Deviations from presidential term limits are potentially damaging to democracies in low- and middle-income countries because they allow for the dangerous consolidation of authority. One way to address this problem is to determine the critical institutions able to protect term limits. By evaluating a set of relevant historical cases using qualitative comparative analysis, this study highlights the combinations of institutions associated with the successful protection of presidential term limits in the past. The study finds that independent judiciaries, legislatures, electoral commissions, and militaries, strong political parties, and vibrant civil societies, working together in various combinations, are the institutions that most effectively protect presidential term limits when they are challenged in democratic countries. Exploiting these findings, large-N qualitative analysis is then used to examine the hypothesized regularities of the optimal pathways identified by the QCA to explain the causal mechanism behind the protection of term limits in the study cases.
Bill Gelfeld (Fri,) studied this question.