Government Authority and Legislative Term Limits in Indonesia’s Constitutional Reform
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26623/jic.v11i2.13891Abstract
This study aims to examine the existence of governmental authority in legal reform concerning legislative term limits in Indonesia and to analyze its constitutional implications within the Indonesian state governance system. The absence of explicit regulations limiting legislative tenure has created constitutional challenges, including concentration of political power, weakened institutional accountability, and unequal political opportunities that contradict the principle of equality before the law. The urgency of this research arises from the need to restore constitutional balance and ensure fair political competition within representative institutions. This research employs a normative legal method using statutory, conceptual, historical, and theoretical approaches, supported by the analysis of primary legal materials (the 1945 Constitution and election laws), secondary legal materials (legal doctrines and scholarly studies), and relevant tertiary sources. The findings reveal that governmental authority constitutionally enables legal reform through legislative policy formation and constitutional amendment mechanisms, and that legislative term limits are necessary to prevent structural domination, strengthen checks and balances, and promote ethical governance. The study further demonstrates that the absence of tenure limitation creates systemic inequality in political access, thereby requiring legal reform as a constitutional corrective instrument. The novelty of this research lies in positioning legislative term limits within the framework of equality before the law and governmental authority theory, offering a new constitutional perspective that integrates limitation of power with democratic legal reform to ensure equal political opportunity and reinforce constitutional democracy in Indonesia.
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