Term Limits

A constitutional or statutory cap on the number of terms, or the number of years, an officeholder may serve, most consequentially applied to a head of state or head of government. The United States imposed a two-term limit on the presidency through the 22nd Amendment, passed by Congress on 21 March 1947 and ratified on 27 February 1951, after the states responded to Franklin D. Roosevelt's unprecedented third and fourth terms, won in 1940 and 1944, by writing the previously unwritten two-term custom, observed voluntarily since George Washington, into binding constitutional text; the amendment does not apply to Harry Truman, the sitting president when Congress passed it. Term limits are argued for on the ground that a hard cap forces a transfer of power to occur on schedule rather than depend on an incumbent's willingness to step aside, an especially significant guarantee in a system without a strong tradition of peaceful transfer of power, and against, on the ground that it removes an experienced or popular leader from office regardless of continued public support and can weaken a lame duck's authority in a final term. Term limits are far from universal: most parliamentary systems impose none on a prime minister, whose tenure instead depends on retaining the confidence of the legislature, and some presidential constitutions have been amended specifically to remove or extend limits already in place.