Dominant Personality and Politically Inexperienced Presidents Challenge Term Limits

Abstract

Research has found that the context in which presidents govern explains the relaxation of term limits. However, presidents have strong motivations to retain power, and a minority of leaders from different world regions have actively attempted to overstay in office. I propose that the individual differences of the presidents explain why some of them challenge their term limits. Building on semistructured interviews with former presidents, I hypothesize that leaders who have a dominant personality and are politically inexperienced are more likely to attempt to overstay in office. Using a novel data set, I conduct discrete-time duration models that test the hypotheses for the 1945–2012 period in Latin America. The results confirm the expectations, suggesting that we need to consider both the context and the personal characteristics of chief executives to understand term extensions. More broadly, the results encourage further examination of the impact that leaders have on executive governance.