Critical Junctures in Executive Aggrandizement:Lessons on Democratic Resilience from Africa

The comparative literature regularly identifies executive aggrandizement as one of the most common pathways of autocratization. Yet because the most widely read research tends to emphasise North American, European and a small number of high profile Latin American cases, it has tended to focus on efforts to weaken once credible legislatures, judiciaries and electoral systems. As a result, it has had less to say about term-limit evasions, which are relatively rare in these countries, but common in many parts of what is often called the “Global South”. This is a significant limitation, because term-limit evasions go hand-in-hand with executive aggrandizement in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa and have been argued to be particularly detrimental to the quality of democracy. This theory-building article seeks to correct this oversight by drawing on African literature and cases to identify five specific mechanisms through which the removal of term-limits undermines democratic resilience. Based on an updated dataset of all attempted term-limit evasions from 1990-2024, and a comparison of Burundi, Kenya and Uganda, we argue that the strategies employed by would-be autocrats to consolidate power are not equally consequential. Instead, we show that certain strategies, such as term-limit evasion, are much more likely to constitute critical junctures in democratic decline, closing off the possibility of “bouncing back”. In turn, this analysis highlights the importance of centring African experiences in debates on executive aggrandizement – particularly with regards to presidential systems, which are more numerous in Africa than in any other region of the world.