Research Data

Protecting democracy from abroad

Heidelberg: heiDATA Heidelberg Open Research Data

DOI: https://doi.org/10.11588/DATA/EMUXDX
Open access

This dataset and analysis files accompany the paper "Protecting democracy from abroad: Democracy aid against attempts to circumvent presidential term limits" (Nowack & Leininger 2022, Democratization). The article addresses the question whether international democracy aid helps to protect presidential term limits, a commonly accepted safeguard for democracy. According to our analysis, democracy aid is effective in countering attempts to circumvent term limits, thus, contributed to protecting democratic standards in African and Latin American countries between 1990 and 2014. While democracy aid lowers the risk for a successful circumvention of a term limit, its effect is not as strong on initiating an attempt to circumvent term limits. Our analysis furthermore suggests that the risk for an attempt to circumvent term limits is about double as high in Latin American as in African states. Our results confirm prior findings that ‘targeted aid’ such as democracy aid matters for protecting democracy when it is at risk. They furthermore support previous indications that more refined theories on the effects of democracy aid in different phases of a domestic process are necessary.

About the IDOS authors

Leininger, Julia

Political Scientist

Nowack, Daniel

Political Science

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