Election Timing in Parliamentary Democracies

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In many parliamentary systems, the timing of the next election is at the discretion of the current government. Leaders are not required to wait until the end of their term; rather, they are free to call elections when it is advantageous to them - when they expect to win. The proposal outlines a theoretical and empirical research design to explore when governments call elections and how the timing of elections influences the electoral result. The decision to call an election is modeled using game theory. At each stage, leaders must choose between calling an election or waiting. If they wait, then the voters get a further opportunity to assess the government's performance. Thus, a popular governments that waits risks having its popularity undermined by poor outcomes. The decision to call an election, rather than wait, depends on a leader's beliefs about her electoral future. Suppose that the incumbent leader is currently popular and trying to decide whether to call an early election. If the leader believes that her party is competent and has the appropriate policies to address her country's problems, then she risks little by waiting. Her party is likely to perform well which enhances, rather than diminishes, her electoral fortune. Yet, for a leader less confident in her abilities, waiting jeopardizes her electoral prospects. She anticipates poor performance, and expects her future popularity to decline if she waits. Hence, it is the least competent leaders, those who do not expect to perform well, who have the greatest incentive to call an early election. The inherent feature of the model is that leaders choose whether to call elections based on their expectations about future performance. This modeling platform is flexible to a variety of assumptions. One modeling choice is that a leader's expectation could be based simply on her assessment of government competence. Alternatively, a leader's beliefs could stem from early access to information. A particularly important form of this is when the government has manipulated policy instruments for short-term gains (political business cycles). Although it is the least competent leaders who always have the strongest incentive to call an early election, there are conditions under which even competent leaders do not want to delay. These condtions, such as size of majority, unity of opposition, and level of public opinion, generate hypotheses about when early elections are likely to occur. Whether these factors do hasten elections can be tested empirically using duration analysis. Since the least competent leaders are the ones with the least incentive to wait, elections called earlier than the public expects signal the incumbent's doubts about future performance. In terms of the empirical model, when elections occur much earlier than anticipated, that is, the estimated harzard is low, then the government is likely to suffer a decline in popular support. In addition, the theory also predicts that government performance is likely to be poor following unexpectedly early elections. This project provides more than empirical estimates of when elections occur; it develops and tests theoretical linkages among election timing, government performance, and electoral outcomes.