Super-Majority Threshold Escalators to Protect Democracy against Autocratic Entrenchment

The two-term limit norm for presidents has protected US democracy for 235 years against autocratic entrenchment but has failed to do so in many other countries. These failures call for a new measure, reducing incumbency advantages in reelection contests by setting super-majority thresholds for additional terms which enhance autocratic entrenchment. Two versions were proposed, ordinal and exponential escalators; both prolong the tenures of successful high-moral effective leaders who use accumulated trust credit for radical changes and solving recalcitrant problems. The ordinal version lacks a terminal term thus it allows entrenchment unlike exponential escalator in which escalating super-majority thresholds for reelection mitigate the growth of leaders’ power and prestige with tenure, proposing a 51% majority threshold for the 2nd term, 60% super-majority threshold for the 3rd, 75% for the 4th and 95% for the 5th. As a 95% super-majority will be rare, a 16-year tenure will be practically the maximum