Election Timing in Parliamentary Democracies

在许多议会制度中，下届选举的时间由现任政府决定。 领导人不必等到任期结束;相反，他们可以在对他们有利的时候--在他们预期获胜的时候--自由地举行选举。 该提案概述了一个理论和实证研究设计，以探讨政府何时举行选举以及选举的时间如何影响选举结果。用博弈论对举行选举的决定进行建模。 在每一个阶段，领导人必须在举行选举或等待之间做出选择。 如果他们等待，那么选民就有进一步的机会来评估政府的表现。 因此，一个等待的受欢迎政府可能会因为糟糕的结果而受到影响。决定举行选举，而不是等待，取决于领导人对她的选举前景的信念。 假设现任领导人目前很受欢迎，并试图决定是否提前举行选举。 如果领导人相信她的政党有能力，有适当的政策来解决她的国家的问题，那么她等待的风险很小。 她的政党可能会表现出色，这会增加而不是减少她的选举财富。 然而，对于一个对自己能力缺乏信心的领导人来说，等待会危及她的选举前景。 她预料到了糟糕的表现，并预计如果她等待的话，她未来的受欢迎程度会下降。 因此，正是那些最不称职的领导人，那些不期望表现良好的领导人，才有最大的动机要求提前选举。该模型的内在特征是，领导人根据他们对未来表现的预期来选择是否举行选举。 该建模平台对各种假设都是灵活的。 一种模式选择是，领导者的期望可以简单地基于她对政府能力的评估。 或者，领导者的信念可能源于抢先体验。 其中一种特别重要的形式是政府为了短期利益而操纵政策工具（政治商业周期）。虽然最不称职的领导人总是有最强烈的动机要求提前选举，但在某些情况下，即使是称职的领导人也不想拖延。 这些条件，如多数的大小，反对派的团结，以及公众舆论的水平，产生了关于何时可能发生提前选举的假设。 这些因素是否会加速选举，可以通过持续时间分析进行实证检验。由于最不称职的领导人是最不愿意等待的人，因此比公众预期的更早举行选举表明现任者对未来表现的怀疑。 在经验模型中，当选举比预期早得多时，即估计的harzard较低时，政府可能会遭受民众支持率的下降。 此外，该理论还预测，在意外提前选举后，政府的表现可能会很差。 该项目提供了更多的经验估计，当选举发生，它开发和测试选举时间，政府绩效和选举结果之间的理论联系。

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.