“Electoral Timing under Alternative Electoral Incentives.” In progress.

Abstract

That election timing is endogenous is considered one of the most important institutional features in Parliamentary systems, and recent years have witnessed several fascinating efforts to examine the causes and the implications of election timing. Yet relatively little attention has been paid to the theoretical and empirical links between election timing and electoral systems. This omission is rather surprising in the face of the consensus that electoral systems shape politicians’ electoral strategies. This paper seeks to bridge this gap: I examine whether and how politicians’ incentives to call for an early election differ under alternative electoral systems. Extending the logic from the existing literature, I argue that electoral systems matter because of the two mechanisms. On the one hand, single-member district (SMD) systems should lead to more frequent early elections because SMD systems either reduce the incidence of coalition governments or yield fewer and ideologically more coherent coalition partners, thereby reducing the transaction costs associated with calling an early election. On the other hand, SMD systems might lead to fewer early elections because the high seat-vote elasticity makes it harder for politicians to translate popularity into winning probability. Using a survival analysis, I test these two competing conjectures against a sample of contemporary democracies, and I find the probability of calling an early election is significantly higher under SMD systems.