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ABSTRACT
Presidential term-limit evasion (TLE) is inconsistent with international human rights, and researchers have linked the practice to democratic backsliding. Yet, this practice has much to uncover, including how different TLE tactics (constitutional court ruling, legislative change, referendum) influence electoral integrity. We expect the increase in the incumbent advantage and the imbalance in the separation of powers obtained through TLE to affect the integrity of the subsequent elections in which the evading leader is running. To test this, we analyse an original dataset of 414 presidential terms in 63 African and Latin American countries (1988–2019), using mixed-effects models to investigate each tactic’s effect on different electoral measures, including overall quality perception, Electoral Management Body Autonomy, election day irregularities, vote buying, and intimidation. We confirm our expectations, further finding that the court mode specifically consistently precedes the worst effects on electoral quality, EMB Autonomy, irregularities, intimidation, and voter registry accuracy.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Jacob R. Turner, the editors, and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback on the paper. We also extend our gratitude to the participants of the Electoral Integrity Project Workshop, the International Political Science Association Congress, and our colleagues at the Democracy Program at The Carter Center for their constructive discussions on this project and earlier versions of the paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The Carter Center, Election Obligations and Standards; Baturo, Democracy, Dictatorship, and Term limits.
2 Maltz, “The Case for Presidential Term Limits”; McKie, “Presidential Term Limits Contravention”; Reyntjens, “Respecting and Circumventing”.
3 Baturo, Democracy, Dictatorship, and Term limits; Kouba, “Party Institutionalization”; Baker, “Outstaying one’s welcome”; Dulani, “Personal Rule and Presidential”; Cassani, “Autocratization by Term Limits”, Corrales, “Can Anyone Stop the president”; Cheeseman, “Should I stay”; Araya, “The Big Five”.
4 Peréz-Liñan, “El Derecho Intermaericano”; Maboudi et al. “Render unto Caeser”.
5 Corrales and Penfold, “Manipulating Term Limits”; Baturo and Elgie, The Politics of Presidential; Landau et al., “Term Limits and the Unconstitutional”.
6 We expect strategic decision-making as, even though they do not have full capacity to choose one of the three modes, since this depends on the country constitution, we do not expect to see a minoritarian president trying to evade term limits through the legislative if this is the predicted route to change the rule in this particular country.
7 Heyl and Llanos, “Sequences of Presidential Term Limits”; Pérez-Liñan, Presidential Impeachment and the New; Linz, “The Perils of Presidentialism”; Riedl, Authoritarian Origins of democratic.
8 Baturo, Democracy, Dictatorship, and term limits.
9 Baturo and Elgie, The Politics of Presidential.
10 Ibid.
11 European Commission for Democracy Through Law, Study No. 908/2017; Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Advisory Opinion OC-28/21.
12 Corrales and Penfold, “Manipulating term limits”.
13 Halff, Changing Term Limits.
14 Baturo and Elgie, The Politics of Presidential, 9.
15 Heyl and Llanos, “Sequences of Presidential Term Limits”.
16 Gerzso and van de Walle, “The Politics of Legislative”.
17 McClean, “The Element of Surprise”.
18 Corrales, “Can anyone stop the president”.
19 Cheibub and Medina, “Politics of Presidential Term Limits in Latin America.”
20 Ginsburg et al., “On the Evasion of Executive”; Heyl and Llanos, “Sequences of Presidential Term Limits”.
21 Baturo and Elgie, The Politics of Presidential.
22 Siavelis and Morgenstern, “Political Recruitment and Candidate”; Carreras, “The Rise of Outsiders”.
23 Corrales and Penfold, “Manipulating Term Limits”, 162.
24 Nowack and Leininger, “Protecting Democrcy From”.
25 Maboudi et al., “Render unto Caeser”.
26 Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding”; Cianetti and Hanley, “The End of the Backsliding”; Maboudi, Nadi and Eisenstadt, “Render unto Caeser”.
27 Tull and Simons, “The Institutionalization of Power”; Haggard and Kaufman, Backslidding: Democratic Regress; Heyl and Llanos, “Sequences of Presidential Term Limits”.
