Protected Term Limits Project

systems_hard_term_limits is a collection of all unamendable or otherwise protected term limit provisions in the world from 1789 to present. To collect these, I started with the Comparative Constitutions Project's list of all unamendable clauses and manually read through hundreds of constitutions to find which ones specifically protected term limits. The unit of analysis is a protected term limit provision. For each distinct provision, I code the year of the constitution where the protection was implemented. If an amendment introduced the protection, I code the year for both the original constitution and the amendment introducing the protection. If the protection is ever removed, I note the year that the protection is removed and the method by which it is removed (amendment or new constitution). Countries can have multiple provisions over time; any word change in the protection results in a new entry in the dataset. aggregated_systems_hard_term_limits aggregates all protections for term limits in a given country, regardless of word changes or goals of the protective provisions. That is, so long as a country has a protected term limit active, it is coded positive for that period of time. Multiple entries for single countries indicate that protections were removed and eventually added again.