynamics of elite politics in China.
Natasha Ezrow is a Professor of Government at University of Essex, where she has been working since 2007. Her research focuses on authoritarian regimes, state failure, corruption, and violent non-state actors. She is the author of several books on these topics including the forthcoming Democracies and Autocracies, Violent Non-State Actors, Failed States and Institutional Decay,
and Dictators and Dictatorships. In addition to research she teaches modules in Comparative Politics and International Relations. She also consults for the European Union External Action Service and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission in Western Asia. Professor Ezrow completed her PhD from the University of Santa Barbara in 2002.
Peter VonDoepp is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont. His research focuses on African politics, with specific focus on judicial development and state–media relations. He is author of Judicial Politics in New Democracies: Cases from Southern Africa (Lynne Rienner, 2009) and co-editor of The Fate of Africa’s Democratic Experiments: Elites and Institutions (Indiana, 2005). His other published work appears in a variety of outlets, including Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Politics, and Comparative Politics. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, Fulbright-Hays program, and Norwegian Research Council.
Nic Cheeseman (@fromagehomme) is Professor of Democracy at the University of Birmingham. He mainly works on democracy and elections and has conducted fieldwork in a number of countries including Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Some of his publications based on this research have won prizes, including the GIGA award for the best article in Comparative Area Studies (2013) and the Frank Cass Award for the best article in Democratization (2015). Professor Cheeseman is also the author of Democracy in Africa (2015), Institutions and Democracy in Africa (2017), How to Rig an Election (2018), and Coalitional Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective (2018). In addition, he is the founding editor of the Oxford Encyclopaedia of African Politics, an advisor to Kofi Annan’s African Progress Panel, and a frequent commentator on African and global events in outlets such as The Economist, Le Monde, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, and many more.
Charlotte Heyl is a Research Fellow at the GIGA Institute of African Affairs in Hamburg, Germany. Her research focuses on processes of democratization, judicial politics, elections and presidentialism in sub-Saharan Africa. Heyl earned her doctoral degree in Political Science from the University of Duisburg-Essen. In her thesis, she analyzed the contribution of constitutional courts to the democratic quality of elections in Madagascar and Senegal. Her current research examines the impact of presidential term limit reforms on political regime development in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. The project is funded by the DFG German Research Foundation. Heyl has conducted field research in Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, and Senegal. Her work has been published in Comparative Politics and Democratization.
Sophia Moestrup is the Deputy Director for Central and West Africa at the National Democratic Institute (NDI), in Washington, DC. She has worked for NDI since 2005 on the design and implementation of democracy support programs in the region. Prior to joining NDI, Dr Moestrup spent six years in Francophone Africa, working for the United Nations in Cameroon, and for the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA) in Niger where she served as Country Representative. She has been a consultant for the World Bank on public expenditure management and social accountability issues, authoring a number of chapters for the World Bank’s Social Accountability Sourcebook. She has published widely on semi-presidentialism and democratic performance, including four co-edited volumes with Robert Elgie. She holds BA and MA degrees in Economics from the University of Copenhagen, and a PhD in political science from the George Washington University.
Paul Chaisty is the University Lecturer in Russian Government at St Antony’s College, Oxford University. His publications include Legislative Politics and Economic Power in Russia (Palgrave, 2006) and (co-author) Coalitional Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective: Minority Executives in Multiparty Systems (Oxford University Press, 2018), plus numerous articles in journals such as Europe-Asia Studies, European Journal of Political Research, Government and Opposition, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Party Politics, Political Studies, Political Research Quarterly, and Post-Soviet Affairs. His research interests cover legislative, party, and interest group politics in post-communist Russia; political attitudes in Russia; nationalism in Russia and Ukraine; and comparative presidentialism.
