Law-abiders, lame ducks, and over-stayers: the Africa Executive Term Limits (AETL) dataset
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Law‑abiders, lame ducks, and over‑stayers: the Africa Executive Term Limits (AETL) dataset Andrea Cassani1 Accepted: 1 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Besides elections, the sub-Saharan wave of political reforms of the 1990s led several countries to introduce limits to the number of terms that a chief executive can serve, even though several leaders managed to bypass them. While Africa’s executive term limits (ETLs) politics has gained scholarly attention, the literature mostly consists of in-depth small-N analyses. Systematic comparative research is rare. To contribute filling this gap, this article presents a new Africa Executive Term Limits (AETL) dataset. Covering 49 sub-Saharan polities throughout the 1990–2019 period, AETL represents the most complete and updated collection of data on Africa’s ETLs politics, and a versatile research tool to address several questions on the present and future of this continent. A preliminary assessment of the new data finds ETLs to be increasingly respected, and to have positive returns for government alternation and development. These findings point to new research avenues that AETL may help travel. Keywords Sub-Saharan Africa · Term limits · Dataset · Democratization · Autocratization · Personal rule
Introduction Besides multiparty universal suffrage elections, the dramatic series of regime transitions that Africa experienced during the 1990s led several countries to adopt specific provisions aimed to limit the number of terms that a chief executive can serve. Executive term limits (ETLs) help de-personalise political power and favour Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1057/s4130 4-020-00291-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Andrea Cassani [email protected] 1
Department of Social and Political Science, Università degli Studi di Milano, Via Conservatorio, 7, 20122 Milan, Italy Vol.:(0123456789)
A. Cassani
alternation at the government (Maltz 2007). For this reason, their introduction in African reformed constitutions was welcomed as an important step in the process of institutionalisation that decades of post-colonial neopatrimonialism and “big man” rule have delayed (Akech 2011; Cheeseman 2018). Unfortunately, the global wave of (re-)autocratization that has been unfolding since the late 1990s (Luehrmann and Lindberg 2019; Cassani and Tomini 2020) had no mercy on the region. ETLs have thus become one of the main targets of African would-be autocrats that aim to hang on to power and revive personal rule, often successfully. Africa’s ETLs politics has been at the centre of a lively debate during the past two decades, especially concerning leaders’ decision to either comply or challenge these legal restrictions (Baker 2002; Reyntjens 2020; to name a few). However, this literature mostly consists of qualitative small-N studies, and the generalisability of their findings has rarely been assessed (but see Baturo 2014 and McKie 2019 for cross-regional
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