Autocrats frequently appeal to socially conservative values, but little is known about how or even whether such strategies are actually paying political dividends. To address important issues of causality, this study exploits Russian president Vladimir Putin’s 2020 bid to gain a popular mandate for contravening presidential term limits in part by bundling this constitutional change with a raft of amendments that would enshrine traditional morality (including heteronormativity and anti-secularism) in Russia’s basic law. Drawing on an original experiment-bearing survey of the Russian population, it finds that Putin’s appeal to these values generated substantial new support for Putin’s reform package, primarily from social conservatives who did not support him politically. These findings expand our understanding of authoritarian practices and policy making by revealing one way in which core political values are leveraged to facilitate autocracy-enabling institutional changes and potentially other ends that autocrats might pursue.

Despite nearly two centuries of actively stylizing itself as above the partisan fray of banal politics, the US Supreme Court faces increasing scrutiny over its ideological nature, ethical lapses, and perceived disconnection from democratic accountability. This article explores potential reforms including ethics guidelines, public affairs offices, and term limits to enhance the Court’s legitimacy. It also examines trends in judicial decision making, the Court’s relationship with public opinion, and the influence of identity politics on judicial perceptions through an examination of the scholarship on the Court. The article concludes by emphasizing the need for ongoing research and methodological innovation to address these challenges and ensure the Court’s role in American democracy.

A vast body of work investigates the consequences of legislative term limits for public policy. However, considerably less research has delved into their effects in noneconomic policy domains. In this article, we develop the argument that implemented term limits increase the effect that a state government’s ideology has on the state’s incarceration rate. When analyzing incarceration rates among all states between 1979 and 2017, we find evidence to support our theoretical expectation. Specifically, for states with term limits, we find that an increase in state government conservatism is associated with a higher incarceration rate. Conversely, for non-term-limited states, we find that the policy preferences of the state government have little influence on the incarceration rate. These findings deepen our insight into how institutional design can affect public policy.

This article seeks to compare the policy histories of the legislative term limits in France and the United States. Both nations debated, initially adopted, and then ultimately rejected imposing term limits during the foundational moments of their democracies. Reemerging in the 1990s in America, proposals to refresh government through such limits have been successful in the states and have failed at the national level. The idea regained prominence in France when Emmanuel Macron supported it during his 2017 presidential election. Although Macron eventually abandoned the proposal, the revival of this debate is an opportunity to draw broad parallels but identify critical differences between the two nations in the philosophical debates over term limits and the ways that leaders have embraced or abandoned them to fulfill their political goals. We show how the idea circulated between the two nations, without a parallel exchange of evidence about its effects.

Legislative term limits garnered public support because they promised to drain the swamp, removing entrenched incumbents from office. There is often a partisan dimension to this appeal since “the swamp” that is to be “drained” has often been controlled by one party for a lengthy period. However, it remains unclear to what extent term limits realign partisanship within US state legislatures. Using newly available turnover data, this research evaluates how legislative partisanship shifted after the implementation of term limits in state legislatures and continued over 20 years. The initial surge effects of term limits did appear to level the playing field between parties. The passage of term limits reversed party majorities in state legislatures, primarily benefiting newfound Republican majorities. These findings have important implications for current understandings of legislative term limits, as more states revisit these proposals, and provide insight into party trends at the state legislative level.

This article examines the relationship between term limits in parliament and “electoral disconnection,” the notion that legislators constrained in their ability to run for office face diminished incentives to perform strategic activities to boost their chances of securing candidacy and re-election. We leverage the case of the Italian Five Star Movement’s party-imposed limit of two terms for affiliates seeking to gain or retain a parliamentary seat. We exploit an original dataset of parliamentary activities covering both chambers of the Italian Parliament between 2013 and 2022. We estimate a series of mixed-effect regression models to assess the performance of MPs who were elected in 2013 and re-elected in 2018. In line with our expectations, the evidence suggests that term-limited representatives serving their second mandate tend to become less productive when it comes to “electorally lucrative” activities and more prone to rebelling than their non-term-limited colleagues. These findings contribute to our understanding of the incentives that drive parliamentary behavior.

This article examines the relationship between legislative civility and legislative productivity in US state legislatures. The research employs data from the National Survey of State Legislative Lobbyists and from the State Policy Innovation and Diffusion (SPID) database. The former dataset is used to generate an overall civility index for each state as developed by Kettler et al. The SPID database allows one to measure the legislative productivity of a state legislature. Employing these data, negative binomial and Poisson regression models reveal that state legislatures rated as more civil by their own lobbyists produced significantly more pieces of noteworthy legislation than those legislative bodies rated as less civil. These results suggest that the quality of internal legislative dynamics matters for legislative productivity.

