Law-abiders, lame ducks, and over-stayers: the Africa Executive Term Limits (AETL) dataset

Besides elections, the sub-Saharan wave of political reforms of the 1990s led several countries to introduce limits to the number of terms that a chief executive can serve, even though several leaders managed to bypass them. While Africa’s executive term limits (ETLs) politics has gained scholarly attention, the literature mostly consists of in-depth small-N analyses. Systematic comparative research is rare. To contribute filling this gap, this article presents a new Africa Executive Term Limits (AETL) dataset. Covering 49 sub-Saharan polities throughout the 1990–2019 period, AETL represents the most complete and updated collection of data on Africa’s ETLs politics, and a versatile research tool to address several questions on the present and future of this continent. A preliminary assessment of the new data finds ETLs to be increasingly respected, and to have positive returns for government alternation and development. These findings point to new research avenues that AETL may help travel.