Seeking Support for Executive Power Grabs: Leaders’ Rhetoric Around Term-Limit Violations

Research on autocratization pays increasing attention to the rhetoric and communication narratives that those incumbent leaders trying to aggrandize their executive power use to justify their actions. This paper expands upon previous such work by focusing on a rather peculiar incumbent-driven form of autocratization, namely term-limit violation attempts, which remain relatively frequent, especially in certain regions of the world, such as Africa and Latin America. Specifically, this paper examines how incumbent would-be autocrats leverage diverse discourses to frame, and shape support for, these tenure-related executive power grabs. Term-limit violation attempts – which encompass all those strategies aimed at either removing term limit constitutional prescriptions, avoiding them with some (more or less) legal deception, or lengthen their duration – constitute quite a visible and disruptive form of executive power grab, especially compared to the gradual and slow-paced instances of executive aggrandizement, which much of current research on autocratization focuses on. Given their visibility and disruptiveness, term-limit violation attempts are generally anticipated to provoke popular backlash and international condemnation. Consequently, incumbents seeking to extend their tenure are more likely than other power-grabbing leaders to ‘go public’ and try to describe and rationalise their actions as compatible with democratic principles, thereby mitigating the potential political costs of these democratic transgressions. Employing a qualitative case-based analysis enhanced with quantitative text analysis of an original corpus of speeches delivered primarily by African and Latin American leaders contemplating executive term limit manipulations, this research first identifies the various discourses/frames utilized by incumbents to justify such power expansions and subsequently explores their effects on popular acceptance of these violations.