The Element of Surprise: Election Timing and Opposition Preparedness

Abstract

How can incumbent governments benefit when they control the timing of elections? The conventional wisdom is that incumbents gain an advantage by timing elections to coincide with favorable economic conditions. An alternative mechanism that has received less attention is the element of surprise: the incumbent’s ability to exploit the opposition’s lack of election preparedness. I theorize and empirically test this surprise mechanism using candidate-level data from Japanese House of Representatives elections (1955–2017). The results show that in surprise elections, opposition parties recruit fewer, lower-quality candidates, spend less money campaigning, coordinate their candidates less effectively, and ultimately receive fewer votes and seats. Evidence from fixed effects models and exogenously timed by-elections further suggest that surprise matters more in shorter, competitive election campaigns and helps incumbents more with confronting inter-party as opposed to intra-party electoral competition. These findings add to our understanding of how strategic election timing can undermine electoral accountability.

Political Oppositions in Democratic and Authoritarian Regimes: A State-of-the-Field(s) Review

“…However, this does not imply that the state of the opposition is of no relevance when it comes to ‘snap elections’. Indeed, recent research suggests that the status of ‘opposition preparedness’ marks a major factor in its own right (McClean 2021).…”

Elections, governments, heads, and legislatures in Italy 1730-2021

“…In Table 2, I summarize early dissolutions throughout the history of the Italian Republic. Importantly, while dissolutions can happen for strategic reasons linked to party politics and policymaking (e.g., Lupia and Strøm, 1995;Becher and Christiansen, 2015;Schleiter and Tavits, 2016;McClean, 2021), the ability to identify premature dissolutions allows scholars to investigate the institutional motives of their occurrence in a context where such decision is delegated to a nominally impartial head of state. Out of eighteen legislatures, between 1947 and 2021 (excluding the Constituent Assembly), eight premature dissolutions can be identified.…”