Former legislators who lobby exacerbate the effects of financial resources on the relative political influence that various organized interests achieve. These lobbyists receive more income and achieve favorable policy outcomes more often than other lobbyists. The value of these revolving-door lobbyists, however, is contingent on the continued presence of former colleagues in legislatures. Former legislators achieve influence because of their insider connections, and membership turnover among incumbents decreases the value of this asset for interest groups. I examine the incomes and clienteles of former legislators who lobbied in the American states over seven decades. Turnover is a consistent, negative predictor of revolver value. This effect is enhanced by the presence of legislative staff support. This study is the first to examine the value of revolving-door lobbyists in the state legislatures. My findings imply that reforms that induce turnover help to level playing fields of political advocacy among interests with different levels of financial resources.

The vast majority of sub-Saharan countries have adopted constitutional clauses establishing that elected presidents cannot serve more than two mandates. While an extensive literature has examined why African leaders comply with or else try to manipulate term limits, the policy implications of the latter remain unexplored. Existing studies of other world regions suggest that setting a maximum number of terms presidents can serve tends to make them ‘lame ducks’ during their final mandate. We reconsider this argument, and posit and demonstrate empirically that constitutional limits can actually induce positive effects on second-term presidents' actions compared to their first terms. More specifically, the absence of electoral pressures, the concern for their post-presidential future and legacy-building motivations may lead to improvements in the rule of law, especially regarding the functioning of the judiciary. This article represents the first empirical investigation of the performance of Africa's second-term lame-duck presidents.

Despite theoretical arguments suggesting the strong effects of presidential term limits and re-election on democracy, there is surprisingly little empirical evidence to evaluate them. We test both the effect on democracy of the existence of a consecutive re-election rule and of reforms introducing it for incumbent presidents. Using evidence from Latin American countries between 1945 and 2018, we test their relationship to both vertical and horizontal accountability. A synthetic control method is employed to account for the effect of term-limit reforms, and time-series cross-section models for modelling the association with the re-election rule. Both vertical and horizontal accountability as well as the quality of democracy are eroded by term-limit evasion reforms in most countries and strengthened in none between 1990 and 2018. Allowing presidents to run for re-election – relative to term-limited ones – is consistently associated with weak democratic outcomes.

Since the third wave of democracy, term limits have become a popular fixture of most constitutions intended to constrain the executive. Yet, recent constitutional reforms around the world show that presidents seeking re-election sometimes overturn the entire constitutional order to extend their power. What is the impact of these constitutional manipulations on the longevity of the executive in office? Using survival analysis of all political leaders and national constitutions from 1875 to 2015, this article demonstrates, for the first time, that when ‘authoritarian-aspiring’ presidents remove constitutional term limits, they increase their stay in office by more than 40%. Our findings contrast with a widely held position in the comparative authoritarian literature suggesting that dictators survive longer under institutional constraints. On the contrary, we argue that by removing constitutional barriers, rulers consolidate more power at the expense of their most ambitious allies and can stay in power longer.

What is the role of legislative term limits in the structure of legislative institutions? Using Mooney’s collective action problem theoretical framework on legislative leadership power, I claim that legislative term limits should be a key determinant in a state Speaker’s power via the delegation of institutional tools that control the lawmaking process. Speakers can use these tools to influence policy outcomes and their colleagues. I test this expectation in an analysis of lower chamber rules in nearly all states between 1981 and 2015. The results indicate that states with implemented term limits are associated with a more powerful Speaker. These findings suggest that a more nuanced relationship between legislative term limits and leadership power exist than previously thought.

Across the United States over time, numbers of registered interest groups have continued to increase, but these populations mask the total amount of lobbying that is occurring within America's statehouses. Among registered interests, average numbers of hired lobbyists have increased markedly since the late 1980s. This study both quantifies this increase and identifies a set of causal variables. Previous studies have proposed a variety of short-term, political and long-term, institutional factors that govern rates of lobbying. Using a new data set spanning multiple decades, I find that changes in lobbying can largely be ascribed to institutional variables, including the implementation of term limits and regulations on lobbying. Lobby regulations, one-party dominance, and legislative expenditures also appear to play a role in determining rates of multiclient lobbying. Direct democracy and state spending do not affect the hiring of lobbyists by registered interest groups.

The unconstitutional constitutional amendment doctrine has emerged as a highly successful, albeit still controversial, export in comparative constitutional law. The doctrine has often been defended as protecting a delegation from the people to the political institutions that they created. Other work has noted the doctrine’s potential utility in guarding against abusive constitutionalism. In this article, we consider how these justifications fare when expanded to encompass claims against the original constitution itself, rather than a later amendment to the text. That is, beyond the unconstitutional constitutional amendment doctrine, can or should there be a doctrine of an unconstitutional constitution? Our question is spurred by a puzzling 2015 case from Honduras where the Supreme Court held an unamendable one-term limit on presidential terms, as well as protective provisions punishing attempts to alter that limit, to be unconstitutional. What is particularly striking about the case is that these provisions were not later amendments to the constitution, but rather parts of the original 1982 constitution itself. Thus, this article examines the possibility of ‘an unconstitutional constitution’, what we predict to be the next trend in global constitutionalism.