Presidential Term Limits: The Reform Processes in Africa and Latin America

Throughout the third wave of democratization, 18 Latin American and 34 African states (re-)introduced presidential term limit rules. The adoption of presidential term limits has been based on democratic aspirations: the aim has been to constrain executive power by limiting the president’s time in office. In recent years, these rules have been contested in both regions. Powerholders have sought to relax presidential term limit rules in numerous instances by modifying the constitution or reinterpreting the rules. The empirical frequency of reform attempts has attracted much scholarly interest. Existing research has sought to explain the conditions under which powerholders attempt to relax term limit rules, the success of reforms, and the impact of term limit rules on democracy. Yet, little attention has been paid to the impact of the different paths that term limit reforms have pursued on the development of the political regime. To study the impact on democracy we require first a more proper understanding on the variety of reform processes and their different natures of decision-making. Therefore, the first goal of this paper is systematically map and compare the commonalities and particularities of term limit reform processes in Latin America and Africa. Then, it undertakes a preliminary assessment of these processes on the political regime. The paper makes a conceptual, an empirical, and a methodological contribution. Conceptually, we elaborate how the decision-making processes of term limit reforms differed in their degree of inclusiveness and legality. Inclusiveness refers to the institutions and actors that were involved in the decision-making process. An inclusive process reflects also the society’s diverse views as well as the voice of the opposition. The legality dimension covers how lawful the decision-making process was in terms of the constitutional spirit of the respective rules. While some powerholders have respected the constitutional order during their reform attempts, others have sought controversial interpretations of existing formal rules through informal interferences. We assume that more inclusive and more legal decision-making processes contribute positively to the future quality of democracy. Empirically, we undertake the first systematic cross-regional analysis of presidential term limit reforms in Latin America and Africa. Although term limit reforms have been underway in these two regions and offer a large variance of procedures as well as of outcomes, no systematic comparison of them has been undertaken until now. The two regions, Latin America and Africa, comprise together the majority of presidential and semi-presidential regimes in the world. We compiled an original dataset of approximately 60 term limit reform episodes in both regions since the third wave of democratization. The dataset systematically covers all steps of the reform processes in terms of the involved actors and institutions as well as the outcome of the reforms. Moreover, we coded the inclusiveness and credibility of the decision-making process. Methodologically, we innovatively analyse the reform episodes with the method of sequence analysis to identify and compare different clusters of term limit reform trajectories. This mapping exercise informs our preliminary assessments on the impact of decision-making processes on regime type and quality.