Executive Aggrandizement in Africa: Presidential Rule, Term-Limits and Democratic Erosion

African politics stands at a crossroads. While 2024 saw democratic erosion and/or authoritarian consolidation in many countries including Chad, Niger, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zimbabwe, the continent also saw more democratic transfers of power than in any year it its history. This raises an important question: what explains the growing gap between the most and least democratic states? Many classic theories and understandings of democratization have been used to address this issue, including past episodes of conflict, international linkage and leverage, the form of pre-colonial political authority, and versions of modernization theory. What has received insufficient attention thus far is the impact of key moments of institutional continuity and rupture. Employing a historical institutionalist approach, this paper argues that whether or not presidential term-limits are retained represents a critical juncture. When term-limits were removed, executive aggrandizement – one of the most common pathways of autocratization that has been identified by researchers, and the most common one in Africa – becomes much more likely. When they remain, there is a much higher prospect that elections will remain competitive, and hence that the ruling party will be defeated in subsequent elections. The main empirical challenge in conducting this analysis is to differentiate between the impact of term-limits and the impact of the background factors that make it more or less likely that term-limits are respected. Given that term-limits are most likely to be removed in countries where the pre-conditions for democracy are not present, a correlation between elite aggrandizement and term-limit removal may not imply a causal relationship. To overcome this challenge, we complement quantitative analysis with process-tracing of the impact of term-limit removal in pairs of countries designed to be “most similar” cases with the exception that term-limits were respected in one case and not the other. These include Kenya and Uganda and Burundi and Liberia. The findings reveal the significance of presidential agency to democratic erosion in Africa, but also the extent to which this process is shaped by the strength of institutional checks and balances.