The Electoral Consequences of Election Timing: Estimating the Popularity Cost of Calling a Snap Election

Do voters punish prime ministers for the calling anticipated elections? It is well known that in parliamentary systems, governing leaders time elections in order to maximize future benefits, but how voters reacts to this opportunistic move is still an open question. Surprisingly, this topic is seriously understudied in the comparative literature, and the scarce evidence available reached contradictory conclusions: on one side, Smith [2003, 2004] found evidence that in the United Kingdom voters react punishing those leaders that call elections earlier than expected; on the other side, Blais et al. [2004] analyzed the anticipated election called by the Canadian prime miniser Chétien in 2000, finding that only few highly educated voters reacted negatively to his opportunistic choice, with almost no consequences for the incumbent. This paper will close the debate, showing that their conclusions do not exclude each other, but they rather represent specific cases of a more general phenomenon. For the first time in the literature, I will link the research on cabinet termination with the research on valence issues in party competition. According to Stokes [1963], every candidate should be described not just by policy issues, on which candidates are divided and spread along ideological axes, but also by valence issues, on which there is no spatial competition: all the voters are assumed to look for features such as competence and honesty in candidates. My argument is that acting opportunistically by calling a snap election represents a valence cost for the incumbent. Since the reaction of the electorate depends, as I will show, from ideological proximity and distance from the constitutionally mandated termination, I will individuate what factors are more likely to influence the magnitude of the popularity cost of calling an early election, while controlling for several covariates. All of my assumptions will be successfully tested on an original dataset based on voting intention opinion polls from seven parliamentary democracies, including United Kingdom and Canada. A case study will conclude the paper, in which I will show how my empirical model successfully explains why in the 2000 Canadian election the popularity shock for prime minister Chrétien was negligible. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blais, A., Gidengil, E., Nevitte, N., & Nadeau, R. (2004). Do (Some) Canadian Voters Punish a Prime Minister for Calling a Snap Election?. Political Studies, 52 (2), 307-323. Smith, A. (2003). Election timing in majoritarian parliaments. British Journal of Political Science, 33(3), 397-418. Smith, A. (2004). Election timing. Cambridge University Press. Stokes, D. E. (1963). Spatial models of party competition. American political science review, 57(02), 368-377.