A national constitution or other statute typically specifies restrictions on executive power, often including a limit to the number of terms the chief executive may hold office. In recent decades, however, some presidents of newly established democracies have extended their tenure by various semilegal means, thereby raising the specter—and in some cases creating the reality—of dictatorship. Alexander Baturo tracks adherence to and defiance of presidential term limits in all types of regimes (not only democratic regimes) around the world since 1960. Drawing on original data collection and fieldwork to investigate the factors that encourage playing by or manipulating the rules, he asks what is at stake for the chief executive if he relinquishes office. Baturo finds that the income-generating capacity of political office in states where rent-seeking is prevalent, as well as concerns over future immunity and status, determines whether or not an executive attempts to retain power beyond the mandated period. Democracy, Dictatorship, and Term Limitswill appeal to scholars of democratization and executive power and also to political theorists.

The hottest political issue in America, term limits, embodies voter fury at incumbent officeholders and the failures of Congress. But now, in this controversial new book, Victor Kamber argues that term limits themselves are a disastrous quick fix and must be stopped.

Presidential term limits are one of the most important institutions in presidentialism. They are at the center of contemporary and historical debates and political battles between incumbent presidents seeking additional terms and their political opponents warning against democratic backsliding and the dangers of personalism. Bringing the team of country experts, comparativists, theorists, constitutional lawyers, and policy practitioners together, The Politics of Presidential Term Limits is a book that aims to provide a one-stop source for the comprehensive study of this topic. It includes theory and survey chapters that explain presidential term limits as an idea, constitutional norm, and an institution; country and comparative chapters including historical, intra-regime, and comparative regional studies, chapters that examine the effects of term limits as well as studies from the perspective of on-the-ground international constitutional builders and that ask what difference do term limits make.--Provided by publisher

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.

In this important volume Norberto Bobbio examines some of the central themes of political theory and presents a systematic exposition of his views. With great astuteness and profound scholarship, Bobbio unfolds the elements for a general theory of politics. Bobbio's wide-ranging argument is focused on four themes: the distinction between the public and the private; the concept of civil society; differing conceptions of the state and differing ways of understanding the legitimacy of state power; and the relation between democracy and dictatorship. Bobbio's discussion draws on a wealth of theoretical and historical material, from Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes and Locke to Marx, Weber, Habermas and Foucault. By analysing the development of different languages of politics in relation to changing social and historical contexts, Bobbio deepens our understanding of the concepts we use to describe and evaluate modern political systems.

Examining constitutional rules and power-sharing in Africa reveals how some dictatorships become institutionalized, rule-based systems.

This book questions the reasons why presidential democracies more likely to break down than parliamentary ones.