Party Institutionalization and the Removal of Presidential Term Limits in Latin America

With a Little Help from the Opposition? Relaxing Term Limits in the Argentine Provinces, 1983–2017

“…At the same time, other provincial institutions display relatively little variation: all provinces have a presidential system, all gubernatorial terms last four years, most provincial executives are directly elected by plurality rule, 18 and constitutional changes require the approval of a two-thirds majority of (both chambers of) the provincial legislature. 19 Moreover, the fact that the country's two main national parties, the PJ and the UCR, tend to be dominant at the provincial level as well means that differences in party institutionalization (Kouba 2016) are unlikely to account for the timing of constitutional reform within provinces. As indicated in Figure 1b, the analysis is divided into two parts.…”

“…If the distributional consequences of term limits are so obvious -they clearly benefit the incumbent at the expense of those who aspire to succeed him or her, both within the incumbent's party and in the opposition-why would opposition leaders ever help the incumbent to run for another term? Even though the relaxation of presidential term limits has received substantial attention recently (Baturo 2010(Baturo , 2014Negretto 2013;Corrales 2016;Kouba 2016), the existing literature is ill-equipped to answer these questions. By studying the case of the Argentine provinces between 1983 and 2017, we seek to overcome this gap both with a new argument and a novel research design.…”

“…Theoretically, the literature has either ignored the role of the opposition in the reform process (Shugart 1998;Baturo 2010Baturo , 2014Corrales 2016;Kouba 2016) or noted that constitutional reforms involving term 2 We speak of "relaxing" term limits rather than "removing" them because constitutional reforms often let the incumbent run for an additional term, but fall short of eliminating term limits altogether. 3…”

“…The shaded areas illustrate the approaches pursued in this paper: we first study the initiation and legislative stages of the reform process, and then examine the ratification stage in the constituent assembly. Compare with the approach followed by Baturo (2010Baturo ( , 2014 and Kouba (2016) (solid line); Corrales (2016) (dotted line); or Shugart (1998) and Negretto (2009Negretto ( , 2013) (broken line).…”

“…As Figure 1b shows, our approach contrasts sharply with those favored by most of the literature. For example, Baturo (2010Baturo ( , 2014 and Kouba (2016) focused on whether the executive manages to relax term limits or not, regardless of the methods employed (see solid line); this offers the advantage of focusing on the final outcome, albeit at the expense of treating the reform process as a "black box." Corrales, on the other hand, restricted his attention to those executives who openly manifested their interest in relaxing term limits (see dotted line), thus ignoring those presidents who did not announce their intention to relax term limits because they expected to fail (Corrales 2016: 17).…”