Abstract
Executive aggrandizement, or the weakening of checks on executive power through legal channels, is on the rise. Taken to extremes, it insulates incumbents against losing elections and puts democracy at risk. What strategies facilitate executive aggrandizement? According to a prominent explanation, incumbents use constitutional replacement and amendment to eliminate checks on executive power. This article challenges this view. It argues that new constitutions and amendments are often less to blame than a set of institutional strategies—colonization, duplication, and evasion—which allow executives to sidestep checks without eliminating them and amass more power than their constitutions formally allow. The article then theorizes how countries recover from executive aggrandizement through an analysis of Ecuador, while cautioning that it may take much longer to rebuild constraints on executive power than to dismantle them.