28 Versteeg et al., “The Law and Politics of Presidential”.
29 Walder and Lust, “Unwelcome Change: Coming”.
30 Wunsh and Blanchard, “Patterns of Democratic Backsliding”.
31 Landau et al., “Term Limits and the unconstitutional”.
32 Ibid.
33 Tull and Simons, “The Institutionalization of Power”.
34 Ginsburg et al., “On the Evasion of Executive”; Helmke and Ríos-Figueroa, “Courts in Latin America”.
35 Cassani, “Autocratization by Term Limits”.
36 Schepelle, “Autocratic Legalism”; Bermeo, “On democratic backsliding”; Heyl and Llanos, “Sequences of Presidential Term Limits”.
37 Negretto, “Tinkering with Executive”.
38 Araya, “The Big Five”.
39 Landau et al., “Term Limits and the Unconstitutional”.
40 Maboudi et al., “Render unto Caeser”.
41 Gibler and Randazzo, “Testing the Effects of Independent”; Reenok et al., “Legal Instituitons and Democratic”; Pérez-Liñan et al., “Presidential Hegemony and Democratic”; Staton et al., Can courts be bulwarks.
42 Cleary and Ozturk, “When does Backsliding”; Gamboa, Resisiting Backsliding.
43 James et al., “Electoral Management and the Organizational”.
44 Hartlyn et al., “Eelectoral Governance Matters”; Rosas, “Trust in Elections”; Tarouco, “The Role of Political Parties”.
45 van Ham and Garnett, “Building Impartial Electoral”.
46 Stokes et al., Brokers, Voters and Clientelism; Lundstedt and Edgell, “Institutions of Electoral Integrity”.
47 Dekel et al., “Vote buying: General Elections”.
48 Ocantos et al., “The Conditionality of Vote-Buying”; Canare et al., “An Empirical Analysis of Vote Buying”.
49 Simpser, Why Government and Parties; Cheeseman and Klaas, How to Rig an Election.
50 Higashijima, The Dictator’s Dilemma.
51 Simpser, Why Government and Parties.
52 Schedler, “The Menu of Manipulation”; Birch and Muchlinski, “Electoral Violence”.
53 James and Garnett, “The Determinants of Electoral Registration”.
54 Elklit and Reynolds, “The Impact of Electoral Administration”.
55 Elklit and Reynolds, “The Impact of Electoral Administration”; James and Garnett, “The Determinants of Electoral Registration”.
56 Cheeseman and Klaas, How to Rig an Election; James and Garnett, “The Determinants of Electoral Registration”.
57 Figure AO1 in the Appendix presents the cumulative number of attempts per country.
58 Cassani, “Law-abiders, Lame Ducks”.
59 Within the Cassani data, the possible relationships between presidents and term limits are “ETL not met”, “ETL respected”, “No ETL”, “ETL Manipulated”, and “ETL Failed Manipulation”
60 All other cases for the region, not mentioned in Corrales’ data, were coded as “ETL not met” for presidents that left office before the end of the term, “no ETL” when there was no term-limits rule, and “ETL respect” for all other cases.
61 Gottlieb et al., Democratic Erosion Event Dataset.
62 We were able to compare our data with theirs, providing further validation for our data. We invite readers to the review our online appendix (AO Note 1) where we discuss differences in further detail.
63 We have stronger expectations for the court mode and for the legislative mode, respectively for worse and better outcomes. This is likely an oversimplification of this process, and a complication to the strategic decision-making of the leader in which mode to pursue that this paper does not address. Future work could unpack this dynamic of when and how constitutions are amended to allow incumbents to extend their term limits. However, we also tested the alternate codification and re-run all H2 models considering the alternate codification. These tables are reported on Tables AO8 on the Online Appedix. Results do not change due to TLE modes codification.
64 Coppedge et al., 2022. To build indices, V-Dem uses point estimates from a Bayesian factor analysis model of the component parts of the index.