Michael J. Korzi is Professor of Political Science at Towson University in Maryland, United States. He has published on a variety of topics dealing with the presidency and presidential politics, including the presidency and public opinion, presidential signing statements, William Howard Taft’s theory of presidential leadership, and term limits and voter turnout in presidential democracies. His book, Presidential Term Limits in American History: Power, Principles, & Politics, a theoretical and historical survey of the subject, received the American Political Science Association’s Richard E. Neustadt Award for the “Best Book on Executive Politics” in 2012.
O. Fiona Yap is Associate Professor of Policy and Governance at the Australian National University. Her main research interests are on policy and political economy in East and Southeast Asia, focusing on how strategic interactions between government and citizens lead to outcomes such as democratization, peace, and economic development. Her research is available through journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of East Asian Studies, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Social Science Quarterly, Korea Observer, Japanese Journal of Political Science,
Asian Survey, Government and Opposition, Journal of Public Policy, and Policy Sciences. She is co-editor of the European Journal of Development Research, and editorial board member for Asian Survey, Korea Observer, 21st Century Political Science Review, and Asia & the Pacific Policy Studies. She is frequent media commentator, with invitations from ABC (Australia), BBC (UK), Channel NewsAsia (Singapore), Primetime (Korea), and Morning Wave Busan (Korea).
Mariana Llanos is a Lead Research Fellow at the GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Institute of Latin American Studies, in Hamburg, Germany, and the head of the Accountability and Participation research program at the same institution. She has been conducting comparative research on the political institutions of Latin America, with a special focus on Argentina and Brazil for many years, and has published several books and numerous peer-reviewed articles and books. Her most recent research interests include the institutional presidency, presidential term limits, impeachments and impeachment threats, and the relationship between courts and the elected branches. Using a comparative area studies approach, her newest project examines the impact of presidential term limit reforms on political regime developments in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. This project is funded by the German Research Foundation.
Juan Muñoz-Portillo is currently an Affiliated Researcher at the Department of Politics and International Studies of the University of Cambridge, where he previously was a Philomathia Post-doctoral Research Associate. He received his PhD in Politics and International Relations from Dublin City University. His research focuses on comparative political economy, particularly on pork barrel politics and clientelism in Central America and causes and consequences of fiscal austerity policies in the European Union.
Ilka Treminio has a PhD in Political Science. She is the Director of the Costa Rican Office of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) and a Researcher and Professor at the School of Political Science, University of Costa Rica. Treminio works in the field of institutional reforms, in particular reforms of presidential re-elections in Latin America. Her most recent publication analyses issues related to Latin American populism.
José Antonio Cheibub is Professor of Political Science and the Mary Thomas Marshall Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. José Antonio Cheibub’s research interests are in comparative politics, with a focus on the emergence and effects of democratic regimes and specific democratic institutions. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of Parliaments and Government Formation: Unpacking Investiture Rules (Oxford, 2015), Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, and Democracy (Cambridge, 2007), the Democracy Sourcebook (MIT, 2003) and Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and
of Contributors
Well-Being in the World, 1950–1990 (Cambridge, 2000). The latter received the 2001 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award given by the American Political Science Association for the best book published in the United Stated on government, politics, or international affairs. He has published in several edited volumes and in journals such as the American Political Science Review, World Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Political Science Research and Methods, Comparative Political Studies, Public Choice, Politics and Society, Journal of Democracy, Constitutional Political Economy, and Studies in Comparative International Development.
Alejandro Medina is a graduate student in Political Science at Texas A&M University.
David Doyle is an Associate Professor of Politics in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Hugh’s College. He is also a member of the Latin American Centre. His general research and teaching interests include comparative politics and comparative political economy, including work on the political economy of the social contract in Latin America; the relationship between remittances and political risk; and experimental work on populism. His research has appeared in journals such as the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, and Comparative Political Studies.
