Term Limits, Leader Preferences, and Interstate Conflict

Drawing on the idea that electoral accountability is a source for peace, recent scholarship claims that term limits result in democratic leaders who are systematically more likely to initiate conflicts. We consider a broader set of theoretical arguments that allow for the possibility that leaders’ preferences and the strategic environment condition the relationship between term limits and interstate conflict. These arguments suggest multiple hypothetical relationships between term limits and conflict, some of which are conditional on the hawkish or dovish nature of a leader’s preferences. Using a new, leader-year measure of term limits, we find that lame ducks—those incumbents legally prevented from serving as political executives in the following term—are less likely to initiate conflicts, on average, than their electorally accountable counterparts. This result holds among democratic leaders with dovish preferences but not democratic leaders with hawkish preferences, a finding consistent with theories of strategic conflict avoidance.