65 Coppedge et al., V-Dem Codebook v. 12.
66 Baturo, Democracy, Dictatorship and term limits.
67 Pearl, “Causal Diagrams for Empirical Research”.
68 Reyntjens, “Respecting and Circunvaiting presidential”.
69 Cassani, “Autocratization by Term Limits”.
70 Cheeseman, “Should I Stay”; Cassani, “Autocratization by Term Limits”.
71 Cheeseman, “Should I Stay”; Dulani, “Personal Rule and Presidential”.
72 James, Garnett and van Ham, “Electoral Management and the Organizational”.
73 Nowack and Leininger, “Protecting Democrcy From”; Posner and Young, “Term Limits: Leadership”; Dulani, “Personal Rule and Presidential”.
74 Dulani, “Personal Rule and Presidential”; Carter and Nordstrom, “Term Limits, Leader Preferences”; Sert et al., “Militarized Interstate Dispute”.
75 The court mode is stronger and statistically different from legislative mode in three out of six outcomes, and stronger and statistically different from Referendum mode in two out of six outcomes. In instances such as EMB Autonomy and Electoral Irregularities, the court mode is stronger and statistically different from both other modes (see Wald test results in Table AO9 in the online Appendix).
76 We present in the Online Appendix empty models of the regional analyses that demonstrate how the coefficients reproduce the signals of the main analysis (Tables AO11 and AO12). Our mixed-effects models have too many variables for such a small number of observations, and our conclusion is that this drives the lost significance of some coefficients in these regional analyses. When both regions are analysed together in our main analysis, the sample size increases and, while controlling for continent, our results demonstrate a generalizable picture of TLE effects in electoral integrity for presidentialistis systems.
77 The Carter Center Nicaragua 2011 Electoral Observation Mission Report. Accessed April 10, 2024. https://www.cartercenter.org/resources/pdfs/peace/americas/nicaragua_2011_report_post.pdf
78 International IDEA, “Bolivia Elections”. Accessed April 10, 2024. https://www.idea.int/news/bolivia-elections
79 OAS, Final Report Bolivia 2018. Accessed April 10, 2024. https://www.oas.org/fpdb/press/Audit-Report-EN-vFINAL.pdf
80 United States Department of State. 2016 Country Reports onHuman Right Practices, Congo, Republci of the. https://www.refworld.org/reference/annualreport/usdos/2017/en/116436
81 We took out the cases of Cardoso in Brazil, Menem in Argentina, Uribe in Colombia, Hejia and Medina in Dominican Republic.
82 Heyl and Llanos, “Sequences of Presidential Term Limits”.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid.
85 Gamboa, Resisting Backsliding..
86 Nowack and Leininger, “Protecting Democrcy From”.
87 For the same reduced sample, we ran models without democratic foreign aid and interstate conflict and we also lost significance of the court mode coefficient for the models with elections free and fair and voter registry as dependent variables. This is further evidence that the lost of significance is not necessarily related to the inclusion of the new control variables.
88 Cassani, “Law-Abiders”; Corrales, “Can Anyone Stop”; Gottlieb et al., Democratic Erosion Event. And also validated by comparing to Nowack & Leininger and Heyl & Llanos.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ian Batista
Ian Batista holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil. He provides research and project assistance for The Carter Center’s Democracy Program and is a Junior Fellow at the Electoral Integrity Project for the 2024 cohort.
Marcella Morris
Marcella Morris earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from Emory University where she studied International Relations, civil war termination, and institution building. During her time at Emory, she worked with the Democracy Program at the Carter Center and served as the 2022–2023 Democracy and Electoral Integrity Fellow.
David Carroll
David Carroll is the Director of The Carter Center’s Democracy Program. He received his Ph.D. in international relations from the University of South Carolina, has published articles and book chapters on development and democratization, and has taught at the University of South Carolina, Georgia State University, and Sewanee - the University of the South.
Anthony DeMattee
Anthony DeMattee is the lead Data Scientist at The Carter Center’s Democracy Program. He is formerly a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow for Fundamental Research. He completed his joint Ph.D. in public policy from Indiana University, specializing in comparative politics, public policy, and public administration.