Christina Murray is a Senior Adviser on the Standby Team of Mediation Advisers in the United Nations Department of Political Affairs, and Emeritus Professor of Human Rights and Constitutional Law at the University of Cape Town. In 1994 she was elected to the panel of seven experts that advised the South African Constitutional Assembly. Since then she has combined academic and practical work on matters relating to constitutionalism, the rule of law, and democratic institutions. She was a member of the commission that prepared the current Kenyan constitution and the 2012 Fiji Constitution Commission and more recently has worked in Yemen, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Libya, and Somalia among other places. Her recent research focuses on constitution-making processes and political settlements, and constitutional design.
Eric Alston is a Scholar in Residence in the Finance Division and the Faculty Director of the Hernando de Soto Capital Markets Program in the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder. He also serves as a Research Associate with the Comparative Constitutions Project. Alston’s research and teaching is centered in the fields of law and economics and institutional and organizational analysis, which he applies to research questions in the development of rights along frontiers, the design and implementation of constitutions, and questions of legal/institutional transitions more generally. His outreach and service activities include educational
materials, instructional workshops, and comparative expertise to constitutional drafting processes and peace negotiations worldwide, working with organizations like International IDEA and the International Development Law Organization.
Micha Wiebusch is a researcher at the Institute of Development Policy (IOB) of the University of Antwerp and at the Law Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He is also an associate research fellow at the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS) in Bruges. His research considers the norms and practices of the African Union on promoting and protecting democracy, human rights, and constitutionalism in Africa. He has worked at the African Union Commission in the Department of Legal Affairs and as a constitutional expert for African Union Election Observation Missions.
Akisato Suzuki is a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute. He is also affiliated as a Research Fellow with the Institute for International Conflict Resolution and Reconstruction, Dublin City University. He obtained his PhD from Dublin City University in 2015. His research interests include international/ethnic conflict, leadership, and methodology. His publications have appeared in Research and Politics, Cooperation and Conflict, International Politics, the Journal of Development Studies, European Political Science, and Federal Governance
1 Presidential Term Limits
Alexander Baturo and Robert Elgie
Term limits restrict the time that office holders can remain in a position of authority. They can apply to any elected representative—deputies, governors, mayors. They can also apply to unelected officials—central bank governors, judges, police chiefs. This volume is concerned with such restrictions on the heads of state—presidents. Presidential term limits are constitutional provisions that restrict the maximum length of time that presidents can serve in office. They stipulate the length of term the presidents can serve between elections and the number of consecutive or non-consecutive terms that are permitted. The question of term limits affects presidents the world over. It affects presidents in democratic and non-democratic regimes. Even though democracy and binding term limits generally travel together, the fact is that democracy does not guarantee that its presidents will be term-limited and non-democracy does not always imply the lack of binding term limits. It also affects all types of presidents irrespective of how they are elected to office, whether they are elected directly as in France, by an electoral college the members of which are popularly elected as in the US, or whether they are elected indirectly by the legislature as in Italy.
The question under what conditions incumbent presidents comply with the constitutional restrictions on term limits is important. When leaders do not comply, their decisions often provoke political conflict. The outcome of such conflict may have profound consequences. In 2018, when upon the expiration of his last term President Sargsyan of Armenia violated his earlier pledge and attempted to remain in power as prime minister, the country erupted in protests leading to his resignation and the opposition taking power for the first time. That said, non-compliance with term limits does not always have to provoke conflict for it to be significant for regime dynamics. The 2018 removal of presidential term limits in China was a fait accompli and concerned the least significant post that the leader of China occupied at the time. The change however signalled that important principles of its collective leadership were being reconsidered.
