An important agenda power in parliamentary democracies is the discretion over the dissolution of parliament. We argue that variation in constitutional rules and the political environment will systematically affect the frequency of early elections. We hypothesize that dissolution will be more frequent under single-party governments, when the head of state plays an insignificant role, when neither parliament nor the cabinet can inhibit dissolution, when minority governments are in power, when the head of state can dissolve unilaterally, and later in the constitutional term. Using standard logistic and Cox-proportional hazard techniques, we test these expectations in a pooled time-series setting against observations of most OECD parliamentary democracies for the years 1960–1995. We find that parliamentary dissolutions are more frequent earlier in the constitutional term, under minority governments, when the head of state plays an insignificant role, and when the parliament or the cabinet is not involved.

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This article measures, compares, and analyzes the degree to which local factors, be they candidate qualities or district characteristics, affect electoral politics. It applies Morgenstern and Potthoff's components-of-variance model to 56 parties or coalitions to measure the "local vote" and shows that only in some cases do local factors manifest themselves in voting patterns. To explain this finding, the authors argue that the type of executive system, ideological cohesion, and a country's ethnic heterogeneity combined with federalism are all strongly tied to the local vote patterns. Statistical tests also show that in spite of the large literature on the incentives that electoral systems can offer to candidates to pursue a personal vote, the electoral system does not have a clear impact on the local vote.

Existing theories assume that particularistic behavior and personal voting are synonymous, and that the level and nature of such activities are driven by the incentives of individual candidates. In this article, both of these assumptions are contested and empirical evidence is provided to suggest that particularistic behavior and personal voting are quite distinct, and that collective party incentives can be equally important in determining both the level and nature of personal voting. This is particularly true in settings where there is direct conflict between the incentives of individual candidates and the incentives of the party. To establish this, electoral politics in Ireland and Japan since 1945 are compared and also how the inability of voters to transfer votes under SNTV fundamentally altered the level and nature of personal voting in that system.

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