yay!!! Congrats!!!!

So young but so politically savvy!

So impactful that I'm even using her tennis rackets tonight!

Even without looking at success rates, attempts themselves are coming from almost all non-democracies! It would be interesting to look at margins, especially since we've identified it as an important variable for predicting candidate behavior :)

Link here: www.annemeng.com/research.html

The original article, "The Law and Politics of Presidential Term Limit Evasion," and replication data can be found on my website. Thanks for reading! /end

Summary table here /7

The last two options don't seem feasible in the US. One is to write a new constitution (Blank Slate strategy) and the other strategy is to cancel or delay elections. Even in autocracies, these strategies are rarely used, although they have a high success rate (probably bc these are autocracies). /6

A Placeholder strategy is another option - this is what Putin did by allowing an associate to become the President and then run again. Depending on the how the rule is written, this may be legal. But this strategy introduces Crown Prince concerns, which is probably why it's rarely used (6 cases) /5

A second kind of strategy (used in 9 cases) is to use the Courts to "reinterpret" term limits. The Courts strategy has an 83% success rate, compared to the Amendment strategy, which has a 60% success rate. /4

By far the most popular strategy (68% of cases) was to try to pass a constitutional amendment removing or changing the term limit rule. This strategy is most successful when the incumbent's ruling party dominates the legislature. In the US, passing a constitutional amendment is very difficult. /3

We collected data on all incumbents who faced constitutional term limits from 2000-2018 (including democracies and autocracies). Out of 231 observations, 23% of incumbents made some kind of attempt to circumvent term limits. Figure 1 above summarizes the 5 main strategies. /2

The only downside is that this paper doesn't come with a 300 page codebook ;)

This feels like a weather event warning hahah