Similarly, the introduction of a two-term presidential limit in Egypt following the fall of Mubarak was heralded with universal acclaim at the time. However, with President Sisi beginning his last four-year term in 2018, the potential removal of term limits has unavoidably appeared on the political agenda. If they are removed, it will signal that the regime is heading toward personalism. How can we study presidential term limits? The institution of term limits can be understood as the dependent variable, as the explanatory variable, as a focal point, and as an indicator—a tripwire. We can also think of term limits as an institution, as a constitutional norm, and as a norm of political behaviour. First, we can treat presidential term limits as the dependent variable, as the outcome to be explained. In practice, this means studying why term limits are introduced, amended, or abolished. It requires the study of compliance or non-compliance with presidential term limits and factors behind such behaviour. Second, term limits can be approached as the independent variable to explain various economic or political outcomes. Given term limits are so strongly endogenous to democracy, the identification of their effects is difficult. Still, depending on the context, term limits may have direct mechanical effects (for example, if they are binding, term limits have the direct effect of restricting the maximum amount of time that political leaders serve in office), and indirect, psychological, or informational effects. Presidential term limits have indirect effects on the behaviour of presidents who pursue different policies as a result of their inability to seek re-election, for instance. They may have informational effects by signalling pending incumbent turnover to potential challengers. Vice versa, as in the case of the plainly redundant removal of term limits in China in 2018, the informational effect may be to publicly signal the leader’s intention to stay in office “forever”. Presidential term limits may also be understood as a focal point for elite and mass coordination against possible dictatorial takeover. Finally, and irrespective of whether presidential term limits can be employed as the independent or dependent variable, they can also be an important signalling device, a tripwire and a component indicator of executive constraints. For example, as in the case of the plainly redundant removal of term limits in China in 2018.1
The issue of presidential term limits as the dependent variable is addressed throughout the volume when contributors discuss compliance with tenure restrictions and the determinants thereof. Many chapters, particularly those dedicated to countries with a long history of presidentialism, also discuss various effects of presidential term limits. Overall, and particularly because of a very “tight” relationship between democracy and term limits, we believe that it is more fruitful to approach the study of presidential term limits by carefully accounting for the time period, place and context, the power and preferences of relevant political actors, contingent factors such as the power of precedent or the role of the first post-independence leaders, inter alia—as in the politics of presidential term limits.
In this context, this volume asks three main questions: in what ways are presidents formally restricted in the time they can remain in office; what restrictions have countries chosen to place on their presidents and why; and what is the effect of those restrictions, in other words what difference, if any, do they make?
To begin, this chapter provides some basic information about the politics of presidential term limits. There are four sections. The first sketches some of the constitutional choices affecting presidential term limits; the second outlines the standard argument for and against presidential term limits; the third considers some of the political issues involved in the decision to introduce, abolish, or amend presidential term limits; the fourth points to some of the likely consequences of presidential term limits.
CHOICES, CHOICES—CONSTITUTIONS AND PRESIDENTIAL TERM LIMITS
As a constitutional clause, the provision on presidential term limits is typically found alongside other eligibility requirements for presidential candidates. It is relatively short and is usually overshadowed by longer and more consequential provisions on executive–legislative relations that define the nature of presidentialism. As Ginsburg, Melton, and Elkins (2011: 1818) note, the choice of presidential term limits is a “second-order” constitutional decision. That is to say, only once a country has chosen to have a president as head of state is the question of whether limits should be placed on the president’s term in office raised. Nonetheless, as soon as this first-order decision has been made, the issue of presidential term limits is necessarily raised. In this second-order context, constitutional decision makers have to make various choices.
Constitutional decision makers can choose to say absolutely nothing about term limits. This constitutional silence has the effect of leaving the president’s term completely unrestricted. The president is faced with no formal obligation to leave office and any attempt to force the president to step down after a period of time is totally unjustifiable in the courts. By contrast, constitutional decision makers can also choose to specify that the president’s term is completely unrestricted. For example, they can decide to state explicitly that the president can be re-elected, while remaining silent about any restrictions on re-election. They can also say that the incumbent president is ‘president for life’, or they can introduce a set of restrictions while at the same time exempting the current incumbent from them, as discussed at length in Chapter 5 on the practice of continuismo—a term for seeking to change presidential term limits that is widely used across Latin America but can also be applied to presidents the world over. These choices have similar but nonetheless different implications.
