IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/ctwqxx/v43y2022i2p309-331.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Protection against autocratisation: how international democracy promotion helped preserve presidential term limits in Malawi and Senegal

Author

Listed:
  • Julia Leininger
  • Daniel Nowack

Abstract

This article analyses the conditions under which international democracy support contributes to protecting presidential term limits. As autocratisation has become an unwelcome global trend, researchers turned to the study of the toolboxes of would-be autocrats, including their attempts to circumvent term limits. Through a paired comparison of failed attempts in Malawi (2002) and Senegal (2012), we find that external democracy support can assist domestic actors and institutions in deflecting challenges to term limits. We offer a novel qualitative analysis that posits that international democracy support can only be effective if sustained by popular democratic attitudes and behaviours of actors in the recipient state. On the one hand, a mix of conditioning relations with the incumbent government while capacitating pro-democratic opposition is a successful strategy in aid-dependent political regimes with a minimum democratic quality. On the other, societal attitudes factor into decision-making at domestic and international levels. Our results suggest that popular pro-democratic attitudes encouraged international democracy support during critical junctures in the two countries, ie when incumbents attempted to circumvent term limitation. Donor investments had positive results when donors had directed resources towards building up civil society organisations long before any attempts at circumventing term limits were made.Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2021.2000855 .

Suggested Citation

  • Julia Leininger & Daniel Nowack, 2022. "Protection against autocratisation: how international democracy promotion helped preserve presidential term limits in Malawi and Senegal," Third World Quarterly, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 43(2), pages 309-331, February.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:43:y:2022:i:2:p:309-331
    DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2021.2000855
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01436597.2021.2000855
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/01436597.2021.2000855?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ashley Fox & Jennie R. Law & Keith Baker, 2022. "The case for metagovernance: The promises and pitfalls of multisectoral nutrition service delivery structures in low‐ and middle‐income countries," Public Administration & Development, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 42(2), pages 128-141, May.
    2. Kohnert, Dirk, 2022. "Des dictatures ouest-africaines « éclairées » contestées par la capture de l'État ? Perspectives du Bénin, du Togo et du Sénégal ['Enlightened’ West African dictatorship challenged by state capture," MPRA Paper 114934, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Christian P. Schneider & Edeltraud Guenther & Dominik Möst, 2024. "International technology transfer to Africa in light of the SDGs: What do we know about the barriers?," Journal of International Development, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 36(4), pages 2129-2151, May.
    4. Kohnert, Dirk, 2022. "'Enlightened' West African dictatorship challenged by state capture ? Insights from Benin, Togo and Senegal," MPRA Paper 114913, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:ctwqxx:v:43:y:2022:i:2:p:309-331. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/ctwq .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.