Strategic Parliamentary Dissolution

Abstract

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.

Constitutional Power and Competing Risks: Monarchs, Presidents, Prime Ministers, and the Termination of East and West European Cabinets

“…Finally, single-party government, the inclusion of the median party, and inclusion of the president's party in cabinet have effects in the direction of reducing the dissolution hazard, but none of these variables reach statistical significance in model 1a or 1b. With respect to single-party government, this is consistent with Strøm and Swindle's (2002) argument that single-party governments are on the one hand more valuable to the party in power, but on the other hand enable the prime minister to dissolve more easily. The two effects appear to cancel each other so that single-party government drops out of the final dissolution model 1b.…”

“…These results suggest that the discipline's long-standing view of government durability as discretionarily controlled by government and parliament has at best been partial, and vindicate more recent efforts by scholars to integrate the constitutional context within which governments operate into explanations of government survival (Druckman and Thies 2002;Saalfeld 2008;Strøm and Swindle 2002). Constitutional variation appears to be much more critical in explaining the competing risks that governments face than has previously been understood.…”

“…This section spells out their operationalization and our expectations regarding their effects in a competing risks framework, because, with the exception of Saalfeld (2008), the existing literature has only detailed expectations about their effects on a generic pooled termination hazard, or on the dissolution hazard alone (Strøm and Swindle 2002). Presidential Elections.…”

Prime ministers and the electoral cost of using the confidence vote in legislative bargaining: evidence from France

“…Related research concerns the electoral cost of strategic parliamentary dissolutions. For instance, Smith (2003) argues that voters punish prime ministers for unexpected elections because they signal low competence or foreknowledge of declining economic performance (related arguments are made by Strøm and Swindle 2002). He finds evidence from Britain that is consistent with this logic.…”

“…For instance, Huber (1996a: 119) explains that some French politicians he interviewed were concerned that the confidence vote is interpreted by voters 'as a sign of executive weakness or incapacity' , with one assistant to the prime minister worrying that it 'shows that our bill is not sufficiently good to pass on its own merits' . Related signalling arguments are made by scholars who study the strategic dissolution of parliaments by prime ministers or other actors (Smith 2003;Strøm and Swindle 2002), though the empirical evidence on this mechanism is mixed (Blais et al 2004). 10 Following the model of blame game bargaining first developed in the context of the separation of powers system in the US (Groseclose and McCarty 2001), the use of the confidence vote may also reveal that the policy preferences of the prime minister are relatively extreme compared to those of the average voter, thus leading to a decline in popularity.…”