Contested, Violated but Persistent: Presidential Term Limits in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa

Presidential term limits have been a crucial institutional feature of the third wave of democratization. They are meant to safeguard democracy by promoting alternation in office and preventing the personalization of power. However, since the 1990s term limits have been subject to frequent contestation by incumbents. Such contestation process has often been considered a sign of autocratization, particularly when it involves the weakening of other constitutional constraints, such as courts and legislatures. Term-limit contestations have attracted the attention of scholars working with a global perspective as well as with a regional or country-specific one too. Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa are focal points of these trends, despite their different histories of presidentialism and diverging types of term-limit rules.

This book generates new empirical and theoretical insights by bringing together the scholarship on Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, providing context-bound intraregional research as well as long-term perspectives for the study of term-limit change. The chapters advance novel findings on institutionalization, the power of precedence, incumbent-centred strategies, and approaches to protect presidential term limits.

This volume will be of great use to students and researchers interested in Latin American and African studies, comparative politics as well as political leadership. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Democratization.

Charlotte Heyl is Associate Fellow at the GIGA Institute for African Affairs, Hamburg, Germany. Her research focuses on judicial politics, elections, and presidentialism in Sub-Saharan Africa. Heyl earned her doctoral degree in Political Science from the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. She has conducted field research in Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, and Senegal.

Mariana Llanos is Lead Research Fellow at the GIGA Institute for Latin American Studies and Professor at the University of Erfurt, Germany. She has published extensively on comparative political institutions in Latin America, particularly on the countries of the Southern Cone. Her current research focuses on presidential impeachments, courts-executive relations, and the personalization of power.